Ep 37 | Mike Lee | The Glenn Beck Podcast
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 28 minutes
Words per Minute
162.30524
Summary
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) joins Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) on the show to discuss his new book, "Our Lost Declaration: A Fight Against Tyranny: From King George to the Deep State."
Transcript
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My guest on the podcast today has got to be one of the only people in the world who is friends
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with both me and Bernie Sanders. We'll talk about that. We'll also dig into his passion for our
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nation's founding documents, the lifeblood of America. He came to his passion, honestly,
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when you grow up hearing about the founders and the Constitution around the kitchen table
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and watching your father argue cases before the Supreme Court, you're probably destined
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for a law career. But he is a former federal prosecutor, served as a law clerk for Supreme
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Court Justice Samuel Alito. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010. He serves on the Judiciary,
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Commerce and Energy Committees. He is currently the chair of the Joint Economic Committee. He is
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consistently one of the most conservative members of the U.S. Senate and also is one of the nicest
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and probably most well-liked on both sides. He's also the New York Times bestselling author of three
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books, including his latest, Our Lost Declaration, America's Fight Against Tyranny from King George
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to the Deep State. We talk about Thomas Jefferson and the Constitution all the way to John Roberts on
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the Supreme Court. And I saw a side of Mike Lee I haven't seen before. And also the socialist Democrats
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that are running that he works with in the Senate and Donald Trump. Surprising interview with Senator Mike
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Mike Lee. Mike, the words we hold these truths to be self-evident has really bothered me lately
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because I'm not sure that we have any truths that we find self-evident anymore.
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But you know, I guess I used to think you could wake anybody up in the middle of the night. You
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would say, hey, should you be free? Of course. Should the government pick you up in the middle of
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the night? Of course not. Should you be able to write your own destiny? Should somebody be able
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just to take your life on a charge and you don't have a way to respond to it? In the middle of the
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night, people could be woken up and they'd be like, what are you talking about? Of course not. That's
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that's OK. But that's not true in China. I could wake people up in China and they won't answer it the
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same way. And we are losing our grasp on so much truth. Should somebody have a chance to defend
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themselves and not be called in front of a tribunal for a witch hunt? I would hope most Americans would
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get that one right, even in the middle of the night with some liability. Are we? Look at Me Too. Look
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at Kavanaugh. Look at some of the things that we're doing right now. You don't get a trial. You're just
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guilty. Yeah. So we've accepted the fact that in a formal legal proceeding, you have a presumption
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of innocence. We started to stray from it in our interpersonal interactions and in even our public
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interactions. So that is a disturbing trend. A chill wind blows. We will generally answer the question
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right when asked the question in the right way. But I worry that cultural norms are eroding our
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concept of what it means to have a presumption of innocence. So can a society have two standards?
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No, and it shouldn't. And I think it's one of the reasons why in China for so many decades,
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they've been really bad and gotten away with being really bad and mistreating their people.
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I don't think there was the same type of cultural resistance to that sort of thing. I don't think the
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Scottish Enlightenment had a chance to work its will on the Chinese people in the same way that
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it did on the American people prior to the American Revolution. So we come from a different starting
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point. And that's one reason why we should expect more of ourselves. But our starting point really is
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the starting of everybody's life. You know, if you're not trained this way, if you're not brought up
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this way, we've done such a horrible job at teaching our children, oh, they know about rights.
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But how many know about responsibilities? How many know why those rights? How many can actually name
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I suspect that most can't. And in fact, I saw one statistic suggesting there are maybe as many as 40%
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of Americans can't identify which rights are protected by the First Amendment. That's troubling.
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And I think one of the things that causes us to steer away from that is that we have
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diluted the word right. We have started to embrace just in our language, in our day-to-day
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conversation, we tend to associate the word right with things that we like. I have a right to be happy
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is different than the fact that I have a right to the pursuit of happiness. Those are two different
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things. Rights typically are things the government can't do to you. They are not things that someone
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has the right to take away from someone else in order to give it to you.
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Well, no, because health care is something that you consume. It's necessary, just like food is
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necessary, just like a lot of things are necessary, but they are not the government's responsibility to
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provide for you. And if the government takes away from A to give to B, that's not a right.
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That's the transference of something, of a good or of a service.
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So wouldn't, let's say food, health care. Health care is not a right. You have the right to access
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Sure. You certainly should have the right to be able to access health care and to not have the
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government interfering with your ability to access health care. And you should have the right to not
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be systematically discriminated against in your access to that or any other service based on your
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skin color, for example, or based on who your parents were.
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So I remember reading a story and I don't remember where this was from. It's either in the Northwest or
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the Northeast, a guy who was living on the land and he was fishing and he didn't want a fishing
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permit or a license. And he said, I have a right to access this river because he was, that's how he lived.
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I have a right to access this river and pull fish from this river without government
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interference. Does that right exist? Is that a right?
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I would ask who owns the waterway, who owns the bank on the river? What is his concepts of ownership
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there? I don't know that you can consider that a right if someone else owns it, if somebody else
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owns that property. Some of that requires us to look at property rights and at laws governing who
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owns what. Well, it's private property, but if it's not private property, you know, if it's, I mean,
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government public land, don't you have a right? The theory behind government public land is that it
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should be public. It should be made equally available to all. And so if government owns a parcel of land and
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it gives some people preferential access to that and denies all others access to that, that's a
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problem. I still don't know that that's necessarily properly considered a right because it's more of a
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license. It's more of an access, but it's also one of the reasons why we ought to question why the
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federal government ought to own roughly 30% of the land mass in the United States. Because when the
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government owns that much land, then it's the government deciding who gets the benefits. It's the
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government granting, as if they were rights, something else. Nowhere in the Constitution does
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it say we have a right to privacy, but we do have an inherent right to privacy in some regard. We have
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a right to be secure in our papers, but just because they said papers, don't we have a problem with things
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like the NSA? Even just collecting, not even listening, just collecting. I'm not secure in my own papers.
