Justice Neil Gorsuch has served on the United States Supreme Court since 2017. Originally hailing from Colorado, he previously worked as a trial lawyer and served as a judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals before he was appointed to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump to fill the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. In 2019, Justice Gorsuch published a book titled A Republic, If You Can Keep It, where he offers a primer on American civics and his personal reflections on the remarkable structure of our Constitution. In his latest book, Overruled, he explores the effects of our government s expanding federal criminal code and the real-world consequences when seemingly innocuous activities entangle citizens with federal law. In this episode, we discuss Justice Gorsuch s inspiration for the book, the structures inherent to our government that keep us free, and his view on how the judicial system may change in the wake of the reversal of Chevron deference. This conversation is essential listening for anyone eager to better understand the functioning of our Government. Stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special. featuring special guest Ben Shapiro! Ben Shapiro is a writer, editor, and host of the podcast and is a regular contributor to the New York Times bestselling book series, . He is also the author of The Dark Side of the Law: A Guide to America s Most Powerful People in the 21st Century, and co-host of the popular podcast, The People s Guide to the Lawyer . and hosts the podcast, The Lawyer s Guide . Ben is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard. . He is a contributing editor at The New York Magazine, and hosts a weekly podcast, and is an avid reader of The Huffington Post, and writer, and a regular guest on the radio show, and radio host, and podcast host. He can be found on social media, and can be reached by clicking here. Thanks for listening to Sunday Special, Ben is your host on the show, too! , and Ben is also on the road here on the Four Corners podcast, Too Smart For This. and on The FiveThirtyEight Podcast. Thank you for listening, Ben also writes a book, and Ben s , too, too, and he s a regular on the podcast Too Smart for This, Too Sensible For This, is a good friend of the Weekly Standard, and so much more.
00:00:00.000If you look around the world, you're going to find better bills of rights than ours.
00:00:04.000I mean, North Korea happens to have my favorite bill of rights.
00:00:08.000It has everything we promise, all manner of good things, and even my favorite right, the right to relaxation, which I really need in the summertime after a long term.
00:00:18.000But it isn't worth the paper it's written on.
00:00:20.000Why isn't it worth the paper it's written on?
00:00:22.000Because all power is concentrated in a single set of hands.
00:00:26.000or a single group's hands. And that's what our framers knew, that men are no angels, as Madison
00:00:32.000said, and you have to assiduously divide and check and balance power at every turn. And when we forget
00:00:44.000Justice Neil Gorsuch has served on the United States Supreme Court since 2017.
00:00:48.000Originally hailing from Colorado, Justice Gorsuch previously worked as a trial lawyer and served on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals before he was appointed to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump to fill the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
00:01:00.000In 2019, Justice Gorsuch published a book titled A Republic, If You Can Keep It, where he offers a primer on American civics and his personal reflections on the remarkable structure of our Constitution.
00:01:08.000In his latest book, Overruled, Justice Gorsuch explores the effects of our government's expanding federal criminal code and the real-world consequences when seemingly innocuous activities entangle citizens with federal law.
00:01:19.000Justice Gorsuch's insights on good governance span from the philosophical origins of the Founding Fathers to the workings of our judicial system today.
00:01:26.000In this episode, we discuss Justice Gorsuch's inspiration for the book, the structures inherent to our government that keep us free, and his view on how the judicial system may change in the wake of the reversal of Chevron deference.
00:01:36.000Justice Gorsuch also delves into the stories of Americans whose livelihoods have been negatively impacted by over-regulation.
00:01:41.000This conversation is essential listening for anyone eager to better understand the functioning of our government.
00:01:46.000Stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday special.
00:01:49.000Justice Gorsuch, thanks so much for stopping by.
00:02:01.000So you have a brand new book out, titled Overruled, which is really about the prevalence of law in Americans' daily life and how it's multiplied over time.
00:02:10.000Can you sort of first give us an overview of just how intrusive lawmaking and sort of the legal system has become into the everyday lives of Americans?
00:02:19.000Well, let me start with why I wrote the book, and it's because I've been a judge for 18 years now, and I just kept seeing cases where ordinary Americans, hardworking, decent people, Trying to do the right thing.
00:02:33.000Just getting caught up in laws and legal problems that they had no way to imagine.
