Sharon McMahon
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
What's your understanding of it?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's roughly right. The judicial branch does more than just constitutional challenges, but that is part of what they're doing. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Well, yeah, they can determine whether or not a certain governmental action, for example, is in the confines of the way the law was written. OK, so it's not just is this law constitutional? It is the way the Voting Rights Act was implemented in Alabama in keeping with the original intent of the Voting Rights Act or things along those lines, too.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They hear far fewer constitutional challenges because a lot of the constitutional challenges have been adjudicated. We're still hearing new constitutional challenges. Like right now, the Supreme Court is just coming back into session and they are hearing a case this term. They work in these terms.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They start in October and they end in June and then they're done from July to September. I didn't know that. Yeah. I already didn't know. They are still hearing emergencies during the summer, but they're not hearing their regularly scheduled or what they call oral arguments. they get about 7,000 requests a year for oral arguments. Like, please take my case.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And of those 7,000 requests, they take about 80 of them. So it's a tiny percentage of the cases that make it to the Supreme Court. One of the big cases they're going to be hearing this term is about transgender medical care for minors. and whether a state banning transgender medical care for minors violates their constitutional right to be free from gender discrimination.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
So, for example, if you are a teenage girl who wants to get breast reduction surgery because your back hurts and you have medical issues with the size, why is that permissible? But it's not permissible if you are a trans boy who wants to have surgery to be in alignment with your perceived gender. Right. Right. Is one of those discriminating against somebody because of their gender?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Of course, these are issues that the Supreme Court did not take up in 1792. So these are sort of like the new generation of constitutional challenges that are coming down the pike. Another case that they're hearing, the founders never would have seen this one coming, is whether or not a state law in Texas that requires the operator of a porn site to verify the identity and age of the user.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
in the state of Texas, whether that violates their First Amendment rights or not.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes, it's already been implemented. And some people have sued. The porn site operators, of course, are not into this because people want to watch TV instead. Watch TV instead. But also your friend might not want his name to be recorded. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
But I understand the age component. Right. The other things like if you're going to purchase alcohol or you're going to purchase tobacco products, they have to verify your age. They can't just be like, oh, First Amendment. Right. So it's a unique question about how do we enforce the law to keep certain materials out of the hands of minors, but yet not infringe on the rights of adults? Right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's a legit question. These are things that people have not thought of before that are finally getting to be decided by the Supreme Court this season.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
There is absolutely a perception that the Supreme Court has been overtly politicized. The number of people who think that they're doing a good job, that everything's above board, non-biased, it's very low. This is one of the lowest points in U.S. history in terms of perceived legitimacy of the Supreme Court. And some of that has to do with abortion.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The majority of Americans are pro-choice in at least some circumstances. I think some people don't realize that if you believe that there should be exceptions for things like rape and incest, that that actually falls under the purview of being pro-choice. That there are some circumstances in which abortion should be legal. Overwhelming majority of Americans think that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And so some people, they really, really view the Supreme Court's recent actions on abortion as delegitimizing the court process. And then the other aspect of it is the ethics concerns related to a couple of the justices on the court now where they're taking all these trips with billionaires and they're not disclosing them and they're supposed to be disclosing them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And then they're like, oh, my bad. I didn't realize the form was supposed to be filled out that way. And it's a little bit like, but you're in charge of determining if people fill out the forms right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Right. And so one of the challenges there is people feel like I would never get away with that at my job. Yes. If you were just a normal federal government employee, let's say you just work in a Social Security office helping people get Social Security cards. There are very strict ethics rules that do not allow you to accept gifts greater than $20.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I cannot send you a copy of my book because it costs more than $20. Right. And so there are very strict codes of ethics for federal employees. It's meant to make sure that things are transparent and above board and you can't just send gifts to grease the wheels and make things happen.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
happen and that it's treating citizens fairly and so when you see that some supreme court members are taking trips with billionaires on private yachts and going to their private hunting fishing retreats and the private jet trips and it seems like the rules are for thee but not for me yeah It makes people feel salty about it. Like I would get fired if I let you take me out to lunch.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
It's easy for Chipotle to even cost more than $20. Yeah, exactly. If you just add on enough queso. Some Supreme Court justices have even talked openly about that, that when they go out to lunch with friends, they insist on paying for themselves. They do not even allow themselves to be treated by a friend to lunch to keep things above board.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
But that has not been the case with a couple of justices on the court. So all that to say that there is a perceived imbalance in terms of how political they have become to where they're supposed to be. The number of cases they hear that are unanimous. If you look at the number of cases they hear where at least one of the liberal justices is in the majority with the conservative justices.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
If you look at the number of cases where one of the conservative justices finds with the liberals, you would find a different pattern, however. you would find a pattern in which their behavior overall is not as politicized as the news would have us believe.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
It's the big name cases. It's the heavy hitters. But it's the political cases. Yes. It is the ones that get the attention. Exactly. And this is the other thing that's true about the court is that they take the cases they want to hear. They get to choose which cases they want to hear.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Four people have to want to hear the case.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Wow, that was nice of you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Got my first F. Four people out of nine have to want to hear it. But here's the other thing is that that's not a law. There's no law that says four people have to want to hear it. They just decided that for themselves. They could change that at any point. They make all of their own rules. So yes, the tradition of four out of nine have to want to hear the case is just a tradition.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
There's no external governing body that dictates these things to them. So four people have to want to hear it. And the fact that they have a six-person ideological consensus means that they are more likely to take up political cases.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And so even though the majority of the cases are not highly political, the majority of the cases are kind of boring, they're administrative, they're pertaining to one specific criminal, doesn't extrapolate to the country at large necessarily. Even though that is true, the willingness of the court
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
to take on these highly politicized cases like affirmative action, like abortion, like transgender medical care, because they now have a crucial majority who wants to hear a certain type of case.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes, that's right. To varying degrees. Even within the six, there's a spectrum.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They feel empowered to take up cases that they maybe would not have felt empowered to take up before because they have a level of consensus amongst themselves that the case is going to be decided in a way that they feel is favorable.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
When it was 5-4 or when it was a more liberal swing to the court, the conservative members would not have advocated for taking up these cases because they know they're not going to be decided in their favor. And so now the opposite is true. The pendulum has swung to the right on the court.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I think that's absolutely true. The role of the court has evolved over time significantly. Members of the Supreme Court used to literally ride around on horseback to hear cases. They didn't even have a building.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They were in the basement of the Capitol. They didn't even have a building until the 1930s. And so if you think about the visibility of or the optics of we meet in the basement of the legislative branch. Yeah. The optics are very different than the building they have now, which is like on the top of the steps with the big marble pillars. It seems very grandiose and official. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The way the court views its role is on a pendulum spectrum. If you think back to the 1950s, during the time when we were making rulings about things like Brown v. Board of Education, school integration, the person who was in charge of the Supreme Court at the time was a chief justice named Earl Warren, who was actually formerly the governor of California. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
