Watch Trump Get Schooled

Sharon McMahon on The Andy Borowitz Show

Last week I had the honor of talking to the great educator Sharon McMahon, who’s been called America’s Government Teacher. In twenty minutes, she managed to shred the biggest lies spewed by the Trump White House.

No one explains and defends the Constitution more lucidly than Sharon, so I asked her to clarify four principles enshrined in that document—principles that Trump and his cronies relentlessly try to obfuscate. Here is a summary of our conversation.

What is meant by “separation of powers”?

Separation of powers delineates who gets to do what in government. That's the most simple answer. Not everybody gets to do everything. And it's to prevent power from being too concentrated in the hands of a single individual or a single group… It's a very related concept to checks and balances. The concept of checks and balances is that each of the three co-equal branches of government are allowed to limit the power of the others. That's what a check is. It's limiting the power of the other branches of government.

So the judicial branch interprets the laws and it limits the power of the executive and the legislative. And we could sit here and go through all different sides of the triangle and talk about how each branch is meant to check and limit the power of the others. But yes, this idea that power is disseminated out throughout the ranks, both the federal government, state governments, and into local governments. And then it is also additionally split into these three branches. Again, this is a system designed to make sure that we never have a king.

How about “due process”?

Well, due process is one of my favorite topics because there were wide swaths of Americans who were not entitled to due process during the first part of America's history. And it wasn't until we decided to amend the Constitution post-Civil War that we began to really be true to what we said on paper in the words of Martin Luther King, that all men are created equal. And the concept of due process means that we are equal in the eyes of the law, and we are all entitled to the rights that are afforded to us.

And so due process does not mean that somebody won't get what's coming to them. It doesn't mean that somebody is not going to prison forever. It doesn't mean that somebody can't be convicted and isn't a bad person. What it means is that they are entitled to the same legal protections as everybody else.

What does the Constitution say about birthright citizenship?

The concept of birthright citizenship is… akin to settled law in the United States. And I hate to use the term settled law because you never know when something's going to become unsettled. But there has not been substantive assault on the concept of birthright citizenship throughout much of the United States' history.

Birthright citizenship was how we enticed people to come to the colonies. We wanted people to immigrate here. We'll give your kids citizenship. It was a way to entice them to get over here and we could flesh out our population and use our manifest destiny to explore new lands, et cetera… You know, we don't think birthright citizenship is going anywhere anytime soon because it’s very clear in the Constitution who gets it. It's very obvious. It's not an opaque concept.

Can the president run for a third term?

Same answer. This has been settled law since the 1950s when we intentionally changed the Constitution in an effort to never have an FDR situation again where somebody was elected over and over. The intent behind amending the Constitution to bar a president from having additional terms is very clear. We had mainstream mass media at the time.

It's not like, oh, we had to go in an archive and find one little letter. We know exactly what people were thinking when they passed this amendment to the Constitution. So I do think that the talk about, oh, he's going to run for a third term… The media loves to ask the president if he's going to run for a third term. Steve Bannon loves to do interviews about it. Do I think that it is a talking point that is meant to recapture the public's attention on them rather than other issues?

Is it a way to flood the zone with so much news that you can't possibly pay attention to all of it? Yes, because there's no serious argument, not one, not one serious argument that somebody can run for more than two terms and be the president more than twice.

I also asked Sharon to name someone from American history who inspires her to fight for what’s right. She gave a fantastic answer which you can see here.

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