Power Struggle: Energy, Climate, and the Future
Release Date: 07/04/2026
Faith Without Force
America at 250: Due Diligence
Who should decide what Americans believe—and what happens when government takes a side? The First Amendment prohibits the establishment of religion while protecting its free exercise. But the phrase most closely associated with that principle—a “wall of separation between church and state”—does not appear in the Constitution. It comes from an 1802 letter written by President Thomas Jefferson to a group of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut. In this episode of America at 250: Due Diligence, Bill Bernardoni and Steve Herman trace the origins of religious liberty from the persecution of...
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The Free Press On Trial
America at 250: Due Diligence
America at 250: Due Diligence goes live from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., for a special hour recorded in the Club's First Amendment Room. As the country marks its 250th year, hosts Bill Bernardoni and Steve Herman convene a conversation on the state of a free press, introduced by National Press Club president Mark Schoeff Jr. of CQ Roll Call. The episode opens with a statement from Catherine Herridge, the Emmy Award-winning investigative correspondent who has covered national security and intelligence for ABC, Fox, and CBS. Herridge was held in civil contempt in February 2024...
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Making Friends: Benjamin Franklin and America’s First Public Diplomacy Campaign
America at 250: Due Diligence
Before the United States could win its independence, it had to convince the world that the American experiment was worth supporting. The thirteen colonies had no navy, no national treasury, and little credibility among Europe’s great powers. Defeating the British Empire would require more than success on the battlefield. The revolutionaries needed weapons, loans, trade, diplomatic recognition, and powerful foreign allies. They also had to persuade European leaders and ordinary citizens that a collection of rebellious colonies could become a stable and successful nation. In this episode of...
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The Power of War
America at 250: Due Diligence
Who decides when the United States goes to war? The Constitution divides that responsibility between Congress and the president. Congress possesses the power to declare and fund war, while the president serves as commander in chief. But from the earliest years of the republic, the boundary between those powers has been tested, stretched, and frequently blurred. In this episode of America at 250: Due Diligence, Bill Bernardoni and Steve Herman trace the evolution of American war powers from Thomas Jefferson’s campaign against the Barbary powers to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and...
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One Toke Over the Line: Prohibition, Marijuana, and the Limits of Federal Power
America at 250: Due Diligence
Alcohol prohibition required the Constitution twice—once to impose it and once to repeal it. Marijuana prohibition took a different path, imposed through federal law even as a growing number of states have chosen legalization. In this episode of America at 250: Due Diligence, Steve Herman and Bill Bernardoni examine how national prohibition takes hold, what happens when Americans refuse to comply, and how conflicts between federal and state power can reshape the law. Historian Richard Hamm explains how nearly a century of temperance organizing, religious activism, women’s groups, and...
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Power Struggle: Energy, Climate, and the Future
America at 250: Due Diligence
In April 1977, Jimmy Carter told the country that solving its energy crisis would take sacrifice — that the alternative might be, in his words, a national catastrophe. Nearly fifty years later, the crisis looks different. The gas lines are gone. In their place: climate change, an aging power grid, and data centers that are starting to draw more electricity than entire cities. But the underlying argument hasn't moved an inch. Who decides what America builds? Who pays for it? And who has the authority to make that call — Washington, the states, or nobody at all? The Constitution says almost...
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The First Shot: 27 Words, 230 Years, and a Fight That Isn't Over
America at 250: Due Diligence
Twenty-seven words. That is the entire text of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. And for more than two centuries, Americans have been arguing about what those twenty-seven words mean — in courtrooms, in statehouses, in campaign ads, and in the streets. The fight is about guns. But it is also about something larger: liberty and public safety, individual rights and democratic government, what the Constitution meant in 1791 and...
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The State of Control: Federalism and the Limits of Federal Power
America at 250: Due Diligence
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, America at 250: Due Diligence turns to one of the oldest unsettled arguments in American life—not whether to have a national government, but how much of one. Where should power actually live: close to the people, in the states and towns where most Americans spend their lives, or at the center, in Washington? The argument was there before the ink was dry. Inside the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison pushed for what became known as the “federal negative”—a congressional veto over state laws—and lost. The states were too...
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The Key to the Cage: Is It Time for an Article V Convention?
America at 250: Due Diligence
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, America at 250: Due Diligence turns to one of the most consequential — and least understood — provisions in the U.S. Constitution: Article V, and the question of whether the country should call its first-ever Article V convention. This episode opens in the summer of 1787, inside a sweltering Pennsylvania Statehouse, where George Mason — one of the sharpest minds at the Constitutional Convention — warned that the founders were “building a cage without a key.” Mason’s insistence on a state-led convention process became Article V’s...
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Kicking the Can Down the Road: What Does Government Owe Its People?