He was also the only governor of California to ever have won both the Democratic and the Republican primary elections to be the governor. He won them both. Oh, my God. So Earl Warren, very popular figure in California history at the time. He's a former prosecutor.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes. Same guy. Earl Warren was not a judge when he got appointed to the Supreme Court. He was the governor of California. Yeah. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
You actually don't have to be a lawyer. I could be on the Supreme Court. You could be on the Supreme Court.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
All three of us can be on the Supreme Court. There are literally no constitutional requirements to be on the court.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The constitutional requirement is you have to be able to get approved by the Senate. That's it. And so if the Senate says you're good, then you're golden.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Anyway, Earl Warren gets on the Supreme Court. He gets appointed by Dwight Eisenhower. Dwight Eisenhower kind of later regretted appointing Earl Warren because Earl Warren went about changing some stuff. He had been in charge of the state of California during the time period that the United States was actively incarcerating Japanese Americans during World War II.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
where we rounded up more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry and moved them into incarceration camps away from the Pacific coast because of the attack on Pearl Harbor. And those people were, by and large, U.S. citizens who had been accused of absolutely no crime. Many of them were children. They received no due process whatsoever.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And Earl Warren cooperated with the Department of Justice and cooperated with FDR in the removal orders to move Japanese Americans to these camps. Later, he wrote about in his autobiography how deeply he regretted those actions. And then he spent the rest of his life on the Supreme Court trying to make up for the fact that he had deprived hundreds of thousands of people of their due process. Oh.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Oh. And so he is the Supreme Court justice who comes into position during Brown v. Board of Education. He's the person who steers the court to making sure it's a unanimous decision. He's the person who oversees Miranda v. Arizona. We've all heard of your Miranda rights. The rights are silent. Everything you say can and will be used against you. That was a Supreme Court case under the Warren Court.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
He was also in charge of Gideon v. Wainwright, which says that people have the right to a court-appointed attorney if they cannot afford forward one. So the courtside hard pendulum swing to the left under Earl Warren in part because of his guilt over what he had done during World War II.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Earl Warren's father was also murdered. He was a prosecutor at the time up in the Bay Area. And he knows people that are investigating his own father's murder. His dad was literally sitting in his house one night and somebody broke into his house and hit him in the head with like a pipe and he was dead. And they get this line on like, we think we might be this guy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And it's a guy who's already in prison. If you wanted, we could like put a wiretap in his cell and see if he's talking about it to anybody and gain evidence against this guy that way. And Earl Warren was like, no, we're going to play things above board. We're not going to secretly wiretap anybody. That's violating people's rights.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
So he, even as a prosecutor, was somebody who wanted to play by the rules, so to speak, even if it meant not solving his own father's murder.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
His father's murder is still technically unsolved all of these years later, although people now feel like it's very likely this one guy. There's a good amount of evidence.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes. And it was the guy who was in prison who he could have wiretapped and didn't. He's the most likely suspect in having killed Earl Warren's dad.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I think you're right that first of all, it is better to have a guilty man free than an innocent man imprisoned. You might think to yourself, yeah, I agree with that. But I think in times like today, that's a big ask for some people. People would rather be safe. Yeah. And if that means putting in some innocent people in prison, then that's the choice they're going to make. Do you agree?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Do you see what I'm saying there?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah, I agree with you. And I think it's really easy when you are operating from a position of fear. In some cases, a fear for their own safety, a fear for their own livelihood, their way of life or their religious whatever. They feel like, well, you know, sometimes that's the way it works. They don't
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
extend that idea to its logical conclusion that sometimes in a system run by fallible humans it does mean that guilty people will walk free but that we have to err on the side of not incarcerating or putting to death somebody who there's even a small chance of being innocent when push comes to shove and it's your own family and it's your own community people have a really hard time well we're
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
It's your normal human instinct to be like, you should no longer walk the earth if you did that to my children. And that is why we can't have laws based on our base instincts. Yeah, exactly. That is why we need to have laws that are principled and not based on the emotional anger that somebody feels in a given moment.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Exactly. It's a lot of arrogance. I think you're right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah, I mean, it is true that they're not supposed to be making decisions based on what is popular, which is what politicians often do. They make decisions that will help them get reelected as opposed to principled decisions. So, yes, that's the idea.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
behind it that we are removed from public opinion that's why the members of the Supreme Court have lifetime appointments and so there's almost always a gap between what happens theoretically and what happens on the ground right theoretically it insulates you from popular opinion so that you only make principle decisions
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
What it can also mean is that it allows people who potentially are corrupt or people who potentially are not playing by the rules, it allows them to stay in power excessively because it's too difficult to get rid of them. So there's always a give and take when it comes to these issues. Yes, it's a good idea in theory, but in reality, it means the following things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Did you guys hire a designer to like do all your shelves?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
But you're right that there's meant to be a lack of reactivity to public opinion on the part of the court system. And sometimes a court gets it wrong.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Sometimes a court has gotten it wrong. They got it real wrong when it came to Plessy v. Ferguson saying that African-Americans were not citizens of the United States, even if they were born here. They got it real wrong in the Korematsu case, which is what found it constitutionally permissible to incarcerate Japanese-Americans. The Supreme Court actually said it was fine that they did that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Rob, you're a designer too?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
So you can look back and point to a variety of cases where you're like, oh, hell no, that is messed up.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Styling shelves is actually a pain in the ass. It's hard to do. It's hard to do well. It just looks like cluttery junk.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's so true. You are absolutely right that if you are taking a principled look at this, if you dislike the conservative bent of the court today and you feel like, oh, it's just become so political. Oh, my gosh. And Shane making so many decisions that impact some of people's lives. Then you are feeling exactly how conservatives felt during the 1950s and 60s, where they're like, what the?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
F is this cart. And they felt like the court was radically reshaping American society during the 1950s. And they were. We just today feel like they were reshaping it in the right way.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
To be fair, they were reshaping. in the right way. You know, like segregation was not acceptable. It's not okay. So it's easy for us to look back on that today and be like, yes, sometimes the court should radically reshape society because lawmakers who are concerned with consolidating and maintaining their own power care more about that than about doing the right thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Or lawmakers are themselves bigots. But then we feel really uncomfortable if the same principle is extended to its logical conclusion. And it means that sometimes the court swings to the right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah, I do. And I have shelves and I'm aware of what a pain in the ass it is. Yeah. I like your sorting hat and your like- Little mice. A nice mix of tchotchkes and books. Yeah. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I totally agree with you. Principle over party. That's how I say it. The principles of democracy are more important than any party allegiance to somebody might have.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Jax, you're right. You are correct.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
