Akhil Reed Amar, Yale Law School, opens his course on America's Unwritten Constitution by asking who presides at a vice president's own impeachment trial. Read literally, the text seems to let the vice president judge his own case, an outcome Amar shows cannot be right. He introduces holistic reading, the practice of interpreting the Constitution as a unified document rather than isolated clauses, and traces the underlying absurdity canon back to Blackstone, the eighteenth century's leading legal authority. The same logic explains why the chief justice, not the vice president, presides at presidential impeachment trials. Amar then turns to McCulloch v. Maryland, where John Marshall upheld a national bank despite the Constitution containing no explicit bank clause, reading the document in light of its purposes rather than its literal wording. The lecture runs twenty-four minutes and moves through chaptered segments from the impeachment puzzle to the McCulloch ruling.