America at 250: Due Diligence
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, America at 250: Due Diligence takes on one of the country’s biggest and most enduring questions: What does the government owe the people it serves? Not as a theory. Not as a campaign slogan. But in real life — in retirement checks, health care, food assistance, taxes, debt, and the promises made to working Americans. This episode traces the American social safety net from the Founding era through the New Deal, the Great Society, the Reagan Revolution, and today’s debate over Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, federal spending, and the...
info_outlineIn April 1977, Jimmy Carter told the country that solving its energy crisis would take sacrifice — that the alternative might be, in his words, a national catastrophe. Nearly fifty years later, the crisis looks different. The gas lines are gone. In their place: climate change, an aging power grid, and data centers that are starting to draw more electricity than entire cities. But the underlying argument hasn't moved an inch. Who decides what America builds? Who pays for it? And who has the authority to make that call — Washington, the states, or nobody at all?
The Constitution says almost nothing about energy. The founders could not have imagined a national electric grid, let alone artificial intelligence data centers competing with homes and hospitals for power. And yet nearly every major energy decision in American history — who builds what, who pays for it, who bears the cost when it goes wrong — traces back to questions about the proper role of government that the country has never fully settled.
The fight is about electricity. But it is also about something larger: federal power versus state authority, private property versus the public interest, and whether government should plan a transition or simply get out of the way. It is a country where the grid was built one boondoggle, one monopoly, and one act of Congress at a time — and where the same argument that played out over canals and pipelines in the nineteenth century is now playing out over data centers and solar farms in the twenty-first.
The modern energy debate has three inflection points. In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the Bonneville Dam and defended the federal government's role in bringing electricity to communities private utilities wouldn't serve — over the objections of those who saw it as government overreach. In 1977, Jimmy Carter told Americans that solving the country's energy crisis would require sacrifice, framing it as "the moral equivalent of war." And in 1981, Ronald Reagan reversed course, decontrolling oil prices and arguing that government should step back and let markets work. Each president left behind a piece of the system Americans still live with today: a grid built around monopoly utilities, a patchwork of federal and state authority, and an unresolved argument about who should be in charge.
In this episode of America at 250: Due Diligence, three guests take on the energy debate from three very different vantage points. A historian of energy infrastructure explains why the pipelines, canals, and transmission lines built over two centuries didn't just meet America's demand for power — they created it, and locked in decisions that last for generations. The longest-serving chairman in the history of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission describes a grid under real strain from extreme weather and an unprecedented surge in demand from data centers, and argues that consumers — not just utilities — have to become active participants in fixing it. And a free-market energy economist at the Cato Institute makes the case that government's job is mostly to get out of the way, warning that decades of political whiplash on energy policy, and the temptation to let planning become monopoly protection, have left the country's biggest questions about affordability and reliability unresolved.
Power in both senses of the word. Who builds it. Who controls it. Who pays for it.
Hosts
Steve Herman
Steve Herman is a veteran journalist and former White House Bureau Chief for Voice of America. He brings decades of reporting experience to America at 250: Due Diligence, helping guide the series through the historical, political, and institutional questions that have shaped the United States.
Bill Bernardoni
Bill Bernardoni is the founder of Bernardoni Media & Marketing and co-host of America at 250: Due Diligence. His work focuses on building, producing, and distributing podcasts and radio programs that bring serious conversations to broad audiences.
• Website: Bernardoni Media & Marketing
Guests Featured in This Episode
Professor Christopher F. Jones
Christopher F. Jones is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University, where he studies the intersections of energy, technology, and the environment. He is the author of Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Personal site: christopherfjones.com
• X: @EnergyHistorian
Jon Wellinghoff
Jon Wellinghoff is the CEO and founder of GridPolicy, Inc. He was appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by President George W. Bush in 2006 and named chairman by President Barack Obama in 2009, serving until 2013 — the longest tenure of any chairman in the agency's history.
Travis Fisher
Travis Fisher is the director of energy and environmental policy studies at the Cato Institute. He has nearly twenty years of experience in energy policy, including roles at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, the Institute for Energy Research, the Electricity Consumers Resource Council, and the Heritage Foundation.
• Cato Institute profile: cato.org/people/travis-fisher
A Question for Our Listeners
If the data centers powering the next decade of economic growth have to go somewhere, whose backyard should they go in — and who should decide?
Send us your thoughts at RadioFreeAmerica.media.
America at 250: Due Diligence is produced in partnership with the Jordan Center for Journalism, Advocacy, and Innovation at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media. Audio production by Bill Bernardoni of Bernardoni Media and Marketing. Portions of this program are recorded at WUMS Radio in Oxford, Mississippi. For more information, visit newslab.org.