It is both a democracy and a republic. A republic is a structure of government. A democracy is a government of the people. That's literally what the word means in Greek. And there are different ways to structure democracies, direct democracies, constitutional republics, a variety of different kinds. You can have a figurehead like a monarch in like they do in England. We don't have that here.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
But yet the UK is still a democracy. So there's more than one way to structure a democratic government. But democracy just means government of the people. And this far right talking point about like, it's not a democracy, it's a republic. My question to you is like, and what is your point? Their point is that they're repeating a far right talking point from the 1950s. Oh, that starts in the 50s?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
It started with a far-right group called the John Birch Society who wanted to put forward this idea that it's not a democracy because if you were going to have a democracy, that would mean that everyone, including people of color in the South, would have to have equal rights.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And so this idea of like, it's a republic. So they're not defending democracy. They're saying it's not a democracy. It's not a democracy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They don't like it when you say it's a democracy. They will try to correct you and say it's not a democracy. It's a republic.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
So all constitutional republics are democracies, but not all democracies are constitutional republics. America is both of those things. It's both a Republican and democracy. And this is one of those things that like gets under my skin. I'm always so curious what the point somebody is trying to make when they say that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Well, you don't even understand it because it's not a democracy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Democracy is mob rule. This is another thing people will say. Democracy is like two wolves and a sheep trying to decide what to have for dinner. This is another thing that people will say. Oh my God.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I mean, it's pretty good. I don't get it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The majority are going to vote to eat the sheep. So it's mob rule.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's absolutely true. Literally from the very beginning, before the modern Republican and Democratic parties, which have not existed in the format that they exist today for very long, you have the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, which were very much this idea of how much should the federal government do versus how much should the state governments do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And obviously leading up to the Civil War, we have this continual tension between what states have the right to do and the federal government has the right to do. You see it with abortion today. Another state's rights issue. What should the states have the right to do?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Of course, you understand Los Angeles needs different environmental rules than northern Minnesota, where I live, where we have too much water as opposed to not enough water, you know, where we have almost nobody that lives there. Of course, it makes sense that there are certain things that fall under the purview of states. But to what extent? To what end?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
But they have to be color coordinated. Yeah, it's a color thing. Yeah, you have to have the blues together, the reds together. And those are obviously antiques.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Is it fair that women in one state should be able to receive a certain type of medical care while somebody in another state should not be able to receive that kind of medical care? And so you're right that this is a continual balancing act that the federal government is trying to find the right happy medium.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And right now, with the more conservative-leaning Supreme Court, they're tipping back towards this sort of states' rights issues. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
More about the collective. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I bring this point up all the time, too, that we actually cannot have one political party. We need multiple political parties. One political party is a dictatorship, right? So we can't just be like, well, I hope the people I like get into power and screw the rest of y'all. That's actually not a healthy democracy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
We're better off by having our ideas challenged and by having the best ideas rise to the top. We should have enough allegiance to the country and to the Constitution to be willing to acknowledge when somebody who belongs to a party that we do not vote for, when they have a good idea. We should have enough humility. To be able to be like, you know what?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I didn't vote for you, but I think that's a good idea. And integrity. Yes. Some of the best leaders from history have done that exact thing. I know you have team of rivals on your shelf right above your head.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's right. It's an opportunity to better yourself if ever you're bored.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The Doris Kearns Goodwin book, it's a great book about how some of the best leaders from history have brought people into their cabinets who some of them did not agree with them. They did not just hire a bunch of yes men who were like, whatever you think, great idea, of course.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes, that's what this is about, team of rivals. So is George Washington. George Washington hires both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson who hate each other. See, thinking behind that is I don't want you to just pat me on the head and tell me I'm pretty and I come up with all the good ideas. Yeah, this is important stuff. Right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Nobody has the lock on we've historically had all the good ideas. That's ridiculous.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's right. And the right thing to do is to admit when you got it wrong and to do what you can to make it right. And I think too often our leaders today view admitting any kind of change in thinking or any kind of, you know, like, I thought it was a good idea. And then ultimately it ended up not working out the way I thought. They're so penalized for admitting those kinds of things. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
When personally, if we're having an interaction together and you call me on the phone, you're like, you know what? I really screwed that up. I am so sorry. I did not realize how it would impact you. I'm going to make changes. You would have respect for that person.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Oh my God, that's so cute.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Who did that to you personally, but yet on a broader political scale, we're like, oh my God, they're a flip-flopper.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
We probably don't need to put every book in an autoclave, right? But yet the initial responses to a global pandemic were not perfect.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Where we would come together?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Totally. Of course, everyone was wrong. It was a brand new thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I totally agree. And now we should be willing to do a postmortem on that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Now we know the learning loss from not being in school was too great a burden to bear. But yet you can also understand how children are not the only people in the schools, right? That the adults that work in the schools also deserve a safe working environment.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And that's very tricky when you have small children who don't understand basic hygiene, who don't know how to cover their cough, who don't know how to wash their hands appropriately. What about the adults in the schools? Don't they deserve to not die from COVID?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
It's not a book to read because you think it's going to have good ideas. Right. But it's a book to read if you want to understand your enemies. Yeah. And that's actually an important part of being a good historian or an important part of understanding what's happening in the world. You have to understand what you're working with.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
But that's a lot of people. A lot of people. The black and white thinking I don't think is particularly helpful here because, yes, the children should be in school. And also, yes, the teachers should not die from COVID. Both of those things are true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the idea that only my side is the correct side. And if you don't agree with it, then you're a Satan worshiper.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes. And both of those things can be true at the same time. Yeah. And people's weddedness to their political party of choice blinds them in some ways to the things that their own party is getting wrong. And this blind allegiance... has never led any civilization somewhere worth going. Blind allegiance to a party or blind allegiance to a leader, that has always led to dehumanization.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That has always led to dictatorships. That has always led to further marginalization of vulnerable groups.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Exactly. The idea of blind allegiance. No one deserves, not me, not any of y'all, nobody deserves your unexamined loyalty.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And I think we're seeing the effects today of some people who have unexamined loyalty to a party or a person. And it's a dangerous direction to be headed in.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