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Right. And you should be. You do have a right to that. You have a right to have the government
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not interfere with your communications or even intercept them. Your papers, your house,
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your personal effects, those are things that don't belong to the government. They belong to you. And
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they're not supposed to gain access to them without a warrant predicated on probable cause.
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Have you seen the legislation out of Europe that is the right to be forgotten?
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Yes. I've heard about it. I'm good. So the right to be forgotten, as I understand it, is
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you make a mistake and there's a natural period where everybody might know about it. But after 10 or 20
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years, nobody really remembers that. But because of the internet, it is a time machine. And so every
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mistake that you've ever made is there forever. And they're like, you know, this isn't fair. I have
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a right to be forgotten. They're declaring that right. Now, look, if you interact with someone,
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if you go into a local grocery store and you buy your groceries there, presumably they can decide
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what they do with their own business records with when you bought a tube of toothpaste and what tube
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of toothpaste you prefer. I don't know that I would call that a right, a right that the government can
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compel them not to keep track of what kind of toothpaste you like. But it does become a problem
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the minute the government itself starts collecting that information or using others as agents to
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collect the government for the government information about you. So let me go one, one more place on
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this, then we'll change. Um, the, the right to privacy, the right to your be secure in your own
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papers. I personally would like the president to be transparent, but, uh, can he be compelled or is
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it right for the government to release information about his taxes because the people or the house demands
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it? No. In fact, I think it's a terrible idea. I think it's a terrible precedent. I think it's a
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precedent that if set by the Democrats, uh, many of whom want to get access to this, I think they'll
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come to regret it in time. This isn't a good place to go. Uh, when, when you say that we're going to
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subject someone merely by virtue of the fact that they serve as president of the United States to have
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disclosed to the entire world documents that the government has considered private, that seems like
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a very foolish mistake. So let's, let's change the topics here, um, to something a little more fun.
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We have Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden. Anybody else
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from the Senate that is running? Kirsten Gillibrand. Okay. All right. So those are the candidates and,
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and you are so polite and, and, you know, you love everybody I know. Um, but let me just ask you,
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if you had to pick one, just one to spend the weekend, just goofing off with.
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That's a tough call actually. Cause I, I really like a lot of these folks. It might well be Corey.
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It might well be Corey Booker. I, I, uh, he and I get each other, we get each other's sense of humor.
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And, um, did you laugh at the, I am Spartacus? I mean, that was so over the top. Yeah, but we're
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politicians, all politicians occasionally do things that are over the top. And, uh, I harass them about
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it from time to time. All right. If you had to work on legislation, protecting constitutional rights,
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which one of those? Um, Amy Klobuchar has a pretty firm grasp of the constitution,
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even though she and I disagree on a number of issues, including some issues of constitutional
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interpretation. I feel like among the Democrats running for president in the Senate, uh, she's one
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who I can communicate pretty easily with on, on matters of constitutional construction.
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That's interesting because you have done two things with Bernie Sanders and, and really the one in
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Yemen is about the constitution. Yeah. I suppose it would depend on which part of the constitution
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we're talking about. Uh, I've worked closely with Bernie Sanders on the war powers issue. He and I
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feel very strongly that the U S government has no business fighting a civil war in Yemen as co-belligerents
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for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And that this is an undeclared war. It's therefore an unconstitutional
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war. It's very unwise, not to mention illegal for us to be involved in it. So the house passed and
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said, where are they going to stop this? The Senate passed, said, we're going to stop this. The president
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vetoed it. I, I, I was trying to figure out that day and I want, I still wanted to call you, but I,
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I leave you alone as much as I can, uh, with stupid questions, especially I wanted to know what good
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is the power of the purse from the house. If they can't buy themselves on something like war powers
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say, sorry, dude, we're cutting you off. What good is the power of purse and anything to do with war
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powers? If they can't stop it. It's not because that's ultimately the power that we have as a
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Congress. The president can't spend any money without an appropriation from Congress. But if,
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but if you can't override a veto, then that stands. Uh, yes, but we could refuse to pass the next
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spending bill. If that spending bill includes funding for said war effort, nobody's going to do
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that. This leads to the problem of the shutdown because in this day and age where we tend to
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consolidate most or all government spending decisions into a single bill, anytime you say
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let's defund this or that you're accused of causing a shutdown. They're saying you're, you're
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flirting with a shutdown. You're threatening the lives of all these Americans who depend on this
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funding stream based on your petty political concern. So besides dishonesty, why can't we separate
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those things out? Why, why, why can't we separate them at least by category?
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We can, we should, and I wouldn't even put it in category of dishonesty. It's almost too deliberate
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from that for that. It's almost, um, deliberate neglect. It's a deliberate refusal to go through
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what would otherwise be a very lengthy, painstaking process. It's easier to wait until the majority
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and minority leader of the Senate and the speaker and the minority leader of the house, uh, all come
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together and come up with some bill. They bring it forward sometimes with only hours or days left
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in the spending period and say, here you go, either vote for all of it or none of it. You either vote
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for this reckless government spending package or you vote to shut down the government. Which one do you
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want? I, I, this is the first time that I think the founders were blind. The very first time they,
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they didn't see a group of people willing to give up their own power.
