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You're listening to Comedy Central. Now, the following message comes from the real world homecoming, New York now streaming exclusively on Paramount. Plus, this is the true story of the real world coming back almost 30 years later. The original seven roommates that started the reality genre are moving back in together for the new multi episode docu series, The Real World Homecoming. New York joined Becky, Heather, Erik, Kevin, Andre, Julie and Norman and find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real all over again.

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The Real World Homecoming, New York, a new multi episode docu series now streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus. Let's start with the simplest explanation of the filibuster. It's basically a loophole in the Senate rules for blocking legislation, because even though you only need 51 votes to pass the bill, you need 60 votes to stop the debate over voting on that bill in the first place, which means as long as the minority party can keep debating, then the bill is basically dead.

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And if you're wondering why on earth would the founding fathers put that in the Constitution? Well, they didn't.

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The filibuster began as a historical accident. It's not some great tradition in the Senate that's protected by the Constitution. That happened in 1855 after Aaron Burr, that a rules change in Burr as vice president in the early eighteen hundreds just going over these rules of the Senate.

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And he made a critical mistake. We thought we don't really need a way to stop a debate, do we?

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I mean, there's just a few of us like we will debate until we're done. Everyone's had their say. How slow could the Senate really be?

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Nobody knew it at the time. It'd be three more decades before the first filibuster was actually mounted. But that was the moment the Senate created the filibuster.

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That's right. The filibuster isn't in the Constitution. It's just a rule that was made up by that guy who shut Lin Manuel Miranda. And it didn't even start out as a way to block legislation. It was a way for the Senate to keep debate open, not to debate for so long that nobody could ever actually vote on a bill. So its original purpose is completely different from what people decided to use it for later on. It's insane. It's sort of like how Facebook was invented as a way to see which of your classmates were hot and then years later became a way to organize a lynch mob for Mike Pence, by the way, is hot.

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And you might wonder why senators back then would want to risk having an endless debate. But don't forget, guys in the eighteen hundreds, it wasn't anything better to do. I mean, it was either listen to Thadeus, talk about a bill or take a bumpy carriage ride back to your plantation where a bunch of black people wanted to discuss their terms of employment. You're probably going to want to hear what Thadeus has to say either way. Eventually, senators realized that they could block legislation by debating forever.

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And that could get pretty ridiculous because there was no rule on what counted as a debate. So senators came up with all kinds of random ways to fill that time, which led to moments like this.

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Louisiana Democrat Huey Long filibustered several bills in arguing against a bill. He recited recipes for salad dressing and discussed at length the best way to fry oysters. His most famous filibuster was on June 12. Nineteen thirty five, he was able to speak without stop for 15 hours and 30 minutes, running out of things to say about the bill. He offered to give advice on any subject someone requested.

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Yup. In nineteen thirty five, this white dude rambled on about nothing for over 15 hours and somehow he gets zero credit for inventing the podcast. So unfair. But the Senate is crazy, man. This guy got on the floor and talked for 15 hours about oysters and salad dressing. I mean, they should make it a rule that you at least have to try to connect your speech to the bill that you're supposed to be debating.

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I guarantee a salad dressing is delicious. But you know what doesn't leave a good taste in my mouth letting women wear pants. But still, I'm not going to lie.

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It's impressive that he could talk for that long. That shit is hard. I can't even think of twenty seconds of stuff to talk about to a co-worker in an elevator.

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So going to floor nine, huh? Yeah. How's this weather? We're having so much weather.

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I think I'm just going to get out here. Good.

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I will say though, it makes sense that senators are so good at filibustering because most of them are grandparents. Don't forget that. Visit your granddad and see if he doesn't take three hours to tell you a story that happened in 20 minutes. You're filibustering, grandpa, but it wasn't until the late nineteen fifties that the filibuster started to become more common. And what caused was so inspiring to senators at that time that they just had to stand up and speak for hours being racist.

