Against a chyron that read “America 249 Years After the Declaration of Independence,” CNN’s Dana Bash welcomed historian Jon Meacham to Thursday’s edition of Inside Politics to promote his new book, which is just an overpriced foreword to the Declaration and the Constitution. Both Bash and Meacham would suggest that this 4th of July, GOP efforts to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill run contrary to the spirit of the Constitution.
Bash read Meacham a part of his introduction, “The making of the Constitution is an instance of a large truth: the end of politics in a democracy is to find a workable consensus while preserving a due measure of liberty. Little can be more complicated. Little can be more important.”
Continuing with her own commentary, Bash wondered, “And just today, Jon, we're seeing examples of lawmakers not working across the aisle to find consensus; president's agenda bill is front and center in the news. What should today's legislators, Democrats and Republicans, learn from that quote that I just read?”
Bash may try to claim she was asking what both parties can learn, but considering the only way to get consensus on the OBBB would be for Republicans to do a 180 and decide to do nothing with their 2024 wins, that is hard to believe.
Like Bash, Meacham pretended to be talking to both parties, but it was clear he was only addressing Republicans, “What do they want the future to think of them? And I think that that's, I call it sometimes the portrait test, which politicians actually kind of listen to because they can't imagine a world where we're not looking at their portrait at some point. What do you want to be judged on? Are you just in this to avoid a primary challenge?”
Meacham further claimed, “We've stumbled toward greater liberty because people from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan have been president at hours where you had to make a decision, were we going to tend toward autocracy, toward the power of a single interest, a single man, a single party? Or were we going to acknowledge the complexity of the world, understand that the Constitution, however flawed it may be, has in fact, now for a quarter of a millennium, kept us going toward that more perfect union.”
When Meacham talks about the threat of autocracy in 2025, he’s talking about Trump and again, Meacham would present the choice facing politicians as either supporting Trump or the Constitution, “Is that the—is that the story in which you want to be a character that the country endures? Or do you want to be a character in a story about the breaking of that compact? And so what I would say to the present is, ‘How do you want to be seen?’”
At no point did Bash or Meacham claim the OBBB was unconstitutional. Instead, they claimed that because it is a partisan piece of legislation, it violates the spirit of compromise that was needed to get the Constitution ratified. Yet, Meacham considered his former boss, President Joe Biden’s, partisan agenda so important that he labeled Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema “two of the most important people in the Western world, you know, since Hobbes and Locke” because “Western liberalism has not had so much riding on two people.”
Here is a transcript for the July 3 show:
CNN Inside Politics with Dana Bash
7/3/2025
12:47 PM ET
DANA BASH: Well, on that, you write in that new introduction to the Declaration of Independence and Constitution the following, quote, “the making of the Constitution is an instance of a large truth: the end of politics in a democracy is to find a workable consensus while preserving a due measure of liberty. Little can be more complicated. Little can be more important.”
And just today, Jon, we're seeing examples of lawmakers not working across the aisle to find consensus; president's agenda bill is front and center in the news. What should today's legislators, Democrats and Republicans, learn from that quote that I just read?
JON MEACHAM: What do they want the future to think of them? And I think that that's, I call it sometimes the portrait test, which politicians actually kind of listen to because they can't imagine a world where we're not looking at their portrait at some point. What do you want to be judged on? Are you just in this to avoid a primary challenge?
And I'm not being dismissive of that. I've never been on a ballot. I understand, Lincoln said, “All men act on incentive.” We live in a fallen world, you know, there was no mythic moment, including Philadelphia in 1776 and in 1787. Those were ferocious political, economic, cultural, racial battles over how to organize power, who was going to have power. And we excluded a lot of people for a long time. So, the American experiment is not an uncomplicated story of this wonderful march of liberty, but we have stumbled toward greater liberty, and we've stumbled toward greater liberty because people from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan have been president at hours where you had to make a decision, were we going to tend toward autocracy, toward the power of a single interest, a single man, a single party? Or were we going to acknowledge the complexity of the world, understand that the Constitution, however flawed it may be, has in fact, now for a quarter of a millennium, kept us going toward that more perfect union. Is that the—is that the story in which you want to be a character that the country endures? Or do you want to be a character in a story about the breaking of that compact? And so what I would say to the present is “How do you want to be seen?”
BASH: Yeah.