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Yes, I think that's right. I would rephrase it slightly. I'm not sure they were blind. I think
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they were correct in their assessment of the culture and the nature of human beings at the time.
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For the first 150 years, uh, their predictions were quite accurate about power being made to
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counteract power. Something has happened over the last 80 years roughly in which members of Congress
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have become less concerned with defending the prerogatives of Congress, uh, and, and more
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concerned with avoiding criticism and achieving perpetual reelection. That's what the founders
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didn't fully anticipate. And I understand why they didn't anticipate it because it wasn't part of
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our culture at the time. No, especially with George Washington, um, there. So is, would this be
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solved by constitutional term limits on you guys? I believe it would be substantially helped. And
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it's one of the reasons why I support the idea of a constitutional amendment that would limit members
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of Congress to 12 terms in either house. I wasn't going to go here. 12 years. Sorry. No, 12 terms.
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12 terms. Really long. Um, let, let me, let me just pursue this here for a second. My problem with,
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uh, term limits. The only problem I think it's right. The only problem I have is then you've got
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a bunch of bureaucrats who are serving in the deep state that aren't going anywhere who say, no, no,
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no, look, you don't know how this is going. You've all, you're just got here and you're just have
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another set of corrupt people who are not even voted for, who are really running. Can you do term
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limits for, would it be wise to do term limits for all, uh, public positions?
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I think the best way to solve that problem is to cut back on the administrative bureaucracy itself
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and to cut back on the amount of power and discretion they have. There would be no need
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to limit all of their terms if we didn't have so many, if they didn't have so much power.
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Yeah, that's the reins act. You know, for the last 80 years, Congress has been passing law
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by platitudinal statements. We shall have good law in area X and we hereby delegate to
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department Y the power to make and enforce good law in that area, make it. So then they go and do
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that. It wouldn't be such a problem if we didn't delegate that power to begin with. And you're right
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in your concern that there are some downsides to term limits. It's just that the downsides to the way
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we're doing things now is keeping us in this very bad path. Uh, the democratic politician that you
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would be least likely to, uh, appear in a buddy film with. Appear in a buddy film with. Yeah. Um,
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I, I don't know. I, I, I don't imagine Elizabeth Warren wanting to appear in a buddy film with me.
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That's, that's hard for me to be a very uncomfortable buddy film. I wouldn't be unwilling
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to do so. I can't imagine she'd be enthusiastic about it. All right. Um, person on the democratic
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side, uh, that you would be most likely to leave your children with if you had a gun to your head
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and you had to leave it to one of these people running. Okay. One of the people, one of the
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Democrats running for president who were in the Senate. Yes. Um, probably Kirsten Gillibrand.
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Uh, I've seen Kirsten Gillibrand with her own kids on many occasions and she's a great mother.
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I'm sure they're all great mothers and fathers. Those who have kids, but I've seen her with her
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kids a lot and she loves her kids. She's very friendly to kids everywhere. She's met my kids.
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She's always nice to them. If you had to, if you were in the fight for your life and it all came down
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to absolutely tell the truth and you were defending the truth and you could pick one person.
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Who would be the one person that you would pick? Okay. Am I picking them to be president or am I
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picking them to be the nominee for their party? Uh, no, I'm having you pick one of the people who
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are running that you had to, you're in, for some reason you're in the fight for your life and it
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has to, the truth has to come out. Who do you pick to defend the truth with you?
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Oh, I think I'd go with Klobuchar. She's a prosecutor. She's dealt with the truth. She's
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brought out Q and A through Q and A through cross-examination. I think I can trust her with
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that. I want to take a quick pause from the podcast, um, and tell you about something that
00:19:58.660
we've put together, a cruise through history. I'm going, uh, Bill O'Reilly will be on the boat
00:20:04.120
with me. Uh, that'll be crazy. Uh, Stu, Rabbi Lappin, David Barton, all really focused on history,
00:20:11.240
but we're going to the Mediterranean. We're going to start in Venice. Then we go to Croatia,
00:20:15.620
Greece, and Israel. And this cruise through history is on a beautiful cruise ship. It happens next
00:20:22.280
spring. We are going to spend time learning about, you know, what made the dark ages end and bring
00:20:28.840
into the light and reason. And what is a Republic in Greece and Athens? And what is our faith really
00:20:34.860
all about? It's going to be an amazing trip. All you have to do is go to the website,
00:20:40.080
comesailaway.com. Find out all about it happens next year. Please join us. Comesailaway.com.
00:20:46.840
So Mike, I want to turn to the green new deal, uh, or this, this report on global warming.
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And this is, um, the resolution here. I'll give you a copy of it. The resolution here for the green
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new deal. And I want to just ask you a couple of things. Um, first of all, you've read it.
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No, no, I'm familiar with what it does, but I have not read the game. Um, if you, uh, look on page five,
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paragraph E to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future and repairing
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historic oppression of indigenous people, communities of color, migrant communities,
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de-industrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low income workers,
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women, the elderly, the unhoused people with disabilities and youth. Um, what does that,
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just that paragraph do to us? Well, first of all, I am confused because I thought we were talking
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about climate change. I thought we were talking about global warming. This seems to be talking about
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something very different. Very different. This is different than the talking points from which
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I've gleaned many of their, um, their own talking points, FAQs on this. This seems to be talking
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about something different, a type of, uh, social justice, uh, effort rather than simply a climate
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effort. If you believed that the world was going to end in 12 years, 11, 11 now, uh, would you,
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uh, be worried about any of those things? What would you be doing? If you were really truly,
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if you really truly believed we had 11 years to fix this problem, what would be your priority?