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For a few decades the filibuster was used, but pretty sparingly. Then at the Senate starts to consider civil rights legislation and Southern senators really hate this, but they don't have the votes to actually defeat the bills. So they start using.

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The filibuster became a tool that Southern senators used to prevent the federal government from intervening in racial segregation.

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Perhaps the most famous one was when South Carolina's Strom Thurmond took the floor against the nineteen fifty seven Civil Rights Act.

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Thurmond notoriously read the phone book, clocking in at more than twenty four hours to try to block a nineteen fifty seven civil rights bill.

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How did you last? Twenty four hours. You never left the Senate floor. I don't anticipate advance for three or four days beforehand and dried out my body in the sauna. Yes, so I wouldn't be tempted to go to bathroom. And so I was able to do that.

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Oh strong.

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You were too much, and when I think about all those black people who suffered because of you, you're for real men, how gross was that story?

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This guy dried out his body to help him filibuster. You know, someone is committed to racism when they're willing to jerk themselves for it. And it really is amazing what humans can accomplish when confronted with their worst fears. Just as a mother will be able to lift a car off of the ground to save her child, a racist senator will suddenly be able to speak for days at a time, only to stop a black person from using his bathroom. I mean, the filibuster was used to block black people so many times.

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I'm surprised they never use it at nightclubs.

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Oh, a black guy. Hey, before I let you in, have I ever told you about my salad dressing? Two tablespoons of lemon juice, a pinch of rosemary. And what you want to try and do is make sure that, OK, he's got right now, eventually the Senate decided that all of these talkathons were slowing things down too much.

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So in nineteen seventy five, they made what they thought was a small adjustment to the rules. Instead of having to speak, a senator could just announced that they planned to speak and unless there was 60 votes to prevent them, the filibuster would be considered successful. And that actually worked for a while until two things happened. America elected a black president and a Senate minority leader who was willing to do anything to stop him.

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The practice became an art form for Republicans under Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. During the Obama years, McConnell impeded nominees and legislation left and right. He has the nickname the Grim Reaper for a reason.

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Today, it's being used in a different way. It's being used to effectively kill a measure, a bill, a proposal that the minority really doesn't like.

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In fact, there have been more filibusters during Obama's time in office than in the 50s, 60s and 70s combined over the entire history of the Senate before President Obama, just sixty eight judicial and executive branch nominees were blocked and required cloture, which ends a filibuster and forces an up or down vote. By contrast, 79 of President Obama's nominees required cloture from twenty nine to twenty thirteen alone.

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Republicans used the filibuster against virtually every controversial bill, the nomination and some that were uncontroversial at all.

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Mitch McConnell has the dubious distinction of being the only sitting senator that filibustered his own bill.

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God damn Mitch McConnell loves to filibuster so much. He filibustered his own bill and he has to get four ribs removed to be able to do it. The man is sick. But yes, once Obama became president, McConnell began filibustering everything Obama wanted to appoint. A judge blocked it. Obama wants it as possible. McConnell stopped him. Obama wants you to watch something on Netflix. McConnell hid the remote in his Nick Foles.

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I haven't shown it anywhere, man. Maybe you should write a book. And once McConnell decided to block Obama's entire agenda, that became the new precedent. When Democrats got the chance, they blocked President Trump's agenda just as hard to the point where now practically every piece of legislation in the Senate needs 60 votes to pass. And that's why there's a movement to get rid of the filibuster entirely, because it's not healthy for a democracy. If the loses can always block the winners from passing their agenda.

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Now, the Democrats don't have the votes right now to kill the filibuster completely. But based on Joe Biden's interview, it seems like they may be willing to make it more annoying again, which won't stop filibusters from happening. But at least we'll finally get to find out what Mitch McConnell uses in his salad dressing. Sure. Walker, one of the chairs of poor people. And then you want to grind it out where the pressure. So that's the filibuster.

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And if you don't know now you know.