If you want to paint yourself as a critical thinker and as an intellectually honest person. And I think most people would want to be labeled a critical thinker. Right. If I'm like, well, you don't know how to critically think you'd be offended. Right. We all want to feel like we're good at critical thinking.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
If you want to be a critical thinker and you want to be intellectually mature and honest, you have to be willing to admit when your preferred ideology gets it wrong. You really do. And I think it's a failure, regardless of what your preferred ideology is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Oh, my gosh. That's like asking me to choose a favorite child. It's so many. There's so many.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And if you cannot listen to a single criticism of your preferred ideology, then you don't have the intellectual maturity enough to be able to say, yeah, you know what? We screwed that up. We should not do that again in the future.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They've been showing clips of old debates. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
No, you're totally right. It doesn't have to be this way. It's this way because we're permitting it to be this way and we're participating in it. People don't realize how much money there is in producing outrage content on the internet. They do not realize how lucrative it is to create this kind of division. And I'm not somebody who's out here like, oh, the media is ruining the world.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The media has an important job. Press has an important role in society. But you don't have any idea how some of these people who have very popular YouTube channels are making $20 million a year pumping out hate content. The idea that like it's somehow the media and what they mean by that is legacy media, ABC News or whatever, that it's somehow their fault.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Okay. I have so many friends who are history writers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
When in reality, they are very willing to ignore the people who are getting paid $20 million a year to make fun of ABC News. This is somehow corrupt over here, but what you're doing is completely legit. Yeah. Sure. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Also, the idea that some people are getting paid $20 million a year to like roll clip and then they watch President Biden like stumble on the steps of Air Force One and then they spend 15 minutes making fun of what an old guy he is. Those clips that go uber viral, that is a tremendously lucrative line of work if you have enough eyeballs on your content. Oh, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Okay. If any of your friends are listening, pause it or plug your ears.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And when you understand the business model behind the hate content that is online, it's very, very eye-opening. It pays far more to be a hyper-partisan pundit. I could make so much more money than I make right now getting a gig on some news network and talking about how shitty XYZ person is, why this person's an idiot, et cetera.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The amount of money that exists in that hyper-partisan space is so much more than somebody who exists There's not cash in common sense, right? And so if I have a choice between a giant check and having common sense, listen, it's very enticing to be like, I'll take the cash and I'll buy the sweaters.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The incentive structure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Precisely. It's producing the exact result that is designed to produce. And everybody is willingly participating in it without even realizing what the incentive structure is. Yeah, right, right, right. And that's the problem.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Okay. So David Grand is one of my favorite history writers. He wrote The Wager and he also wrote... Killers of the Flower Moon. Fantastic history writer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah, it is. So the legislative branch of the federal government is Congress. Congress has two houses in it, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Senate has a six-year term, and they're meant to be slow and deliberate. Every state gets two senators. And so consequently, small states like Wyoming get exactly as much representation as giant states like California get.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And a lot of people feel like, how is that fair? Wyoming has less than one million people in it and they get two senators just like California does. This is something they argued about when they were writing the Constitution. They fought like cats and dogs about this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And the House of Representatives has allegedly proportional representation where a state gets a certain number of representatives based on their population. And all of those representatives serve two-year terms. So there's 100 senators and 435 representatives. And together, those 535 members make up the entirety of Congress. There are a few people, they have kind of more advisory jobs to Congress.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They're delegates to Congress. And they represent places that are United States territories, places like Guam or Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., places that are not states represented. They're allowed to go to committee meetings and make their voice known, but they can't vote on legislation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
So the problem with proportional representation is still that there is a finite pie that has to be divvied up. Every 10 years, they go through and re-divvy up the pie again, these 435 seats. After the 2020 census, California actually lost a seat in the House of Representatives, even though California is bigger than it's ever been, of course, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
He's one of those people who, when one of his books comes out, it stays on the bestseller list for like, oh, 17 weeks, 39 weeks. Okay, great. It sounds like he deserves it if he's your favorite. He does deserve it. And he also wrote a blurb for the front cover of my book, which I feel extremely honored. That's awesome.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And that's because other places grew faster than California did. So the number of people that are being represented by one representative in Wyoming or North Dakota is much, much, much smaller than the number of people that are being represented by one representative in the state of California, for example.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's one of the big criticisms of Congress is that the way people are represented is not equal across the entire country.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes, or at least relatively equally. Nobody's saying it has to be perfect, but get us in the ballpark here of one representative for every 500,000 people or, you know, whatever it is. So the way that it works, there's an actual commission that goes through and divvies up this pie of 435 people every 10 years.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Inevitably, some states are going to lose some people and some states are going to gain some people, but inevitably, Together, those two houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives, some of the roles they have are very similar, but they each have some specific roles. Like the Senate has to confirm the president's appointments. They have to confirm people to the Supreme Court.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They're meant to act differently because the House of Representatives is being reelected every even year. Congress is on recess right now until after the election. For six weeks, they're off of work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah. Yeah. Because they're all running. I'm going to do that on my break from being a justice. No, see, you can't be in two branches of government at the same time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Okay. That's an F. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. They're all off because they're campaigning for reelection. Imagine having to campaign for reelection every other year.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Two years. It's meant to be more immediately responsive, thinking people have short memories. And if you screwed up last year, I'm going to remember it this year. Yeah. I'm going to vote you out. That's the thinking behind it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yep. It has to pass both.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yep. You know, I won't go into the whole, like, how do committees work, the whole structure of how every aspect of Congress works. But the bottom line is, yes, both the Senate and the House of Representatives has to pass identical versions of the same law to land on the president's desk for him or her.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes. But then it also has to be ratified by three-quarters of the states. Oh, my God.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's right. Yes. I also love Timothy Egan, who wrote a book called Fever in the Heartland. Did he write a blurb too? Yes. Yes. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The Constitution has been amended 27 times.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
In the 90s. Oh, what was the last amendment? The last amendment, it had to do with the way, like if Congress is going to adjust its own pay, it said that the change in pay would not go into effect until after the next election.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Right, so they can't be like, everyone gets $20 million and then they get a check tomorrow. They have to wait till after the next election. So it has not been amended since the 90s, but we have amended it 27 times. And the framers of the Constitution wrote two different ways to amend the Constitution into the document itself. This is not holy scripture. This is not forever and ever. Amen.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Thus saith the Lord. These are two different ways. Like, listen, if we got something wrong, here's two ways you might go about fixing it. But please do fix it in the future. They were at least smart enough to understand that they didn't know what was coming down the pike. They had no way of knowing that there's going to be the internet and porn websites and transgender medical care for minors.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah, exactly. Semi-automatic weapons that kill children in their classrooms in Texas. They had no way of anticipating these things. And so consequently, even though they did get a lot of things wrong by today's standards, namely the rights of women, the rights of people of color, they got a lot wrong. They at least knew that they were fallible people. They did not view themselves as gods.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And I think some people today hold up the framers of the Constitution as like Thomas Jefferson. Like he's some kind of deity. Right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's right. I know. You're good at pattern recognition. I play connections. That's why.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