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Well, okay. So if, if I believe the world was going to end as we know it within 11 years,
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unless we did something in place, some drastic, um, uh, greenhouse gas emissions legislation,
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I think it would focus on getting that enacted into law as quickly as possible. I'm not sure
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that I would focus on the secondary, uh, social justice ramifications of that because I'd probably
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be more concerned about saving the planet, saving human lives. Now, if they do believe that I
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understand a lot of their passion that goes into this. And yet I find it difficult to believe that
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any law, the government, any law that Congress can pass is going to make the difference between us
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existing and ceasing to exist in 11 years. I can't imagine it, uh, to achieve the new green
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deal goals and mobilization, uh, green new deal would require the following goals and project
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providing and leveraging in a way, this is on page 10, providing and leveraging in a way that ensures
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that public receives appropriate ownership stakes and returns on investment, adequate capital,
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uh, including community grants, public banks, and public financing, technical expertise,
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supporting, uh, policies and other forms of assistance to communities, organizations,
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federal, state, local government agencies, businessmen working on the green new, uh, the
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green new deal mobilization. What did, what, what does that mean? We're, we're all becoming
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shareholders in. I think so. Now they're using some terms in here that I'm not familiar with. Um,
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public banks. What's that? That's sort of like a municipal church or a, uh, federal family. I mean,
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these are concepts that don't really exist in our system of laws and within our constitutional
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structure. Public bank. That wouldn't even be the fed, would it? Yeah. I, it sounds to me like it's
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some sort of government office that redistributes wealth perhaps. Is there any doubt in your mind,
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Mike, that the people that we're talking about that put this together, all of these people who are
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running endorse this? Are they serious? I don't think they can be serious about endorsing this
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because at least the colleagues who you referenced who are currently serving in the United States
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Senate, not one of them voted for it. We, we brought up the green new deal bill for a vote
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in the Senate. And, uh, in fact, uh, this is the one we voted on. If this is the same bill that was
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introduced in the, what kills me is they said by you saying, let's vote on it, that you were all just
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playing a game with them and tricking them. Oh no, quite to the contrary. We were wanting to
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demonstrate that legislation isn't a game. Uh, that's not a game at all to say, okay, you've proposed
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this. Uh, those of you who say you support it, which as I understand it, all of them do ought to be
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able to tell us whether or not you'd be willing to actually vote. Yes. Not one of them did not one
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of them. But is that because they're wearing a mask? I mean, you don't draw this up if you're not
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serious. One would think so. I, although many of them responded to it by saying, um, that this,
00:25:49.940
yeah, this is the Ocasio-Cortez bill, just to be clear. And this was the one we did vote on.
00:25:54.440
Um, I think they're saying we agree with the concept, but we're not ready to vote on it because
00:26:01.200
maybe it's not yet ready, but I don't really know what that means. If they support the concept,
00:26:06.660
then why wouldn't they vote for it? I don't know. Tell me about your, um, tell me, first of all,
00:26:14.840
tell me, can America be a socialist country, uh, and still be constitutional?
00:26:26.400
I don't think so. Uh, but let me qualify that by saying, I think within our constitutional structure,
00:26:33.020
you probably could have a state or its political subdivisions choosing to go in a different
00:26:39.920
direction, choosing to go in a more collectivist direction, at least having much higher tax rates
00:26:45.240
and things like that within our constitutional structure. They couldn't deprive people of,
00:26:49.600
uh, of their fundamental rights. They couldn't deprive people of property and take that for
00:26:55.700
public purposes, uh, without just compensation. But I think there is probably some more room to
00:27:02.600
move in a progressive direction at a state and local level than it is there, than there is at the
00:27:06.120
federal level. Because in addition to any due process and property rights type protections
00:27:13.840
that we have in the constitution that applied to governments generally, we have additional
00:27:17.400
restrictions that apply to the federal government. Restrictions that say you basically have to have
00:27:24.020
an affirmative grant of authority within the constitution for the federal government to act
00:27:28.700
at all. Most of those authorities are found in one part of the constitution in article one, section eight.
00:27:33.180
And if it's not in one of those 18 clauses or, or, or in one of a few other affirmative grants of
00:27:39.240
authority to Congress within the constitution, we can't do it. There's nothing in there that I see
00:27:44.220
that says that, uh, the Congress should have the power to make things equal, uh, to, uh, provide, to be the
00:27:51.060
healthcare provider or the insurer of first or last resort. It doesn't work. And I don't mind. Um, I mean,
00:27:58.320
I don't like it, but I don't mind if, if California wants to be crazy and do all of those crazy things.
00:28:05.560
Okay, well, I'm not going to live there. Um, but why is it that they won't do these things on the
00:28:12.400
state scale? They insist that everything be done on the national scale because they're winning.
