Parent proxy voting for children is in the news and it's gone viral!

On Ross Douthat's podcast, Yale Law professor Samuel Moyn proposed giving 20-somethings extra votes, rather than parents, because “young people — not people who are raising families — will have the best insight into the interests of children” and “Part of our goal as a society is trying to make sure that children aren’t the hostages of their parents." Douthat responded: "I think that’s daft. I think it’s absurd to imagine that a 24-year-old recent college graduate has a better assessment of the interests of my own children than I do." And a meme was born!

It happens that THE leading article on this subject -- "Give Parents the Vote" -- was written by Rationally Based’s very own Joshua Kleinfeld! So in this episode, Josh and co-hosts Kathryn Johnson and Ilan Wurman examine the proposal that parents should be able to vote on behalf of their minor children — and why the Left wants to give that power to anyone BUT parents.

Some highlights:

• Children are nearly a QUARTER of the citizenry, and parents and children together are nearly half of the citizenry — but have just 19% of the vote. Adults without children are just over half the citizenry but have about THREE-QUARTERS of the vote. The result is policies — like COVID school closures, debt-financed entitlements, and more — that systematically shortchange the young.
• Children ALREADY count for apportionment: they determine each state’s seats in Congress, electoral votes for the President, and the drawing of legislative districts. But because they can’t vote and their parents can’t vote for them, their voting power is simply redistributed to all the adults in their districts. The most powerful voter in America is a childless adult in a district with plenty of children.
• Parent proxy voting is purely a matter of state law. Any state could independently adopt it tomorrow for both federal and state elections without violating the Constitution or any federal statute. It is also feasible. And it is consistent with the role parents have in every other context — defending their children’s interests in contexts from the schools to hospitals to courtrooms.
• The world-historic fall in the birth rate means that, for the first time in American history, most adults are not parents. The collapse in the birth rate has made the political divergence between parents and the childless newly consequential. Arguably there is NO other intervention that would have more far-reaching effects on American politics than giving parents the vote.

This is the rational — and based — discussion of who should speak for the next generation that you won’t hear anywhere else.

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In this bonus episode, we cross post our host's appearance at the National Constitution Center. You can also listen to this episode on We the People, the NCC's wonderful podcast.

Julie Silverbrook, Chief Content and Learning Officer at the NCC, asks Professor Ilan Wurman a series of questions about the Founding and the Constitution, based on his new book The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction. What was the connection of the enumerated powers to the royal prerogative of the British monarch? What is the separation of powers, properly understood? What is the meaning of "the executive power," and who has power over foreign affairs? What is the nature of American federalism and our compound republic?

Tune in for this wide-ranging and fascinating discussion of America's founding document.

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Election Money, Mail-In Ballots, and the Supreme Court

In this episode, Kathryn Johnson and law professors Joshua Kleinfeld and Ilan Wurman take on three fights over the rules of American elections — and the deeper question of who should control them.

First is the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in NRSC v. FEC, which freed political parties to spend unlimited amounts in coordination with their candidates. What is the case really about? Why did it split along partisan lines? Why do Republicans want stronger parties while Democrats prefer a system dominated by advocacy groups? And was the Court's most famous campaign finance case — Citizens United — sound originalism or did it wrongly treat massive publicly traded corporations as if they were small advocacy groups, handing the managerial class a First Amendment license to push progressive politics with corporate money? (Josh and Ilan fight this one out!)

Second is Watson v. RNC, the case on the meaning of “Election Day.” On the surface, the case is a technical dispute over whether mail-in ballots must be received or merely sent by Election Day. But under the surface is a larger struggle over who controls the ground rules of counting -- and what rules best protect the integrity of American elections.

Third is President Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballot integrity. Trump directed the Postal Service and other agencies to develop stronger rules — and a district court blocked the order before the agencies had even acted. Is that a proper use of judicial power? Or is the real game simply to freeze the status quo before the midterms?

This is the rational — and based — discussion of the rules of the political game that you won’t hear anywhere else.

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In this episode, hosts Kathryn Johnson and law professor Ilan Wurman take on a hard and controversial question: Are all cultures created equal? Or, more precisely, do all cultures have the same current capacity for constitutional self-government? How much migration and importation of people from foreign cultures and with foreign habits is ideal? Is it racist to even have such discussions?

Our hosts also start with other controversial topics. Does the Trump anti-weaponization fund justify...weaponization against Trump's lawyers by referring them to bar discipline? Our hosts discuss Judge William's ruling and how it applies to Obama's lawyers, too, who engaged in "sue and settle" practices. They also return, once again, to birthright citizenship. Even accepting the Court's holding in Trump v. Barbara, is there an argument that the Court's fiction of extraterritoriality, which the majority argued explains the historic exemptions from birthright citizenship, in fact applies to some of the individuals covered by Trump's executive order?