00:02:56.000And people say Congress hasn't been busy.
00:02:59.000Turns out that according to some reports, they add to the U.S.
00:03:02.000Code two to three million new words to our laws every single year.
00:03:08.000And of course, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
00:03:11.000Our federal agencies have been busy, too.
00:03:13.000There are so many federal crimes now buried in those regulations adopted by agencies, not necessarily by Congress, that nobody knows how many there are.
00:03:25.000Conservative estimates put them at 300,000.
00:03:29.000The Federal Register 100 years ago when it started was 16 pages long.
00:03:34.000This year, in recent years, the government adds 60,000 to 70,000 pages to the Federal Register every single year.
00:03:46.000But the book isn't really about the numbers.
00:03:48.000It's about the people and the lives who are affected by those numbers.
00:03:52.000So when you look at the breakdown of how exactly that works, as you go through in the book, the right likes to put a lot of focus on the administrative state, about the fact that it is regulators who are largely unelected who are making these rules.
00:04:04.000Nobody has a clue what's getting put in the rules.
00:04:20.000Is that the administrator's fault, or is that the fault of a Congress that has spent the last century basically delegating more and more power to an executive branch because it provides a lack of accountability?
00:04:31.000Well, I don't think any one institution is to blame.
00:04:34.000I think that's a mistake to think about it that way, because law has proliferated at the state level as well.
00:04:42.000It's unlawful to sing the Star Spangled Banner in a certain manner in Massachusetts.
00:04:48.000I faced a case when I was a circuit judge rising from New Mexico, where I think he was a seventh grader, got arrested for burping in class.
00:05:01.000You know, it used to be you're taken to the principal's office, your parents might get called.
00:05:10.000So, it's happening at the state level.
00:05:11.000As I mentioned, it's happening in Congress and it's happening in the administrative agencies.
00:05:15.000So, I don't think you can blame any one institution for this.
00:05:18.000This is something that's remarkable and the speed with which it's happening, again, in my lifetime, is what I wanted to Think about and focus on maybe where it's coming from and why.
00:05:31.000But I think the impulses are much deeper than pointing to any single institution.
00:05:36.000And you really go into depth in that about about that in the book when you talk specifically about the fact that law is has become a sort of response to the lack of social capital that In a situation in which everyone trusts one another, you just don't need as many laws.
00:05:49.000I mean, in my local religious community, there are no laws that compel us to do anything.
00:05:53.000We just have social sanctions that apply.
00:05:55.000When somebody violates the social precepts, the unspoken and unwritten rules of the social group, then the social group tends to ostracize or they tend to cudgel in particular ways or curb that behavior in particular ways.
00:06:07.000When it comes to a family, you never have like a written constitution that dictates exactly how the family is going to work because presumably there's a high level of social capital.
00:06:14.000But as the country has grown larger and larger, more and more disparate, more and more different, then the temptation is to fill that gap with laws to govern every particular scenario because you can't trust your neighbor as much because your neighbor might not be your neighbor.
00:06:28.000They might live 3,000 miles away from you and have a completely different way of viewing the world, but you still have to live in a country together.
00:06:34.000Well, I think what you're touching on is really the heart of the book, and it's really Madison's question to us as well.
00:06:41.000You know, the framework Of our constitution, the backbone of it, the Virginia plan, and he wrote that, of course, we need some laws, right?
00:07:00.000And in fact, he thought that was the greater danger both to our liberties and to our aspirations for equality, because who can manage a world with too much law or so much law?
00:07:10.000The moneyed and the connected can find their way.
00:07:13.000They can even capture agencies, regulatory capture today.
00:07:23.000I think you're putting your finger on, I think, probably the heart of the problem.
00:07:27.000I'm no social scientist or psychologist, but trust has a lot to do with it, I think.
00:07:34.000When we trust ourselves to make good judgments, when we trust our families to make good judgments, when we trust one another in our communities and are able to work together to solve problems in our communities, we don't need law, right?
00:07:48.000But some of those old identities, our faith, our families, our simple local connections, right?
00:07:55.000I mean, poker nights have given way to online gambling and bridge night is now, you know, you do Wordle online.
00:08:04.000We've lost a lot of human connections, the loneliness epidemic that people write about.