00:28:18.560
They're winning on the national scale. And they have been since the 1930s, since April 12th, 1937,
00:28:23.900
when the Supreme court decided a case called NLRB versus Jones and Laughlin Steele, basically
00:28:28.220
anything that Congress can dream and Congress can articulate in a way that satisfies this very
00:28:33.960
loosey goosey formula. If they're regulating something that affects interstate commerce in a
00:28:39.940
substantial way, then the sky's the limit on Congress's ability to regulate it. And so why
00:28:47.140
wouldn't they continue with that? They've had a real nice long progressive winning streak by
00:28:53.040
nationalizing everything. It'd be one thing if they had been losing at the federal level,
00:28:57.240
then it would make sense for them to play it state by state. But I think deep down,
00:29:01.300
they know number one, that they're winning. Number two, that if states have a chance to compete,
00:29:04.960
people will vote with their feet. They're already doing it. And that will make a difference. But I've
00:29:09.580
said for a long time, I think it'd be better for everybody. Most of the people in Vermont would prefer
00:29:13.180
a single payer health care system. Let them knock themselves out. Let them do it. They could do so
00:29:17.760
a lot more quickly and effectively and efficiently at a state level than a national level. We ought to
00:29:21.620
let them do it. So I am totally for that. I am a 10th amendment guy. You, you can do whatever you want
00:29:27.400
in your state. Here's the rule though. You can't force me in another state to pay for your mistakes.
00:29:34.080
Right. And, you know, is there any role for, uh, you know, all government, you know, federal
00:29:42.540
government rolling all these things out because they know it will fail on a federal, on a, on a
00:29:48.500
state level and they will not be able to afford it and they'll be held for it. So bump it up to the
00:29:55.540
federal government because the federal government can run deficits and just print money. And that is
00:30:00.320
effectively what we do. That is effectively what has been happening now for decades. And it's very sad
00:30:06.740
because, uh, within our federal system, we, we, we know that people can't just move to another state
00:30:12.840
and avoid all of this. Uh, and we also know that, uh, we're better off in the United States than we
00:30:19.560
are in most other countries. Most people aren't going to move to another country over this, but it still
00:30:24.460
means that we're falling short of where we could be and we're still holding people back. And I think
00:30:28.460
at the end of the day, ironically, Glenn, this disproportionately adversely affects America's poor and
00:30:33.120
middle-class more than anyone else. The poor and middle-class are those who are being most harmed
00:30:38.260
by this mindset that says, if anything in government is going to happen, it has to be at the federal
00:30:43.040
level. We're all worse off as a result, but especially the poor middle-class.
00:30:49.600
It was in 2005, I think, maybe 2004, that I did an interview with your former senior senator,
00:30:59.560
Orrin Hatch. And we were talking about the border and he was given the, you know, usual blah, blah,
00:31:05.920
blah about the border security. And I said to him at the time, I said, you know, Senator,
00:31:11.780
there's going to come a time where people will be sick of this. You have to come through at some point.
00:31:25.800
And he said, oh, I know, I know, I know people are getting upset. And I said, no, no, no,
00:31:32.040
there's coming a time to where they'll come for you. And whether that's at the election box or with
00:31:40.460
torches around the Capitol, they'll come for you because you can only be lied to so many times.
00:31:47.280
If you see what's happening, did you see the election in Ukraine, the new president?
00:31:55.620
He's a comedian. He played a comedy president on their television set. The people were so sick
00:32:03.640
and tired of the politicians. He ran. He gave no proposals. He had no policies, gave almost no
00:32:14.440
interviews. Any of these he did give. He wasn't serious. He had the two competing, you know,
00:32:21.820
interviewing newspapers or television stations. They had to pay, play ping pong. And the one who
00:32:28.400
won the ping pong battle got the interview. He won 75% to 24.
00:32:36.200
Do you sense that the people are not you? Do the people in Washington, are they getting the
00:32:49.340
understanding at all that the people are sick and tired of this?
00:32:56.900
In a sense, yes, because we're all keenly aware of the fact that as an institution,
00:33:01.300
we have an approval rating that hovers between nine and 11%, makes us less popular than Fidel Castro
00:33:08.100
in America and only slightly more popular than the influenza virus, which inexplicably is gaining
00:33:12.880
on us as we're falling. So yeah, they get it. But I think there is a tendency to think, well,
00:33:19.260
we're just going to have to do more good stuff then. Neglecting the fact that part of the reason
00:33:25.460
why we're held in such low esteem is because so much of what we touch has the opposite of the
00:33:30.480
Midas effect, the reverse Midas effect. Things we touch sometimes turn out very, very badly.
00:33:36.460
Some of them view it though as let's touch more things. Let's get the federal government more
00:33:40.860
involved. And I think that's what we're failing to grasp. It's the concentration of power in
00:33:45.860
Washington and then the delegation of power within Washington from the people's elected lawmakers
00:33:49.940
to unelected accountable bureaucrats. That's making everything worse. And at the time when the
00:33:53.980
people are fed up with that, we're doubling down. We're stepping on the accelerator and that's
00:33:58.900
going to create problems. So let me, let me go back to the border here. I think that the border,
00:34:04.880
the cry for a border wall, it's not racism. It's not, it is, uh, it's not even about security really.
