Episodes

Polling shows over 60% of Americans support term limits for Supreme Court justices, a number that includes a large percentage of conservative-leaning independents who are presumably happy with the court's 6-3 conservative majority. To find out why, I invited Arjun Moorthy from The Factual to...

Americans expect the Supreme Court to be nonpartisan, but history tells us this wasn't always the case. Rachel Shelden of Penn State joins me on this episode of YDHTY to discuss the Supreme Court of the Civil War Era, where Americans expected their courts to be partisan, partisanship to be fluid,...

In last week's episode of YDHTY, term limits for Supreme Court Justices were discussed as one reform that could make the Court more representative of the population they serve. The argument goes that if Supreme Court Justices served terms of 18 years, each president would get to appoint two...

Earlier this year, President Biden signed an executive order enacting a commission to explore potential reforms to the Supreme Court. Much of their discussion has focused on ways to make the partisan makeup of the Court more representative of the electorate at large - whether that be through term...

Last week, Congress passed Biden's much-awaited infrastructure bill, coming up about $2 trillion short of the version that was originally proposed. In addition to repairing America's roads and bridges - something popular with voters - the original version also contained provisions such as...

In the prior episode on infrastructure, we discussed how the interstate highway system spawned a migration of businesses to the suburbs, where rent and property were cheaper. This left many lower-income workers in central cities without access to employment or the means to get there. This was...

In 1956, the US embarked on a 10-year mission to connect its major cities via the Interstate Highway System. When the project was completed in 1992 (a little over 10 years, for those of you doing the math) China began a similar journey to transform its own infrastructure. As Congress debates the...

In the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush campaigned on the idea of being a "uniter, not a divider". His successor, Barack Obama, made post-partisanship the centerpiece of his bid for president. Even Donald Trump, who invited every woman who accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment to sit...

As US troops began their withdrawal from Afghanistan and Americans began to see scenes of Afghans crowding Kabul's airport in an attempt to flee the country and Taliban parading the streets, sometimes in vehicles abandoned by the US military, The Factual ran a series of polls measuring their...

In the first episode of this series on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan a question came up that went to the root of both the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks and instances of domestic extremism in the US today: Why do comfortable people seek purpose in political violence? While the attacks...