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Being president is a weird job because in a democracy, the president is the leader of the country, but they are also an employee.

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So do presidents have the right to keep their health problems to themselves? Well, throughout history, presidents have answered, yes, Eisenhower was the first president to actually open up medical records.

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But when a bad event happened, they went into a kind of cover up mode. September of nineteen fifty five, he was in Colorado and had a massive, I mean, massive heart attack. And instead his personal doctor told the press it was indigestion.

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After Ronald Reagan was shot in nineteen eighty one, the White House released a photo showing him standing with Nancy Reagan, dropping out a nurse holding a machine connected to a chest tube and never revealing how close he came to dying.

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Kennedy flatly denied his Addison's disease, a hormonal deficiency that can cause fatigue, low blood pressure and weight loss. But he had it while in office.

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He at times took as many as eight medications a day just to function, including painkillers, stimulants, antibiotics, steroids, hormones.

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The man was essentially a walking pharmacy. FDR was never transparent about his health, never. He tried to hide that he used a wheelchair for years and largely got away with it.

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If Secret Service agents saw a photographer taking a picture of Roosevelt, say, getting out of his car, they would seize the camera and tear out the film.

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Damn FDR.

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People really went all out to make sure people didn't see him in a wheelchair, which kind of makes you wonder what they told people was actually going on.

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Isn't it weird that we've never seen the president stand up or you should. OK, no questions. Let's move on.

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I mean, look, at least back then, you could tear out someone's film in their camera in twenty twenty. The moment someone points a camera at you, you're already a meme. It's like, give me that phone.

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Give me that phone. Give me that phone. Give me that. Give me. Give me. Give me. Give me that. Give me that. Give me that phone.

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But yes, throughout American history, administrations did whatever it took to keep secrets about the president's health from lying about FDR, his wheelchair, by confiscating cameras to lying about Bill Clinton's asthma, by hiding his inhaler in a saxophone. In fact, hiding health conditions goes all the way back to Lincoln. I mean, why do you think he was wearing that top hat? Dude had a conjoined twin under that guy's. That's that's real. I saw that on Facebook.

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In fact, the only American president who didn't get away with it was President Taft and they spilled all the tea on that guy. Poor dude got stuck in a bathtub once, and we're still talking about it one hundred years later. And then there's Grover Cleveland. Twenty second president and world's most adorable. Grover Yes. Said it. Grover Mutant Smurf. When it came to keeping secrets, President Cleveland took it to a whole new level.

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It's hard to imagine an American president dropping out of sight for nearly a week, but that's exactly what happened in eighteen ninety three when Grover Cleveland underwent secret cancer surgery.

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Back in eighteen ninety three, Grover Cleveland actually had a cancerous tumor in the roof of his mouth. He didn't want anybody to know, so they snuck him onto a yacht.

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He had a friend who owned a yacht. So the cover story would be just going on a fishing trip. And while they were on that boat, the operation took place. Six doctors were recruited. They were all sworn to secrecy. And in about 90 minutes, they removed most of his upper left palate, five teeth and a good part of his upper left jaw as well.

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They managed to keep the press at bay. They kept them at a distance from his home on Cape Cod until the wound was healed well enough.

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It took about three weeks and then he was fitted with a prosthetic device that he could pop up into his upper left job. But by and large, the secret held for twenty four years.

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Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Nobody heard from the president for three weeks.

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What a dream. But God damn, that's a major cover up. Grover Cleveland basically invented that move that celebrities do when they get secret butt implants. Oh yeah. I've just been away traveling for a couple of weeks. Oh my. But yeah, I guess it did get twice as big. You know how vacations are. And if you ask me, it's hard to imagine a risky situation for a president's surgery on a boat in eighteen ninety three. And don't forget, they had Dragon's back then President Clinton was a sitting duck out there.