00:08:09.000Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, what's happened to our nation and our isolation from one another.
00:08:15.000When that happens, where else do you have to go?
00:08:20.000But some new identities associated maybe with parties and with the state.
00:08:26.000When you look at sort of the history of the development of this giant bureaucracy, the amount of rulemaking, you trace this dramatic increase to sort of the latter half of the 20th century, but its roots lie in Wilsonian administrative state theories, and really that comes from German progressivism.
00:08:41.000I mean, the original checks and balances of the Constitution were largely designed to
00:08:45.000prevent things from getting done in the absence of a large-scale approval of the things.
00:08:49.000The American public really had to be nearly unanimous in a lot of ways in order to get
00:09:55.000What we've seen in my lifetime, when the U.S.
00:09:57.000code doubles in length in 40 years, when the number of criminals in our federal criminal justice system explodes, there are more people serving today life sentences in federal prison than there were serving any sentence in 1970.
00:10:12.000Something happened Around 1970, I think.
00:10:41.000for its efficiency and its expertise, and he thought the tripartite system of government was antiquated, and we needed experts to rule from above.
00:10:53.000I think what he overlooked, I would argue, and what James Madison knew instinctively is the value of the wisdom of the masses.
00:11:04.000There are at least two kinds of knowledge, right?
00:11:06.000Expertise, and it's important, and I don't think we should denigrate it.
00:11:10.000It just has a place in our social order.
00:11:13.000But the wisdom of the masses is what Madison tried to capture in our legislative branch, right?
00:11:19.000Bringing together all voices and having debate and decide.
00:11:26.000And in that system, we have to get through two houses and a president Oftentimes, minorities play a key role.
00:11:34.000They stand at the fulcrum of power and actually protects minority rights.
00:11:39.000Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, once attended a county fair in England, and there was a guess the weight of the ox contest.
00:11:49.000And he noticed that he looked at all the guesses by the experts, and then he looked at all the guesses by ordinary people, and he found that the average guess of the ordinary people was the most accurate.
00:12:01.000That's what we call the wisdom of the masses today.
00:12:04.000And that is an important part of our system of government, too.
00:12:08.000And I think Wilson just maybe missed that.
00:12:12.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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00:13:19.000I think one of the things that is fascinating about this or the Wilsonian vision of government, especially because it was adopted from German progressivism, is that the whole model of German progressivism under Bismarck was that he was attempting to legitimately create a nation out of a series of nations.
00:13:34.000I mean, if you look at German history, it's a series of principalities.
00:13:37.000Prussia is only one of those principalities.
00:13:39.000And Bismarck is attempting to create a full-scale German nationalism And the way to do that is top-down because it has to be created in almost ersatz fashion.
00:13:47.000You need the imprimatur of authority with a consistently applied minutiae-based law in order to establish a social capital that doesn't pre-exist.
00:13:56.000And the story of the United States is precisely the opposite, which is that you have authority that's bleeding up from the bottom.
00:14:01.000You know, Tocqueville saw this when he visited the United States in the 1830s.
00:14:04.000obviously a federalism where the basic idea is that the people are to be represented in
00:14:06.000the Constitution, but so are the states.
00:14:09.000And so this idea is that the highest level of authorities exist at the lowest possible
00:14:13.000level of government, as opposed to a German progressive or Wilsonian view where the highest
00:14:17.000levels of authority exist at the highest levels of government.
00:14:20.000You know, Tocqueville saw this when he visited the United States in the 1830s.
00:14:24.000He said what a British lord might be undertaking on behalf of the government in England or
00:14:52.000And everybody has a chance to participate and shape them.
00:14:56.000And you're probably going to get wiser policies when everybody can be heard and participate in the process and different ideas can be tried.
00:15:05.000That was the system of government the framers wanted for us.
00:15:10.000It's interesting that if you look at kind of the intellectual history, you're talking about Wilsonian ideals, that even people like James Landis and William O. Douglas, whom I admire greatly, a fellow fellow justice from the West, Who are real solid Wilsonians in their youth and avid new dealers came over time to recognize that perhaps, just perhaps, we've gone too far.
00:15:40.000And Douglas talked about the dangers of delegating too much of our legislative responsibility outside of Congress.