You can have a convention of states in which the states can decide to circumvent Congress and be like, forget you, we're going to do it ourselves. And there actually is a movement on the political right right now to have a convention of states to amend the Constitution and to sort of refashion portions of the Constitution in the way that they view is preferable.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And how many states would that require? Three quarters. Oh, still three quarters. Okay. What's interesting, too, is how would states decide who gets to go to the convention of states? That's the million dollar question. Is it me, my friends? Is it the governor? Yeah. Do they have to be elected? Who gets to choose? Because who shows up at that convention of states would be real, real important.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
We've never used it, but it's there for the using.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Chernow's great. He's a very serious historian. He doesn't write popular history. And there's a difference.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
There's more guns than people in the United States. Yeah. You can say we need to get rid of all of the guns all day long, but practically, how does one do that, right? I know. It's like saying we're going to deport 80 million immigrants. How does one do that? Practically, what does that even look like? Are the cops going door to door? No. Are the cops even going to cooperate with that? No.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The idea that that's somebody's concept is like, come and take my guns. That's just silly. It's not even a real idea. There's no practical way to carry that out. But what the overwhelming majority of Americans want, 80 plus percent are just really common sense laws. How about we just do universal background checks to make sure you are not a domestic abuser?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
How about we make sure that you haven't been flagged for being a potential school shooter? How about we just have safe storage laws that require you to lock up your weapon and lock up your ammunition? If you are a law abiding citizen, you should want other people to be law abiding citizens. Just like when I am driving safely on the road, I don't want it to be permissible for drunk drivers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Academic history has a different audience than popular history. So if you think about the book Hidden Figures, that is a popular history book. It is meant for a broad general audience. It's meant for somebody to be able to pick up and read with their middle school or make a movie about. That's sort of the genre that David Grant and Timothy Egan work in. I do love academic history, though.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I want you to follow the rules of the road as well. Right. Just like I want to follow the rules of the road. Normal firearms owners want other people to be law abiding firearms owners.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
What about the rights of children to not be shot in their schools? It's not in the Constitution. Most people agree with that. That's the thing. Exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
To your point, if Congress is supposed to reflect, generally speaking, the will of the people and they are absolutely shirking that duty, it makes people feel like the government is not legitimate. It makes people feel like I'm not going to listen to what they have to say. I'm just going to violate whatever rules they come up with because they're not a legitimate lawmaking group.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
This has been the least productive Congress in United States history. That's not my opinion. I mean, like the number of laws that have been passed, the least productive Congress in U.S. history. Again, that doesn't play well in Peoria.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
If you're from a blue collar area like I am, where people literally work on ore ships or they mine iron ore or they work in health care, like they are working hard for their money. It seems really frustrating. that I should pay you $170,000 plus a year plus great benefits to sit around and just do press conferences about how stupid your opponents are.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That really sticks in people's craw where they're like, I'm working two jobs to put food on the table and y'all are sitting around being shitty on television. That's not how it's supposed to work. Meanwhile, it's fine that the kids keep getting shot in the schools and we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to go on TV and say, well, it's just an unfortunate reality is how it is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
We're not going to do anything to fix it. That doesn't fly in any other line of work. If you just straight up refuse to do the job that you were hired to do, you would soon find yourself out of a job. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The problem with it'd be great if everybody could do it is that they can also wield that power to do bad things, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. If that person has too much power, that's how we get dictatorships.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They intentionally restrain the power of the president significantly on purpose because the framers of the Constitution were all coming from monarchies where the governments were saying, here's the religion you have to belong to. The idea that whatever I say, whatever whim that's at the top of my head, we're just going to go with that thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They intentionally created a system that constrained the power of the president. This is one of my pet peeves when a president is like, I've created 82 million jobs.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And that's kind of where the Ron Chernow's and the David McCullough's and people in that genre, the John Meacham's, they write in a different style and for a different audience. And it's really important work, but it's a little less accessible for the average person. You have to really be into it to pick up a book this thick about the life of one dude. Yeah. You gotta be real into it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes, you might have some ideas that can help promote job growth. Maybe you have some ideas. And you can call up some of the people in Congress and be like, listen, we should pass the CHIPS Act. We should start getting more microchips made in the United States. We should start passing some tax incentives so that people bring manufacturing back to the United States. Yes, you can do things like that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
But the idea that you get like, oh, attaboy, pat on the back, you made all those jobs. That's really annoying to me. Also, the same is true of the economy. The president gets a lot of blame or a lot of credit for how the economy overall is doing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
When the economy is so multifactorial and so complicated, the factors that go into creating low unemployment reach so far beyond what a president has the power to do with his little pen.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Pull it down and move it to the low position. We want low unemployment.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Totally. Your state and local government has a lot more to do with your day to day because on a day to day basis, with the exception of a few big hot button issues, if you are in the military, sure, I'm willing to grant you that the federal government has more impact on your life if you're in the military or if You're a federal employee. The things that they're doing impact you more.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
But if you just like live here in a normal neighborhood, you have a job and you're not the recipient of government benefits by and large, you're just working for a living. The things that are impacting your life are like, what kind of schools do my kids have to go to? How well are my streets cleaned? Do somebody pick up my trash? Do I have clean drinking water?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Do people have the ability to pursue an education, you know, if they can't pay for it? By and large, these are state schools, their state and local programs, their local school boards that are impacting our daily lives. And we get so hung up on who the president is. This is not to say they're not important because they are. That's not to say they don't set the tone because they do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And that's not to say you shouldn't vote for president because it does matter.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
If they could just like, oh, they lowered gas prices. Right. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
You obviously don't know how gas is priced.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I live near an oil refinery that gets its crude oil from a pipeline from Canada and they refine it and then put it on trains and trucks put all over the world. And gas is like 285 near my house, right? And we don't have $4 in state taxes, but neither do we have 35 million people trying to occupy a very small area of environmentally fragile land. It's complicated. It's very complicated.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Anybody who tries to reduce the economy into the words a president speaks into a microphone or a telephone either does not have an understanding of how the economy actually works and thus we shouldn't be listening to you. Or they do understand how it works and they're lying, in which case we shouldn't listen to you. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