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I saw that on Facebook. That's a real thing, right? Honestly, I don't even know why Cleveland went through all this trouble. If I were a president with a fake jaw, I would own that shit. Maybe I would use it to intimidate other foreign leaders. Oh, what's that? China. You're going to put sanctions on us. Well, check this out.

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And look, maybe it's not a big problem if a president hides some dental work or a mild pill addiction. I mean, as long as they can still do the job, what's the difference?

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But there was also one case of a president who got so sick that he couldn't do the job and they still didn't tell the American people Woodrow Wilson had a stroke that not even his closest advisors knew about.

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His last year and a half, almost a year and a half in office, he was incapacitated.

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His wife tried to conceal how bad it was. It turns out he was partially blind. He was partially paralyzed. He was lying upstairs in a bed in the White House, growing a beard.

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And they pretended that it was not that that his wife and his doctor told the cabinet and told the vice president, he's OK, we got this. You just can't see him. He's in seclusion upstairs and we'll pass down his decisions.

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They told the public their leader was suffering from exhaustion. Many say Edith Wilson effectively ran the country during that time.

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Holy shit. You guys act like this is some fun little quirk of American history. But you all had a straight up coup and also a secret woman president's guys. That's huge.

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What do people talk about this morning who run the world girls, but only behind the scenes while getting none of the credit girls? So, yes, America has a proud history of its presidents misleading the public about their health.

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So from now on, when you hear Trump or his doctors withholding medical information, don't stress because in a way, this might actually be the most presidential thing Donald Trump has ever done it. And if you don't know now you know. The Daily Show, Eres Edition and the following message are brought to you by Norton LifeLock Hate doing taxes. There are a lot of people out there who would love to do them for you, not just tax specialists, cyber criminals and identity thieves to during tax season.

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Don't let cyber criminals make taxes an extra taxing. Save twenty five percent or more off your first year of Norton 360 with LifeLock at Norton Dotcom, The Daily Show. That's twenty five percent off at Norton Dotcom, The Daily Show. The Daily Show Eres Edition in the following message are brought to you by Ford Motors in the Ford F series.

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The Ford F series has been America's pickup truck leader for 43 years and counting in the all new 20 21 f when 50 is completely redesigned to be the toughest, most productive F 150 ever, the interior has been given a serious upgrade with more luxury and comfort. Front and Center is a huge new available 12 inch sink Ford touch screen in an available storable gear shift that actually folds down to make room for an available interior work surface that provides a desk like workspace or even a nice flat surface for lunch to help make work more productive.

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It includes guides for measuring and even a built in slot for a smartphone or tablet computer. Tough. This smart can only be called F 150. Check out the all new twenty twenty one Ford F 150 at Ford Dotcom built. Ford proud. Built Ford tough. The first lady, it's not a job that's actually in the Constitution, but that's just because in 1787, women hadn't been invented yet and even the first lady is not an official role. They've been important figures in the country from the very beginning.

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From the earliest days, America's first ladies were referred to as lady presidents or Republic and queen.

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The term first lady didn't come into use really until Dolly Madison's time.

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The fourth first lady pioneered the practice of championing social causes. She helped orphaned children and supported women's rights.

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And it said that at Mrs. Madison's funeral, President Zachary Taylor eulogized her as the country's first lady, the first time that title was ever used. That's right.

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Dolly Madison was the first first lady, but she didn't know it because President Taylor only called her that at her funeral.

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If I would Dolly Madison, I would be dead.

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But also, I would have been so pissed at Zachary Taylor because before him, people were calling her lady presidents or Republican queen, and that was so much cooler as names. Then at her funeral, some dude is like, no, she was the first lady. If I was her, I'd be getting out of that casket. Like what you say, bitch. You call me Queen, Supreme First Lady Queen. But while the idea of a first lady has been around from the beginning, the job as we know it today didn't really kick off until the 1930s.

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You know, it's like how four years Netflix was a company that sent DVDs in the mail. But that's not what people think of as Netflix now. And the first streaming on demand first lady was Eleanor Roosevelt's.