00:15:46.000And Landis wrote a really kind of incredible report for John F. Kennedy when he became president along the same lines.
00:15:54.000The founders created a general system of neutral applicability, and it seems as though that that has fallen by the wayside.
00:16:00.000That depending on where you are in political power, what's happening politically at the time, the sides will actually flip politically.
00:16:06.000Sometimes you'll have one side that will make the argument that you need a stronger federal government and weaker state governments, and then it'll immediately flip, and depending on who is in control, It'll be precisely the reverse.
00:16:15.000And the job of the judiciary, theoretically, is to maintain that original structure.
00:16:19.000Because if the structures of government change based on who's in power, then that is precisely the level of unpredictability in law and regulation that make life unlivable for the normal citizen.
00:16:31.000I think our system of government was genius.
00:16:34.000And the separation of powers is what keeps us free.
00:16:38.000And it is what has made this country great.
00:16:42.000and the rule of law so profoundly stable in this country.
00:16:45.000I mean, you go, if you look around the world, you're going to find better bills of rights than ours.
00:16:51.000I mean, North Korea happens to have my favorite bill of rights.
00:16:55.000It has everything we promise, all manner of good things, and even my favorite right, the right to relaxation, which I really need in the summertime after a long term.
00:17:05.000But it isn't worth the paper it's written on.
00:17:07.000Why isn't it worth the paper it's written on?
00:17:08.000Because all power is concentrated in a single set of hands or a single group's hands.
00:17:15.000And that's what our framers knew, that men are no angels, as Madison said.
00:17:19.000And you have to assiduously divide and check and balance power at every turn.
00:17:25.000And when we forget that, it's a danger I worry about.
00:17:31.000So in the system, obviously, you're on the Supreme Court.
00:17:33.000What is the role of the judiciary in this system?
00:17:36.000Because there are those who would argue that, OK, fine, so let Congress fight it out with the executive, let the states fight it out with Congress and the executive.
00:17:44.000What is the role of the judiciary in either greasing the wheels here and making sure the system continues to run or in stopping the excesses?
00:17:52.000Well, my job is to decide cases and controversies.
00:18:23.000Once you've got laws passed, the executive, all that power is vested in one person because it should be fairly and quickly and efficiently administered.
00:18:35.000But when the executive comes after you for violating the law, Shouldn't you have a neutral judge and a jury of your peers decide those cases?
00:18:44.000People who are not beholden to the political branches and who don't put any fingers on the scale.
00:18:50.000I mean, Lady Justice, when she's portrayed, has a blindfold on and the scales are usually evenly tilted, unless you're in an autocratic society.
00:18:58.000I was in one not long ago and there Lady Justice is portrayed without a blindfold.
00:19:04.000And the scales of justice are kind of thrown by the wayside.
00:19:07.000You know, when you look at some of the cases, obviously we won't talk about specific cases,
00:19:12.000but sort of the general idea of deference to executive branch agencies.
00:19:16.000Obviously, the Supreme Court recently overruled Chevron's deference and suggested that actually
00:19:20.000the role of the judiciary is not in simply allowing agencies to determine for themselves
00:19:25.000what the law is and then to enforce that law, because that's actually a union of legislative,
00:19:29.000executive and judicial power all in one branch.
00:19:32.000But how is the common man to stand up against a branch of government that combines all three powers without any sort of checks and balances?
00:19:40.000Maybe you can explain to people exactly why it's important that, for the common man, he be able to appeal, say, an administrative ruling.
00:19:48.000Why shouldn't the cult of expertise win in these particular cases?
00:19:51.000Well, I'd love to kind of answer that and then maybe tell a story if I can from the book.
00:19:56.000So, you know, at a high level of generality, if any agency or anyone, just think about it, can make the law, enforce the law, and then try your case, how's that going to go for you?
00:20:28.000The procedures are not the same as they are in court.
00:20:31.000You're not going to get all of the same protections that you would in court.
00:20:34.000You're not going to get a jury as you would in court.
00:20:37.000And the judge is just another employee of that agency.
00:20:41.000And who knows what happens to him or her If the rulings don't go the way they like.
00:20:47.000So that's what's at stake when you're in and out of court.
00:20:50.000And Americans, according to Professor Jonathan Turley, are today 10 times more likely to face one of these administrative judges than they are a judge in court.