00:34:16.120
It's about, they've been asking, they've been asking politely, they've been asking, can somebody
00:34:23.360
care about these things? Cause we really do care. They've been told now by both sides that they do
00:34:29.580
care about that. And yet they've been shown by both sides. No, they don't not at all. And so the border
00:34:37.340
wall is the American people saying enough with you, enough with you people in Washington. I want
00:34:44.560
something permanent because you guys tell us one thing and then you do the exact opposite. I want
00:34:51.240
a wall. That wall is a demand and, and a statement to Washington. It's not about Mexico. I don't trust
00:35:01.880
If we have a wall, it makes it harder for people to look the other way. It makes it harder for people
00:35:12.540
to sneak across the border for drug cartels and people otherwise who do not wish us well outside
00:35:19.040
of our country. You lived on the border for two years. I did. I did. And what I experienced down
00:35:24.140
there, and this was 25 years ago when the caravans didn't exist like they do today. But even back
00:35:33.240
then, I sensed that those who were most impacted, most personally, most adversely by uncontrolled
00:35:39.640
illegal immigration were poor people consisting in many cases of recent immigrants whose jobs,
00:35:48.900
whose livelihoods, whose neighborhoods were all put in jeopardy, potentially as a result of
00:35:55.920
uncontrolled illegal immigration. Today, the problem is so much worse. And we've got drug cartels. We've
00:36:01.960
got people who want to subvert our form of government, bringing people across the border. We've got people
00:36:06.980
engaging in human trafficking of children across the border, and we're not stopping it. That's to our
00:36:13.540
everlasting shame unless we fix that promptly. You and I felt very much the same about Donald Trump,
00:36:32.320
I think. I was concerned, and I'm still concerned, about the public behavior of the president.
00:36:44.540
However, I will tell you, at times, it feels really good to see him just punch people in the face.
00:36:50.440
You know, and that's not, I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it, it, you have that human reaction.
00:37:00.080
When I was judging him for the election, I was judging him on that and what record he did have,
00:37:07.660
and none of it was conservative. The president's not a conservative, but he has done and accomplished
00:37:14.940
some amazing things. Israel probably being paramount on that. How is your relationship with
00:37:24.480
Donald Trump? How is, how, how, what do you, how do you, how do you view him now going into this next
00:37:31.160
election? You're exactly right. I had some concerns with him, and I was probably more vocal
00:37:38.220
than many would have been at the time at expressing those concerns. I have been pleasantly surprised at
00:37:45.080
what he's done. Now, I don't agree with him on everything. There are some things he says that make
00:37:49.220
me nervous. I disagree with him, for example, on trade policy. Big time. But I have great respect
00:37:53.900
for the fact that he came to Washington and actually did what he said he was going to do.
00:38:00.140
Yeah. More so than any president in modern U.S. history. People wouldn't be asking for a wall if
00:38:05.660
more people did what they said they would do. Exactly. And I, you know, I think I fundamentally
00:38:10.240
misunderstood him at the time. I think I was viewing him through the same lens that I view other
00:38:15.080
politicians. He, he is different. I still don't agree with him on everything, but he's done exactly
00:38:21.260
what he said he was going to do. I have a friend who, toward the end of 2016, pointed out to me
00:38:27.360
something that helped me understand the phenomenon. He said, imagine that we're all in a bar and
00:38:33.060
everybody senses that a bar fight is about to break out. Um, I, and all of a sudden there's,
00:38:38.260
there's, there's one guy who's big and strong and tough and he takes out a beer bottle and he breaks
00:38:42.480
it across the table and he holds it up and brandishes, it brandishes it against those who
00:38:46.980
were opposing him. Everybody has to decide which person to line up behind. They're probably going
00:38:51.520
to line up behind that person. I think that resonates with what happened in 2016. I think
00:38:57.720
people had had enough and they wanted somebody who would go in and knock over a few tables.
00:39:04.680
And I think that's where the left is now. I mean, the right is still there, but the left is there
00:39:09.600
now to the same. We need a bottle breaker. Right. Right. And which makes for an interesting
00:39:14.820
inflection point when we've got a choice. And I think that choice is going to force us
00:39:19.220
either to become a more conservative nation, a nation that recognizes and trusts in the dignity
00:39:25.160
of individual human beings and communities and churches and neighborhoods and synagogues
00:39:29.500
and civil society, or a government that marches to the progressive drumbeat, federalizes more power,
00:39:37.080
essentializes more power in Washington, D.C. That will be the choice that we've got to make
00:39:41.580
in our next election cycle. And I hope we choose the right, the right option.
00:39:48.480
Are you willing to say you would or would not vote for Donald Trump?
00:39:53.020
Oh, I'm going to vote for him. I'm going to vote for him. I'm going to support him.
00:39:56.640
I think he has proven that he's willing to drain the swamp, even when it doesn't want to be drained.
00:40:03.060
And so it makes me more comfortable with him than I was in 2016. I didn't really know him at the time.
00:40:09.980
I've gotten to know him since then. We've actually become friends since then. We talk on a very
00:40:15.580
regular basis. And, you know, for the first year, he would routinely remind me of the fact that I
00:40:21.500
was hard on him in 2016. It finally stopped toward the end of 2017 when I said, look, that's behind us
00:40:27.560
now. Well, we've worked together a lot and he doesn't bring it up anymore is. Let's let's talk
00:40:34.660
about judges a bit, because I know you and Ted Cruz have been instrumental in helping shape the
00:40:42.920
judiciary beyond the Supreme Court, if I'm not mistaken. And that has been pretty remarkable.
00:40:51.380
He has because Obama did not fill a lot of the judgeships. Is that the right word? Judgeship?