So that person should be regarded with suspicion if they're like, well, such and such had low gas prices. Why? Explain the mechanism by which gas prices were low under their presidency then.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Do you like reading books about people that you can sort of emulate or idolize?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I think it's really easy to feel like on the internet criticizing people, it creates this heightened emotional state. A great example of this is Hurricane Helene. Absolutely devastating to people in North Carolina in particular, Florida, Georgia, six states that have been affected by this hurricane. So many people have lost everything.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And people look around and they see what they view as an inadequate female response, federal government emergency response to this natural disaster. And they feel like if I am mad about it, And I'm posting about how mad I am about it, or I'm posting about how they're not doing enough. But that is in some way activism. That being mad on the internet is activism.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They feel like it is because they feel a heightened emotional response. They feel like by criticizing the federal government or criticizing the governor of such and such, blah, blah, blah, that they're doing something. I think it's worth remembering that there's nobody in our history book who went down as somebody who really changed the world.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And that person was somebody who just wrote mean tweets or somebody who just wrote letters being like, your response is terrible. I don't approve of anything you've done. The people who history smiles kindly upon are the people who actually did stuff. They're the doers. I think it's important for us to realize that, like, did anybody get clean drinking water because of my post on X today?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Does anybody go to bed with food tonight because I've left some mean comments on Facebook? Probably not. Nothing has changed.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I can see what you're saying that there's enough social media outrage about something that can influence what's covered by the news.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That doesn't change anything even though they're talking about it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Right now, just using the Helene response as another example, the news is spending an inordinate amount of time debunking lies on social media about how FEMA works and about what the actual response is. And that actually makes it so that resources are diverted. away from people who actually need help.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
If these organizations, instead of publicizing ways to get help, ways that FEMA can help you, where to go to apply for assistance, how to contact your homeowners insurance, et cetera, if they are spending all of their time being like, no, the hurricane wasn't man-made to try to win the election for Kamala Harris, that's literally what the New York Times is spending its time doing. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's a waste of resources.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's a waste of effing time. Let's focus on helping people who actually need it. There's a difference between raising awareness of something like these people really need our help. Over the last few days, I have personally raised a half a million dollars for people who are impacted by Hurricane Helene.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I can simultaneously talk about, yeah, Congress doesn't fund FEMA well enough to actually help all these people. I can say that thing as a true thing. It's my belief that Congress needs to get their rear in gear and stop spending time arguing on TV cameras and actually do something on behalf of the American people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I can simultaneously hold that as true while also actually not just spending all my time running my mouth. And actually move my hands and feet to do something to help. Can I do everything? No. Can I do something? Yes. I can leverage my platform to do something instead of just criticizing. I think we just feel like if we're angry, that will change things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And ultimately, running your mouth doesn't produce the kind of change that you think it should.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah, the dopamine hate of as soon as I'm like, you know who is the worst? Females. Yeah, I hate them too. Like you get this like validation of like we both hate the same thing. And then we feel like we're on the same team and it produces this feedback loop in our brains. You feel like you're making a difference because other people agree with you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Well, you know, I've been teaching for a while. I teach on the internet now and I used to teach in a classroom, obviously. And it's very apparent to me that people in this moment, they feel really hopeless. They feel like nothing they do matters. They feel like nothing they will ever do matters. They don't have billions of dollars. They don't have a weirdly shaped rocket ship.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
To blast off into space with. Yeah. They don't have millions of followers. They're not in movies. They don't have any kind of capital on which they can access the levers of power. They know those levers exist, but they feel like there's nothing they can ever do to be able to move them themselves. And they feel like I've written letters, I've voted, nothing has changed.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And it feels really hopeless to people. And I hear that, you know, I get more than 10,000 DMs every day.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And a huge amount of them are people who are like, I just feel like nothing will ever change for the better. And so I know from experience how meaningful it is to hear about people who have changed things without having access to the levers of power that we traditionally think you need to be able to make a difference.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I'll tell you one thing about George Washington. Maybe you didn't know this. Maybe you did.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And history is actually full of people who did such consequential things, not because they woke up in the morning and felt hope, but who chose to have hope. And I think that's a distinction that we really, really need today, that hope is a choice that we can make. It is not a feeling that we wait to feel.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Our ancestors who did incredible things in this country, who built schools for children who had no access to them, who reformed prisons, people who wrote incredibly consequential words, people who were incredible philanthropists.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
people who changed the course of history without access to the levers of power did not wake up in the morning and feel hope because the totality of their life circumstances in many cases were such that none of us would ever want to trade places with them. We would never be like, yes, let me get her life instead.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
George Washington, this is something that fascinates me about him, is that when he was appointed to be sort of the head of the army in the war against the British, he had never commanded a large army before. He'd worked in the Virginia militia, but he didn't have any like big general nationwide experience, not even at like a lower level where you often sort of work your way up.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
People who were falsely arrested or incarcerated, people who were fired from their jobs, who grew up in the segregated South, people whose parents were enslaved, people whose children died, people People whose husbands were liars, who had second lives or married to another woman or had kids with those people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
We would never look at the totality of their life circumstances and say, I would love your life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Right. No, we would never say that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Inez was a suffrage worker whose story is really remarkable. But one of the things that I find really amusing about her is that she used what she had and what she had was her beauty. And she also was very smart. She went to law school at a time when women did not go to law school.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
19 teens. 19 teens. Have you seen Seth's? I have not, but I want to. The producer reached out to me and was like, please come see it. We'll get you tickets. I'm going to. Yes. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Inez is a character in the Broadway show. Mill Holland, yes. She's very beautiful and also very smart. And she is somebody who really changed what suffrage meant in this country. Suddenly, suffrage grew up with temperance movements.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes, to enfranchise women. And the temperance movement was the movement that led towards the fact that we made it illegal to sell alcohol in the United States for a period of time. And we quickly also amended the Constitution to get rid of that amendment. These are two branches of the same vine, temperance and suffrage. It was women who were working on this for decades, 30, 40 years.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And so by the time we get to the 19-teens, many of these women are in their 40s and 50s. And here comes Inez, who newspaper reporters said things like, her white satin dress clings to her with the tenacity with which she clings to the suffrage cause. Oh, wow. Oh, very flowery. Suddenly, suddenly suffrage became sexy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah, she was a very, very attractive woman who was willing to be at the front of every parade, who was willing to carry all the banners. She had a car and the idea that like women could drive. That is noteworthy. She had Inez in her car. She was willing to use what she had.