00:21:40.000Turns out the agency had taken the ball and run with it and adopted regulations which made even backyard magicians subject to federal licensing requirements.
00:21:51.000OK, that's kind of what we're talking about.
00:21:54.000What does that mean for Marty and his life?
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00:25:01.000Well, one of the things I think that people also have to see about these regulatory agencies and the regulations coming there from is that they really undermine the Americans' general trust in the government.
00:25:14.000I mean, the harder they try to grasp these galaxies, the more will slip through your fingers.
00:25:19.000The harder the government tries to crack down on minutia, the more people distrust the government because the simple fact is that the government cannot game out for every single one of these circumstances, nor should they be involved Well, thank you for explaining the Star War reference, Ben.
00:25:32.000And then beyond that, there's the issue of regulatory capture, this massive issue of
00:25:36.000regulations that are being written very often in cahoots with lobbyists who are working
00:25:41.000with staffers for particular agencies.
00:25:44.000So all of this undermines the general trust in the government.
00:25:46.000So ironically, the more that, as you say, the law multiplies, the less trust people
00:26:18.000He used to post his laws written in a hand so small and a column so high, deliberately did this so that nobody could ever be sure what the law was.
00:26:48.000They used to sell timber from their land to support themselves, but after Hurricane Katrina, that wouldn't work anymore, so they tried to get into the casket business.
00:26:57.000They make caskets for monks who pass, and they thought perhaps other people would want simple caskets for their funerals that are handcrafted by monks.
00:27:11.000The Louisiana Funeral Directors Association went after them because apparently in order to sell caskets in Louisiana, you have to have all kinds of licenses and a funeral home with a parlor and all that.
00:27:25.000They didn't want to, they didn't want, they just wanted to sell caskets.
00:27:29.000But the funeral home regulators had become so powerful, they had overtaken and effectively captured the agency.
00:27:38.000Monks took years and years of litigation.
00:27:43.000I learned another one, uh, the other day about the Reagan library.
00:27:47.000You know, President Reagan really wanted to be buried with his wife at the Reagan library.
00:27:52.000Well, it turns out you just can't bury people in California.
00:27:57.000And they told him, no, you had to have a funeral director on staff at the library.
00:28:03.000So the head of the library had to go to funeral director school so that the president could be buried there.
00:28:10.000I did not ask whether they still have a funeral director on staff or whether the regulations might require one because I don't want them to become federal prison criminals either or stateless.
00:28:22.000Well, Justice Gorsuch, what are the solutions?
00:28:24.000I mean, you could theoretically see a Congress that takes back its own power and starts to write regulations itself, as opposed to just delegating them to these agencies.
00:28:31.000You could see agencies starting to police themselves, but our system of government is really not built for people policing themselves.
00:28:41.000So I don't think there's going to be any one solution Ben, this is too big of a problem, right?
00:28:48.000At the most basic level, I don't think we could ignore the need for civic education.
00:28:53.000So at least people understand what we're talking about, why we have three branches of government, I mean, a third of Americans can't name the three branches of government, let alone know why we have them.
00:29:05.000Sixty percent of Americans would fail the citizenship test my wife took to become an American citizen.
00:29:13.000And let me tell you, that test is a heck of a lot easier than filling out the forms required, which I wasn't very good at.
00:29:18.000OK, so this isn't going to work unless the American people want it to work and want it to work.
00:29:25.000They have to know how it was designed.
00:29:28.000We have to also be able to talk with one another again and learn how to disagree, because democracy at the end of the day is about disagreement.
00:29:37.000Disagreements making our ideas stronger and our decisions better.
00:29:42.000And then we need to learn how to win and lose, debate, decide and move on.
00:29:49.000That's what we do in this court every day.
00:30:22.000Did you know in Idaho, not long ago, The legislature said we're going to eliminate the entire administrative code of the state except for those provisions the governor deems important enough to preserve.
00:30:35.000Texas has a sunset commission that eliminates agencies after a set number of years unless they're expressly reauthorized.
00:30:43.000New York and New Jersey have commissions to eliminate old laws that are no longer needed on the books this is starting to happen at the state and local level and those licensing problems we talked about like with the monks.
00:30:57.000Increasingly, states are really looking hard at that.