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Eleanor Roosevelt really innovated the first lady's role as a public communicator. She wrote thousands of columns, twenty seven books. She participated in hundreds of radio shows.

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She felt that her role was to really reach out to the American people and to learn from them about what they wanted in policy.

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First lady had taken to the road and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, going right to the source of the country's pain during the Depression, meeting miners in Appalachia. Challenging Southern Democrats to support anti lynching legislation and during World War Two, visiting internment camps where Japanese Americans were imprisoned simply because of their race.

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The first lady was often alone at the wheel, driving herself cross country.

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Now, that is ballsiest as hell. Eleanor Roosevelt was so politically active, she visited the Japanese internment camps that her husband set up. It's so classic for a wife to go around cleaning up her husband's mess. She was probably at those internment camps like, I'm sorry, he just gets a little racist. Sometimes work has been really stressful. He's not normally this way. Really, really isn't. And she even took road trips by herself, which was very gutsy.

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In the nineteen thirties, there was no phones, no GPS, you know, although I guess it's hard to get lost when they were only like what, two roads in the entire country.

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OK, listen up. If you want to get from California to the White House, pay attention. You want to turn on the road. Are you listening. You want to turn onto the road one and then you're going to drive straight down road one and then you'll be there.

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And once Eleanor Roosevelt realized that she could use her position to bring attention to the issues that were important to her, every first lady who followed did the same.

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Lady Bird Johnson sought to beautify the nation and took an active role in the Head Start program for early child development.

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Barbara Bush advocated for literacy, as did Laura Bush in 1960 to Jackie Kennedy Onassis created the White House Historical Association.

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Betty Ford was vocal about women's issues. She supported the Supreme Court's ruling on Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal, and she supported the Equal Rights Amendment. She openly discussed her breast cancer and mastectomy.

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When Michelle Obama was first lady, one of her key initiatives was to push for healthier nutrition and food choices that translated into a change for public school lunches around the country.

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In the 80s, Nancy Reagan appeared in a popular sitcom to boost her just say no campaign about Mrs. Reagan.

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I'm concerned about drug abuse, especially among the young.

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Wow, that is commitment. Nancy Reagan was so determined to stop drug abuse, she even went on a sitcom to speak out on it, which would be impossible to do today. I mean, TV shows are so much more adult now. I mean, it's easy to tell Gary Coleman not to do drugs. It's a lot harder to try and do that on your forehead. Just say no, Zendaya bitch. You should have been here season one. But it's through that activism that first ladies get to show who they really are and how they want the world to change.

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You know, Michelle Obama cared about health. Hillary Clinton cared about children and education. Melania cared about stopping cyberbullies and say what you want, but her agenda got done. And the thing about being a first lady is that they're not just expected to promote social causes. They're also expected to be style influences, Jackie Kennedy's pillbox hats, Nancy Reagan's red dresses, Hillary Clinton's pantsuits or Nixon's Zenna cosplay.

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But of course, all this attention also means that first ladies get subjected to intense scrutiny by the press. And it's not something that they've been happy about.

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To be the first lady may be the most difficult job in Washington. Martha Washington famously said the role of first lady can sometimes feel like a state prisoner.

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Michelle Obama wore a pair of shorts, just a regular pair of mom shorts, and an uproar ensued. Days of video commentary and pictures and debate about whether it's OK for a first lady to wear shorts.

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Andrew Jackson's wife, Rachel, was blasted in the papers for being a pipe smoking hillbilly from Tennessee.

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Jackie Kennedy called the press harpies, and she hated the constant attention.

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This he felt very uncomfortable, very ill, at ease with all the fanfare and the attention of the press.

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There was a famous incident where she was doing a christening of a ship and she went to break the bottle and they forgot to score the bottle ahead of time. So she's banging it and banging and it just won't break it. She was humiliated.