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And I know that there are a lot of feminists, myself included, who feel like women shouldn't have to trade on their looks in an effort to make change in society. But let's also be real. That is one of the levers of power that women have always had access to, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Is their ability to make themselves attractive in conventional sense. But Inez ultimately is a martyr for the cause of suffrage, right? And I won't give away how she goes about becoming a martyr for the cause of suffrage, but her efforts are a precursor to the passage of the 19th Amendment.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And I think one of the things that's worth remembering about Inez, of course, she martyrs herself and so her sacrifice is noteworthy, but ultimately she dies before the 19th Amendment is passed. And one of the things that people say about her after she's gone is that no work for liberty can be lost the nation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And so on his way to fight in the Revolutionary War, He had to stop by a bookstore and buy a book on how to be a general. And I was like, hmm, there's a lot to unpack there. George Washington had to buy a how-to book on how to be a general. There was such a thing back then? Yes. I mean, it wasn't like how to be a general for dummies, black and yellow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And I think that's really worth remembering that even if we don't see the ball make it into the end zone, whatever we're working for, even if we don't see the ultimate like, and the bill was passed and they all lived happily ever after, ultimately the fabric of the country is changed because of your efforts. We are made incrementally better because of your efforts.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And these are the kinds of messages that I think people need in this moment when it seems like the rich and powerful have usurped the reins of power for themselves. This is a phrase from George Washington in his farewell address. Beware excess partisanship and factionalism, lest unscrupulous men usurp for themselves the reins of government.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And I think Americans, maybe they wouldn't say it in those words, unscrupulous men usurp for themselves the reins of government, but they feel that sentiment. That unscrupulous men and women have stolen the reins of power from the American people. And the people in this book show what it means to be able to make change because you make the choice to have hope.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's a great question. Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on the bus before Rosa Parks ever gave her seat up on the bus. And Claudette Colvin was a 15-year-old girl when she refused to give up her seat on the bus. And in the moment these white law enforcement officers get on the bus and are telling her to give up her seat, there's a white woman who wants...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Not just her seat, but she wants all of the African-Americans in that row to get up and exit the row because she refuses to sit even in the same row. That would mean they were equal if they could sit in the same row. And Claudette Colvin is like, I paid for this seat. I am sitting in the black section of the bus. I have every right to sit here.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes, because the white section had filled up.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The bus driver is yelling at everybody, you know, move back, move back.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Everyone back. Precisely, precisely. Yeah, yeah. Exactly right. And Claudette says in that moment, she feels the hand of Harriet Tubman on one shoulder and the hand of Sojourner Truth on the other. And she feels them sort of like pin her down in her seat. You know, if she had been alive today and she had seen Hamilton, she would know the phrase history has its eyes on you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That she refuses in that moment to get up. They actually pick her up and carry her off the bus and bring her to jail. Oh. They bring her to an adult jail. Again, she's 15 years old. She's sitting in the backseat of the police car while the two officers who are driving her, one wedges himself in the backseat next to her.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They're having a conversation about her bra size amongst themselves while she said she's riding in the backseat of the car, like, pinning her knees together, repeating scripture to herself that she will not be sexually assaulted by these police officers. Aight. Because for hundreds of years, Black women were sexually assaulted by white men and nothing ever happened as a result of it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
So eventually Claudette Colvin gets pregnant. And so she is a pregnant 16 year old during the Montgomery bus boycott. And she is essentially excluded from being the face of the civil rights movement because she's a pregnant teenager and she's not the right one. And one of the reasons, right, the optics of it were important. They needed somebody who was regarded as quote unquote respectable.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes. And pregnant teenagers of any race were not viewed as respectable people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's right. Yeah. We had to kick Claudette out of school, which is what they did. You weren't allowed to stay at school. And Rosa Parks was viewed as, again, quote unquote, respectable. She was a seamstress, a quiet, mild-mannered, pleasant-looking mom figure who was not viewed as quote unquote problematic, like perhaps a pregnant teenager would have been. But again,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Claudette Colvin ultimately feels abandoned by the civil rights movement. Like they just cast her to the side. When she gives birth, nobody contacts her and tries to help her with her baby. Nobody sends her a welcome baby gift.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
But if you think about it, he would have had to go into a small shop where all of the goods are kept behind the counter. He would have had to ask for a specific book on how to become a general. And I think it's a great lesson for today in that how many of us feel like I'm not ready to get started because I don't know how to do that thing yet. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
No, she has never publicized who the father of her baby was, but some people presumed that he was a white man with whom she had a consensual relationship. But yet Claudette talked openly about how she had absolutely no idea where babies came from. She was taken advantage of by an older man who was married. But we don't know his identity. We don't know for sure if he was white.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
But she talked about how they had a consensual relationship with each other. But again, she's a teenager. Yeah. How consensual can it be?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's right. She gives birth and she raises her child and all of these things. And ultimately, Claudette Colvin was the party to an important civil rights lawsuit regarding the bus boycott, Browder v. Gale. The Supreme Court ultimately declared segregation on Montgomery buses unconstitutional.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And she has the courage, even though she's been abandoned by the civil rights movement, on the morning that this trial is starting, she's one of the witnesses on this trial, she has to like pump her breast milk because she has a new baby. But
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Nothing fancy. So that she's not a breastfeeding teenager leaking milk everywhere in a courtroom where she knows that the opposing counsel is going to try to destroy her character. And she was smart enough to anticipate what it was that they were trying to do to her. They kept trying to trip her up. They kept trying to get her to admit that Martin Luther King put her up to it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Kept trying to get her to admit that she was a pawn in this bigger party.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes. Yeah. And she's smart enough to know that she shouldn't take the bait. And ultimately, the lawsuit was successful. And she had an incredibly important role in the first domino that falls in segregation in the United States. But because she was a pregnant teenager, she was relegated to the sidebars of history and
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
She's actually convicted of multiple crimes as a result of refusing to get off of the bus. Claret Colvin's still alive. It wasn't until recently that her criminal record was expunged, that she filed a request with the state of Alabama. She's like, I did nothing wrong. Your laws were unconstitutional.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And so within the last couple of years, she has had that conviction removed from her criminal record. Yes, yes. Wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah. Do you find yourself struggling with choosing to be hopeful? Do you find yourself struggling with cynicism?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Are you naturally cynical? That's a good question. No shade if you are. No, I know. I think it's a very common way to be.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's right. I'll wait till I finish the degree or have worked at that company for five years. When in fact, history smiles the most kindly on people who just went for it. People who just tried stuff, who just did something no one else had done. Sometimes they fail at it. George Washington had failures. In fact, he was almost fired from being the head of the Revolutionary Army in
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
You're not wrong that the level of contempt is very high. I think where it might be helpful to you to think about this is we cannot wait for a person on a white horse to ride in and be the plan. The plan is not a dude with a scroll that arrives with a trumpet and is like, I have arrived and here is the plan.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah, that's right. By the way, if a dude does arrive with a scroll that says the plan, they want to be a dictator. Yeah, exactly. Like the dude with the plan is the dictator. Be scared of the dude with the plan. We cannot sit around waiting for someone to go first, for someone to come save us, for a political figure to be the voice of reason because we're the plan.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