00:31:00.000I mean, there was a time when the only regulated professions were law, medicine, and a couple others.
00:31:05.000And now, recently in Texas, Texas of all places, 500 professions were being regulated.
00:31:13.000And they started to realize that's too much.
00:31:16.000And there's lots of good things going on there.
00:31:19.000At the federal level, it's more of a challenge, okay?
00:31:22.000But at least I think this is something that we can recognize as a bipartisan concern.
00:31:27.000You know, President Trump had that, if you're going to put in a new regulation, two have to go.
00:31:32.000President Obama also had some important deregulatory initiatives and spoke about it at the State of the Union, where he quipped that it's gotten so complex that I think the Interior Department regulates salmon when they're in freshwater, the Commerce Department when they're in saltwater, and it gets more complicated than that when they're smoked.
00:31:53.000And the fact checkers thought he'd overstated the complexity.
00:31:56.000I went busy to work and found out he actually understated it.
00:31:59.000So, seeing the problem at the federal level is great.
00:32:02.000Can I give you one more example of something that gives me hope, right, at the federal level?
00:32:08.000Well, for most of my life, certainly after World War II, for a long period of time, the airline industry in our country was heavily regulated.
00:32:22.000By the Civil Aeronautics Board, one of those alphabet soup agencies created in the New Deal thereafter.
00:32:29.000And you could not start a new airline without permission from the government.
00:32:34.000You could not offer a new route without permission, nor could you change your fares.
00:32:41.000And you know, in the 1970s, on a bipartisan basis, really spearheaded by my friend and former colleague Steve Breyer, when he was working for Ted Kennedy on the Judiciary Committee, sat down and said, does this make any sense?
00:32:55.000Yes, flying is very comfortable, but only a few can afford it.
00:32:59.000Maybe we need to do something about this.
00:33:03.000The only people who liked the Civil Aeronautics Board were the Civil Aeronautics Board and the regulated industry because they were able to create all these barriers to entry to protect themselves.
00:33:13.000And they decided to do something about it.
00:33:15.000Steve Breyer and Ted Kennedy, on a bipartisan basis, actually eliminated an entire federal agency.
00:33:24.000And it led to the ability of Americans to afford to fly.
00:33:30.000We have to pay 50 bucks for our hand luggage.
00:33:34.000But the opportunities that open for us are enormous as a people.
00:33:40.000And we have a bipartisan reform to banks.
00:33:43.000So I think there's reason for hope then.
00:33:47.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
00:33:48.000First, amid rising tensions in Israel, on Thursday, August 1st, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews welcomed a flight of 155 new Olim, those are immigrants, from France to Israel.
00:33:58.000Despite the threat of an intensifying war, of the 256 Olim the Fellowship has welcomed to Israel last week, 187 have been from France, because France is a disaster area.
00:34:07.000This latest flight brings the number of French Olim who have arrived in Israel since October 7th to more than 1,000.
00:34:13.000More than 24,000 people have made Aliyah to Israel globally since October 7th.
00:34:17.000The fact that Jews are still willing to go to a country under direct attack rather than live in fear in France speaks volumes about the incredible rise in unchecked antisemitism in France.
00:34:25.000We're looking for 500 listeners to join me by donating $100 to meet these urgent security needs.
00:34:30.000Thanks to a generous IFCJ supporter, your gift will be matched, doubling your impact in the Holy Land.
00:34:34.000To give to IFCJ, visit BenForTheFellowship.org.
00:34:51.000So you mentioned earlier civic education and people getting familiar with the system of government.
00:34:57.000This is something that I harp on on my show is that people spend way too much time thinking about the particular people in government and not enough time thinking about the incentive structures, which is, of course, a Thomas Sowell point, is that it's never about getting the right person in the right place.
00:35:09.000It's more about making the wrong person do the right thing via the incentive structures that are provided by the government or by the governmental system or whatever system you're talking about.
00:35:18.000Let's say that you were setting up a civic education for kids and you're looking at primary tax.
00:35:24.000We have a big young audience, obviously.
00:35:25.000A lot of teenagers listen to this show.
00:35:27.000What are the most important things for, say, a 15-year-old kid to read and understand in order to really understand what you're talking about here?