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She told her husband, I'm not doing another public appearance. Oh, poor Bess Truman. I honestly feel bad for her because we've all had that moments where we just can't open a jar of peanut butter. But imagine if the entire country was watching you struggle with that jaw. Almost got everybody.

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Hold on. Try running hot water over it. I tried that already, if you ask me, the person to blame is the one who started this whole tradition, who thought it was a good idea to christen a new ship by smashing it with a champagne bottle. You don't christen a new car by slashing the tires with a samurai sword. And honestly, all the first ladies are in an unfair situation because none of them asked to be in that position.

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Martha Washington was right. It is sort of like a prison, although it's weird to say you feel like a prisoner when you own slaves yourself.

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Sometimes I just feel like I can't leave. You know what I mean? Yeah, Mrs. Macer, I think I do. But maybe the most fascinating thing about First Ladies is that even though no one votes for them and they kind of make up the job as they go, just by virtue of being married to the president, they can end up having a lot more power than many elected officials.

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The first lady is the most powerful woman in the country because she has the ear of first thing in the morning and last thing at night of the most powerful man in the country, going back to the very first first lady, Martha Washington, and the second one, Abigail Adams.

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Both of them were politically involved. They were involved in cabinet decisions. They were involved in campaigning. These women were political partners.

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Nancy Reagan was pulling a lot of the strings, calling many of the shots from President Ronald Reagan's first campaign for the White House back in 1980 to his Cold War ending triumph in nineteen eighty seven.

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Hillary Clinton became more involved, obviously, in policy making than any first lady before her. She had an office in the West Wing. Bill Clinton even ran on the slogan Buy one, get one free.

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In 1919, Edith Wilson was unofficially running the country after her husband, Woodrow, suffered a stroke.

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That's insane, man. Not only have first ladies influenced the president, Edith Wilson ended up running the government. And by the way, that totally screwed the vice president over. I mean, like 90 percent of the vice president's job is being the case. The president goes down. So that's like being Tom Brady's backup and then he gets hurt. But then Jazelle comes out like, no, no, no, I got this. Get back on the bench, loser I throw for my husband.

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So as the Biden administration gets underway, history suggests that Jill Biden will likely be a major part of it because first ladies always have been.

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And if you don't know now you know.

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When you were a little kid, you probably believed that people vote for presidents and whoever gets the most votes wins.

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Yeah, simple child mind the same way you believe that your younger brother was brought by the stork. But once you got older, you learned that actually your mom and dad were riding the F train to Bowen town because Bowen town is where the stock lives and that's how they got your little brother. And in the same way, the system for electing a president in America is more complex than just one person, one vote.

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Because, you see, America's founding fathers wanted to come up with something that would prevent their biggest fear, the people choosing someone terrible.

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The Electoral College is a sort of glued together solution to the constitutional convention, really.

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So they said, should the Congress elect the president? No. If they do that, then Congress will own the presidency.

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Another option was to have the people select their leader. But at the time, they thought the country was too large and the people not informed enough to make that choice.

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And one of the odd compromises that they came up with was actually using this set of political elites to do the actual voting for president, but still providing a mechanism to select those those electors.

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They thought by creating this wise group of elites, these electors could filter popular passions. They were afraid of a demagogue being chosen. They mistrusted direct democracy.

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Alexander Hamilton wrote that the goal was to ensure that, quote, The office of president will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. That's right.

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According to Alexander Hamilton, the office of the president will never fall to the left of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed. Damn, I should make a musical out of this. You guys do this. But the point is Americans don't vote for the presidents. Americans votes for a slate of electors who will then go on to vote for the president. In many ways, it's the same way that American high school kids don't buy the beer.

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They give the homeless men money and then he goes to buy the beer on their behalf. That way it's more responsible. And it's amazing how if you read into it's the founding fathers really thought that everyone in the country was Super Dome because everyone talks about how they wanted to build a new perfect society when really they were just basically installing childproofing to keep the country safe and stop Americans from eating sand. Now, this whole idea of electors being smarter than the masses fell by the wayside pretty quickly.