00:40:58.980
Yeah. Because he didn't fill a lot of them. I think he came into office with 150 openings. Is that
00:41:06.320
right for federal? It was a lot. It was a lot. And I think he's he's going to have the opportunity
00:41:13.060
to appoint more judges on the lower bench than anybody else in history, except maybe of FDR who
00:41:21.480
had four terms. When you're when you're looking at that. Tell me the effect of the the appointees that
00:41:31.780
he has made and what it means for the future. One of the things that I loved most about this country
00:41:41.900
is its judicial system. When I speak to people across the country and even in other parts of the
00:41:47.960
world, I like to point out that despite its flaws, the federal court system is one that I would put up
00:41:54.140
against any of its counterparts anywhere in the world. And it would stack up favorably, warts and all.
00:41:59.860
Um, we are making it better. President Trump is making it better. And the judges that have been
00:42:06.800
confirmed to those positions and the justices confirmed to the Supreme Court are making it
00:42:10.740
better by doing a very simple thing, which is focusing more attention on finding those who
00:42:16.820
actually want to judge rather than engage in social policy. Those who want to use the judicial robes
00:42:23.760
as an opportunity to be social justice warriors. We just want judges who will read the law
00:42:29.660
and interpret the law based on what the law says. There are tools judges have
00:42:33.300
canons of statutory construction and constitutional interpretation that help guide their their reading
00:42:42.040
of the law. And that's all we want are people who are willing to say the law says X, it should do X
00:42:48.220
and decide what that law actually means rather than what they wish it meant. Right. And if you don't like
00:42:53.220
it, then people go work to change it. Exactly. And as simple as that sounds is somewhat revolutionary
00:43:00.360
in that it, a few decades ago, this sort of thing, uh, uh, what I've described is, is essentially what
00:43:07.160
we call textualism and originalism. Um, these concepts were somewhat foreign 30 years ago. Now
00:43:13.540
they're commonplace. And in fact, in this administration, there are more or less prerequisites
00:43:17.720
for getting a robe on the federal bench. The United States will be better off as a result.
00:43:24.500
Uh, I'll just throw this out at you. I think that John Roberts should be impeached.
00:43:32.140
And here's why. If something wasn't right on that decision about Obamacare, it just, you could see it,
00:43:39.900
you could see it, you could read it, uh, in his decision. You can see there was a last minute flip.
00:43:45.920
I mean, it, it didn't even make sense. And then we find out just here recently that if your gut said
00:43:55.140
that it was right. And he went in and he bargained and horse traded and he was trying to save the
00:44:03.500
reputation of the Supreme court. That is not the job or the role of a Supreme court justice. Is it?
00:44:13.440
It's not. In fact, it's directly contrary to the oath he took to administer the law even handedly
00:44:19.760
and without regard to external considerations. So shouldn't he be impeached?
00:44:26.320
It's hard to draw the line between him and other members of the court who have also made decisions
00:44:31.500
that I would consider wrong. But if we don't start impeaching people, I mean, I don't think the
00:44:36.580
impeachment process, especially for the Supreme court was meant to be as hard as it, it is.
00:44:42.060
It look, you never hear about impeachment for judges. When these judges go offline, you know,
00:44:49.020
I'd like quite, quite honestly, there's several people in, in the Senate and the house that I
00:44:52.820
wouldn't mind impeaching because you are violating your oath. You are to protect the constitution
00:45:00.180
against all foreign and, and, uh, and, and domestic enemies. I see people making decisions all the
00:45:07.800
time. That is absolutely unconstitutional. But when you have a sitting judge and it is revealed
00:45:15.640
the horse trading that went on, that's just another political house. Now it's wrong. And that's one of
00:45:23.000
the things that differentiates that from just other members of the court with whom I sometimes disagree
00:45:28.680
in, in their interpretation of the statute or the constitutional provision before them.
00:45:33.660
In this instance, we now have evidence. I widely suspected at the time wrote and did extensive,
00:45:38.840
uh, uh, media interviews about it at the time that something had gone terribly wrong. I wasn't sure
00:45:44.060
what it was, but now we know, but now we know, right. So you can't say, well, this is a difference
00:45:48.780
of opinion or maybe we now know, shouldn't he be impeached? Perhaps he should. I have never given
00:45:56.420
serious consideration to that until this very moment. It's something worth considering makes
00:46:00.820
up for the fact that it'll never happen. I mean, first of all, this house of representatives,
00:46:05.580
impeachment proceedings are initiated in the house and then they require a two third super
00:46:10.020
majority, uh, to bring about removal. It never happened. Isn't it worth having the conversation
00:46:15.940
about to, for a definition of what it means? Maybe so. Maybe that would send a signal that needs to be
00:46:24.360
sent that if you engage in, uh, consideration of extraneous factors that are inappropriate to be
00:46:32.700
applied in that case, if you rewrite the law, not once, but twice to save it from an otherwise
00:46:36.900
inevitable finding of unconstitutionality, you are a political branch. That's what he's done.