The political party is not the plan. And if you are wedded to a political party being the plan, you are going to be disappointed and you are going to be cynical because that political party is going to fail over and over. They're going to fail if they compromise in your eyes. We didn't get everything we wanted. When in reality, compromise is the only way anything gets done.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Anybody who's ever been married will tell you that it can't be all your way and it can't be all their way. Sometimes we have to eat food we don't like. The compromise cannot be viewed as a failure. The change is going to come when we decide that that's how it's going to be. That's a tremendously freeing feeling because I am no longer subject to external forces that I have no control over.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I don't have to wait for the right person to get elected. The world's shittiest human can get elected and I can still do everything I can and I can still impact the world for good and I can still change the course of history despite my external circumstances. And this book is full of people who prove exactly that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Most of the big and important things that have happened in this country, the lasting change that has been created has come about from people
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
History does not smile kindly on the timid or the critics.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
ordinary people, the pregnant teenagers of history, the people whose parents were enslaved, the wrongfully accused, who just kept doing the next needed thing, the people who just kept trying things nobody else had ever done before, the people who were willing to let other people watch them fail, were afraid to let people watch us fail. But the great Americans of history are
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
have failed over and over and have set aside the fear of judgment of others and have just decided, I can work with my enemies because my enemies might have a change of heart at any moment. And how will our enemies ever have a change of heart if we are not there to show them the light? How will our enemies ever change if we are not a force for good in their lives?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
If we have blocked, deleted, canceled, and unfriended the people who ideologically oppose us? So that orientation of your spirit does not come from a place of everything is going great. It comes from the knowledge that things will improve when I choose to hope that they can.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes, and then you can build on that from there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's exactly right. And then you can build on something. That is how all long-term change happens. Anybody who is advocating for, like, a revolution. Revolutions have happened infrequently. They are always bloody. They are always highly destructive.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Complete unknown of what is going to happen afterwards. We view the American Revolution as, like, the standard of which to judge all revolutions.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Precisely. That's exactly right. And the British were like, you know what? Fine. They were willing to let it go.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Great. Well, and they tried to come back in the War of 1812. And then they tried to like light the White House on fire and light the Capitol on fire. And eventually they were like, fine, you what? Never mind. We're better off as friends. Let's both hate France.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They let it go. But the idea of a revolution within the confines of your own border is an entirely separate matter. Change in a pluralistic society should not be advocated for in a revolutionary sense. Change is incremental. You have these two forces of like this very progressive force that wants to have a trajectory of change at a rate that the conservative breaks are not willing to tolerate.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And ultimately, the conservative breaks are an important component in this movement. relationship because it's too easy to go quickly too far afield if you have nobody being like, slow down. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I will come back any old time. You just give me a jingle.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
He loved fancy outfits. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah. Myself included. Thank you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah. Thanks for inviting me. I loved it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Velvet. Yes. He loved fancy wine, like Madeira wine. Is he me? I could have been the first president. Oh, yeah. That part's not me. He had expensive taste. Unlike Abraham Lincoln, who's like, I grew up in a little log cabin and I had nothing and my clothes are too small. You know, like he has this vibe. I taught myself how to read. Oh, my God. Dad says that all the time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
No, you don't have Marfins. I don't think you do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yeah, but you're not like excessively tall.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
No, see, I wouldn't. I'm six feet tall. That's true.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's early, early, early, early. Oh, Shannon, that's really... It's real rough, you guys. Even in Minnesota, where people are above average,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
It's so rough. But of course, George Washington was famously tall, too.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I'm from Minnesota. I live on a dirt road.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes. Outside of a town of 80,000 people and 150 miles from the nearest Whole Foods. Oh, my God. Wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
That's true. But, you know, I grew up in a lower middle class family. My dad was a blue collar worker.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
He was a carpenter. He was a disabled Vietnam vet who later died of his war related injuries. Oh, wow. He didn't have enough food to eat and things like that. But there were times where each person got a $10 Christmas gift. So neither of my parents went to college. I certainly was not well positioned for this trajectory from my childhood. But what I did have was a library card.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
And I did live one block from the library. And that was very instrumental in who I have become. The unfettered access to books has been super instrumental in what I do now.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I taught for 12 years in California. I taught up in the Bay Area. Oh, you did? I did. I did.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
My husband's job. And that was great. I've taught in Minnesota, but I taught for the majority of my career out in the D.C. suburbs. Which is a very different animal than teaching in the Bay Area. When I was in the Bay Area, it was middle class high school. It was like a performing arts magnet. Great people. I loved teaching there. But we had no hot water.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
We had no toilet paper or soap in the bathroom. Children carried around toilet paper in their backpacks. Wow. We had rolling blackouts all the time where the power would just go out. We did not have TVs in every classroom. The media center was closed because there was nobody to work at it. We did not have even like whiteboards and overhead projectors.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I wrote a grant proposal to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, seeing if I could get whiteboard screens, like the projector screens. Oh, sure, sure. And the overhead projectors that people use.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I loved those. Me too. Like the transparency. Yeah, transparency.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
I discovered that 32 of the classrooms in my school did not have overhead projectors or the transparencies or the screens, nor did we have any of the other options to go along with it. Additionally, all of our textbooks had been destroyed in a water main break.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Yes, and then they'd explode it into the hallway. There was no budget to buy new books. The icing on the cake, every teacher had a $15 a month copy budget. You could make $15 a month worth of copies. And if you wanted more than that, it literally came out of your paycheck. Wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
So we had no materials. Nice middle class area. Those were the conditions on the ground in the schools. Oh, moving to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where people are absolutely rabid about public education was very eye opening. They have two billion dollar a year operating budgets.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
Maryland. Every supply you could ever want. And of course, the Maryland suburbs are very competitive with the Virginia suburbs. Everyone wants to see who has the better public schools. So there's this sort of competition between the two. The one school that I worked in had five computer labs. It was just such a different environment than DIY toilet paper.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
All my girlfriends. Here in California, they make you take this class about bloodborne pathogens. so that you don't contaminate the children when the kid's bleeding on the floor at the school. So you have to get this like certification in order to get a license to teach in California. And so I remember going to the Bloodborne Pathogens Workshop.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They're giving you this whole spiel about like, and then you run your hands under more hot water and soap, 20 seconds and blah, blah, blah. And I raised my hand and I was like, what if we don't have hot water and soap? Yeah. Because we literally did not. All that to say, I've taught in a few different places and every spot in the country has their own educational vibe.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Sharon McMahon (law and government teacher)
They're very related. You can't learn government without learning the history of government. So in terms of like a class that I preferred to teach, government was always my preferred class. I also taught upper class electives in law. Those are also a big favorite of mine.