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And one of the main reasons for doing this was because they thought a lot of Americans wouldn't know enough about the candidates to vote for them. But you see, that was hundreds of years ago when information was harder to come by. Like you only found out news when someone delivered it by horse. But now we've got the Internet people with everyone super informed, like everyone in America. We all know things. Look at my phone like I know that Hunter Biden moved to Russia and sold his laptop to Rudy Giuliani for drugs.

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I know that Hillary Clinton is in a pedophile ring and they drink the blood of children. And I know that Melania has a body double who's having an affair with Gary Busey.

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Actually, you know, maybe we should go back to the horse. I don't know about this Internet thing, but the point is today it's understood that a state's electors will vote for the candidate who won their state's popular votes.

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The only problem is that's just an understanding. It's not an actual law.

[00:32:09]

According to the National Archives, there is no constitutional provision or federal law that requires electors to vote according to their results of the popular vote in their state.

[00:32:19]

Those who don't follow the wish, the will of the electorate, they're called faithless electors. In twenty sixteen, four of the 12 electors in Washington decided not to vote for Hillary Clinton, despite Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote in that state. Instead, three voted for Colin Powell and one voted for the Native American activist Faith Spotted Eagle.

[00:32:38]

It isn't a new concept. According to a fair vote, there have been one hundred and sixty seven faithless electors since the Electoral College was founded. Forty three percent change their vote because the candidate they were supposed to vote for died before the Electoral College could vote 40 percent who chose to vote for the candidate they wanted rather than matching the popular vote, 17 percent either didn't vote or cast an abnormal vote in the 2004 election.

[00:33:03]

Rather than casting their vote for John Kerry, the unknown elector cast their vote for Kerry's VP, John Edwards, and also misspelled Edwards name as Edwards. Wow.

[00:33:13]

So the founders just let elect us, do whatever they want. They can choose someone the people didn't vote for. They can vote for a third party. They can even just vote for a typo. I can't believe what a giant flaw in the American electoral system. This is like finding out that they keep a key to Fort Knox under the doormat. And just by the way, I don't know if we should be holding voters accountable for the correct spelling of names.

[00:33:37]

I don't think that's fair, especially in a country that's got a hundred different ways to spell. Alison, how do you for allies in your name, Alison? Now, a lot of people do realize that this system is a problem.

[00:33:50]

In fact, states were recently given the power to require electors to follow the will of the people. Unfortunately, very few of them actually do.

[00:34:00]

In the past term, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the states to insist that electors vote for the person who won the popular vote. But here's the deal. Only 14 of the 50 states actually have that legal requirement in those 14 states. If if the faithless elector goes rogue, the state can throw them out on the street and get somebody else in to vote, according to the popular vote. But in all the rest of the states, if a faithless elector goes off on their own two, there's nothing the state can do about it except find them.

[00:34:34]

Really? Electors can subvert the will of the voters and undermine the foundations of democracy, and their punishment is the same as parking in front of a fire hydrant. In fact, parking in front of a hydrant is even worse because you don't just get a fine, you'll also get towed. I mean, charging someone a thousand dollars for giving the presidency to someone doesn't mean that they won't do it. It just means the bidding starts at a thousand dollars. Now, the good news is Trump has done so many electors that it's unlikely he can convince enough of them to turn against their state's voters and vote for him.

[00:35:03]

But the bad news is it's easy to see how a future election could be close enough that the losing candidates could convince enough electors to make them the winning candidates. And it would be totally legal. The Daily Show with Criminal Ears Edition, watch The Daily Show weeknights at 11:00, 10:00 Central on Comedy Central and the Comedy Central. Watch full episodes and videos at The Daily Show Datong. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to The Daily Show on YouTube for exclusive content and more.

[00:35:39]

This has been a Comedy Central podcast now.