00:35:36.000Well, I think there's, you know, one organization I'm involved with, by way of disclosure, is the Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
00:35:44.000And the resources they have online for free are incredible.
00:35:48.000You can, they have something called an interactive constitution.
00:35:51.000You can click on any clause of the constitution and get three things immediately.
00:35:56.000One, two scholars who disagree about the clause's meaning and appropriate interpretation, but they'll sit down first and talk about what they agree on.
00:36:08.000And then you'll have the two other videos with their additional independent thoughts.
00:36:13.000You can also read there all the books that James Madison read as he was preparing for the Constitutional Convention.
00:36:21.000They have those primary resources there.
00:36:24.000And they have also a curriculum for high schools that are free for use to teach about the Constitution and our history in really an incredibly powerful way.
00:36:36.000And it starts not with the Constitution's text, but with a unit on civil dialogue and learning how to You know, disagree without being disagreeable with one another.
00:36:47.000How to do debate without hating or hurting one another.
00:36:52.000And I think it's a tremendous resource.
00:36:58.000If you're younger than that still, iCivics is a group that was started by Sandra Day O'Connor.
00:37:05.000And it really aims at middle school kids.
00:37:08.000And there are interactive games to play that will teach you about the Constitution and our history.
00:37:16.000There's a new one involving Colonial Williamsburg and you can pretend you're a spy right during the beginning of the independence movement.
00:37:26.000I'm also involved with Colonial Williamsburg and it's kind of happy to see those two organizations get together and do that as we prepare for the Declaration's 250th anniversary.
00:37:36.000So, those are just a few things that I point to where young people can just get an immense amount of material for free.
00:37:43.000So, you mentioned comedy and civil dialogue, and obviously that's something that's in very short supply in the United States right now, generally.
00:37:49.000I was wondering if you could give sort of a window into what it's like to make any decision at the Supreme Court level.
00:37:54.000You're talking about some of the most important decisions in American history that are happening right now, or have happened over the course of the last couple of terms.
00:38:02.000Yet your job is to get in a room with people, many of whom disagree with one another and try and hash out either a consensus or where you disagree.
00:38:09.000What does that process actually look like for people who aren't in the room?
00:38:34.000And yet almost all of those cases are resolved in a trial court, somebody winning, somebody losing, a settlement happening without any appeal.
00:39:21.000Yet we were able to agree unanimously on the right outcome of cases 95% of the time.
00:39:28.000Again, our law is pretty determinate, and that is a miracle.
00:39:35.000That is not true throughout most of human history.
00:39:37.000Most of human history looks more like Caligula we talked about earlier than it does this, and that's still true in a lot of places in the world today.
00:39:46.000Okay, now you asked me about my court.
00:40:00.000Because our primary job is to resolve disputes about the law's meaning between the lower courts, because the Constitution or a statute can't mean one thing in California and another thing in New York, right?
00:40:13.000So we only really take cases when the lower courts have disagreed, that tiny, tiny fraction of cases.
00:41:26.000So, half of those 6-3's are something else altogether.
00:41:30.000And those numbers, that 40% and that maybe 25% to 33% that we talked about, unanimous versus divided kind of cases, are the same today.
00:41:41.000As they were in 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt had appointed eight of the nine justices to the Supreme Court.
00:41:49.000So my message is, we're doing what we've always been doing.
00:41:55.000And I think we're doing pretty well if we're doing as well as they did in 1945, when eight of them had more or less the same presidential appointment background, at least.
00:42:04.000So final question for you, Justice Gorsuch.
00:42:26.000It's when I see people like Isis Brantley, who lost Lost her home and her business, was raided by police, and fought for 20 years to rectify the situation, and in fact, changed how Texas looks at licensing laws.
00:42:40.000It's people like John and Sandra Yates, the fishermen I talk about in the first chapter of the book, who pursue their case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, even after they've lost their home, even after John's been sent to federal prison over Christmas when he's trying to raise two young grandchildren, and who win.
00:42:59.000And we're still not satisfied because they only won five to four and they think they should have won even more.
00:43:05.000It's when I see stories like that, the American people love this country.
00:43:10.000They love their constitution and they want it to work.
00:43:14.000And I think if you look at the long stretch of history in our country, have there been bad times before and trying times?