This is the rational — and based — conversation you won't hear anywhere else.

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Can You Love America While Facing Its Hardest Truth?

In this special episode of our series on the American Founding, hosts Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld take on the hardest question about American patriotism: slavery.

Drawing on Ilan’s new book, The Constitution of 1789, they lay out what the Founders actually wrote about slavery — and what they deliberately left out. Almost without exception, the Founders viewed slavery as profoundly evil, though many of them did not match their behavior to their ideals. They designed the Constitution as a containment strategy: a set of political compromises meant to prevent slavery’s expansion and lead eventually to its extinction, not to sanctify or permanently entrench it. The South later abandoned the Founders’ understanding, developing the “positive good” theory of slavery that led to the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision and helped trigger the Civil War.

The conversation then turns to today. The hosts push back against the 1619 Project and the broader progressive claim that America is uniquely and permanently defined by slavery. America is permanently defined by overcoming slavery. They ask what a non-propagandistic history actually requires — and what a mature patriotism looks like in light of it.

They close with the most personal question of all: Why do you love this country?

This is the rational — and based — discussion of the American Founding that you won’t hear anywhere else.

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In this episode, Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld break down the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision upholding state laws that bar biological males who identify as girls from competing in girls’ sports.

The majority held that Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause permit states to maintain sex-segregated sports teams based on biological sex. But the deeper divide among the justices was revealing. Justice Kavanaugh wrote a narrow opinion for the Court that avoided the big cultural issues, while Justice Thomas wrote directly that men and boys who identify as women are not women or girls, that sex is an immutable and binary biological reality, and that using ideological language to obscure this fact amounts to lying to the public.

The hosts debate whether the Court was right to stay narrow or whether it should have confronted the larger questions head-on. They examine how the majority distinguished this case from Bostock, discuss the Court’s deliberate avoidance of pronouns, and confront the central issue: Is recognizing the sex binary an act of bigotry, as the Left claims, or is it simply a recognition of biological reality that transgender ideology denies?

This is the rational — and based — discussion of the Court’s biggest decisions that you won’t hear anywhere else.

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In this episode, Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld break down two blockbuster end-of-term SCOTUS decisions on the administrative state: Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook.

In the first case, the Supreme Court held that the President can remove commissioners and directors from powerful, insulated agencies like the FTC, the SEC, and the CFPB — effectively overruling a century of government by independent agencies. This is one of the most significant expansions of presidential authority over the executive branch in decades. The era of unelected bureaucrats running the federal government may not be over, but this is among the biggest blows it has ever been dealt.

In the second case, however, the Supreme Court carved out an exception for the Federal Reserve. Does the exception make constitutional sense, or is it simply a pragmatic concession?

These are earth-shattering developments. Was the Court right to allow the President to fire all principal officers? Should expert power (agencies) be more insulated against popular power (presidents)? Is the exception for the Fed just based on pragmatism? Is that a bad thing?

This is the rational — and based — discussion of the Court’s biggest decisions that you won’t hear anywhere else.

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In this episode, Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld break down the Supreme Court's 5-4 birthright citizenship decision — a much more closely divided ruling than many expected.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, held that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on virtually anyone born on U.S. soil, with only narrow historical exceptions. The decision effectively takes the issue out of the democratic process, requiring either a constitutional amendment or a future Court to change course.

The hosts also analyze the full range of views across the concurrences and dissents: Justice Kavanaugh’s narrower, more statutory approach that would leave room for Congress to act; Justice Alito’s rejection of British “birthright subjecthood” and focus on the Civil Rights Act of 1866; and Justice Thomas and Gorsuch's domicile-based theory. They also examine Justice Jackson’s concurrence, which pushes a sweeping “antisubordination” reading of the Fourteenth Amendment that even Justice Sotomayor declined to join in full and that puts Justices Jackson and Thomas directly at odds.

The conversation explores the deeper stakes: Did the majority get the original meaning right, or did it entrench a contested historical view and disable democratic self-government? Should consequences — such as birth tourism and incentives for illegal immigrants — matter in constitutional interpretation? And what realistic paths remain for those who believe birthright citizenship should be more limited?

This is the rational — and based — discussion of the Court’s biggest decisions that you won’t hear anywhere else.

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New Podcast Episodes every Thursday morning, find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on YouTube!

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