00:46:42.280
He's made it a political branch. It is not a political branch. These are unelected officials
00:46:48.180
that are, are acting like politicians. That's not their job. And in fact, it's so slaps America
00:46:57.980
and the constitution across the face. It's obscene. It's in some ways, much more obscene than what the,
00:47:05.560
the Democrats and the Republicans have done with healthcare, because I mean, at least that's dancing
00:47:10.680
around the edges. This is completely foreign. Right. And I think what bothers me the most about
00:47:16.000
it Glenn is the fact that at the time he did this, it brought him praise, not just from the left,
00:47:23.180
but from many who call themselves Republicans or, or at least, or, or not avowed leftists people who
00:47:29.820
said, Oh, this was so statesmanlike, so strong of him to do that. But in calling it statesmanlike,
00:47:35.460
they unwittingly described it as exactly what it was. Yes. It was an act of political
00:47:43.100
insurrection. It was an act against the legislative branch and against the constitution. And you
00:47:49.540
couldn't say, I mean, I said, when that happened, I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't
00:47:54.600
make any sense. And then we saw the, his, his decision. We're like, this looks like it was
00:47:59.500
rewritten in haste, right? This is not what his decision was. What happened? Because, because it
00:48:04.640
was, and, uh, having clerked at the Supreme court and been involved in, uh, assisting justice Alito
00:48:10.920
with drafting opinions, uh, I've seen the way this works and that what came out as the dissent
00:48:18.620
read, like a majority opinion, read, like a majority opinion that in the, the, the final days or weeks
00:48:24.820
before it was released suddenly had to be turned into a dissent. So then don't we, if we don't stop
00:48:31.100
this, um, and I have to tell you, I disagree with justice Ginsburg and she has said, and I think this
00:48:38.600
is an impeachable thing, but she said, I don't look to just our constitution. I look to the,
00:48:44.200
the new African constitution, which is now, you know, grabbing land from people. Well, that's not
00:48:50.060
your job, Ruth. You're not supposed to look at the African constitution. You're supposed to look
00:48:54.800
at our constitution. I didn't come on here to defend her point of view. I think in that
00:48:59.500
circumstance, she said, if I were drafting a new constitution, I wouldn't look to the U S
00:49:03.400
I would look to the South African conversation. I'm actually, I'm actually defending her in some
00:49:08.880
way. I can't, I have not seen something where she didn't have some sort of constitutional underpinning
00:49:19.020
that I think is screwed up, but it's underpinning of the constitution. I have not seen anything like
00:49:26.260
that. This one is, and if we don't stop this now dead in its tracks with this evidence, you're creating
00:49:36.160
a new political branch that is the most powerful of the three and it's political and unelected.
00:49:45.620
Uh, that is a fair point and worthy of consideration. I doubt that it will ever come
00:49:51.400
to fruition with that. Um, but it's worthy of consideration. It's also worthy of bringing up
00:49:57.400
in connection with future nominees to the lower courts and especially to the Supreme court.
00:50:01.900
I think it's significant that since then, uh, when Donald Trump ran for president, for example,
00:50:06.820
he ran by saying, I'm going to appoint people in the mold of Anthony Scalia of Samuel Alito,
00:50:12.020
uh, in the mold of, of Clarence Thomas. And he did not say of, of John Roberts that by itself
00:50:19.700
will have an impact. And I think that by itself will help deter future Republican presidents from
00:50:25.760
putting someone on the court who would do that for the, for the sake of political expediency or
00:50:30.640
whatever it was that was motivating him there. Last question on the Supreme court. Uh, why was
00:50:35.560
Kavanaugh added to this list at the last minute? I don't know. I want to get back to that. I want
00:50:40.840
to get back to the, uh, South African constitution thing for a second. Uh, the fact that she said
00:50:46.660
she would look to the South African constitution is itself very disturbing. I point that only to
00:50:53.020
clarify what she was saying. If you read the South African constitution, which I did a short time
00:50:57.160
after she made that statement, you'll understand why it's very disturbing. It has a whole lot of
00:51:02.220
concepts that are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of government,
00:51:06.000
uh, South African constitution, which is like, I mean, and I believe it's been changed since then.
00:51:12.740
It's very different from our own. Yes. We'll just say, uh, as to why Kavanaugh was put on the list,
00:51:18.000
I don't know. Um, uh, I, I know that, uh, a number of people, uh, within the white house and those
00:51:25.380
advising the president knew him and thought well of him. Um, he had clerked for justice Kennedy and,
00:51:31.900
uh, perhaps they wanted to make sure this is rank speculation on my part. I can't,
00:51:37.400
I don't know this and I can't know. Um, but I wonder whether they wanted to find somebody who,
00:51:41.960
um, would make justice Kennedy feel uncomfortable, uh, feel comfortable with the decision to retire.
00:51:48.320
If he knew that whoever they were replacing him with, with someone he knew and trusted,
00:51:52.480
maybe that made him feel happier about stepping down. Is that the right thing to do?
00:51:58.680
Um, no, but, uh, I, I, you're not in the circle. You asked for my speculation. I offered him and,
00:52:05.860
and I want to be clear. It is nothing but speculation. I know of no reason to believe
00:52:09.240
that's what happened. So I, I I'm concerned because are you concerned by the way he's been
00:52:13.720
voting and he's kind of like teaming up with justice Roberts at all? Did we blow an opportunity?
00:52:18.620
I think it's way too early to predict that they never get more conservative. Um, yeah,
00:52:24.120
that's, that's right. But even still with justice Kavanaugh, he hasn't been on there long enough
00:52:29.040
for us to have a fair snapshot. In many instances, it takes years. Uh, some would say a decade or more
00:52:37.260
to be able to get a clear picture of where they are. Uh, remember when, um, David Souter was put on
00:52:43.400
the Supreme court, a lot of people said he was a conservative and continued to insist that he was
00:52:47.260
a conservative. Um, he turned out not to be, uh, so is there anything in, in Kavanaugh's record at
00:52:53.440
this point that make you concerned at all? There's nothing in his record at this point that causes me
00:52:58.580
to believe that he will not, uh, fall under the category of justice Alito, justice Thomas, justice
00:53:04.820
Scalia, uh, and, uh, and so forth. Um, it's, it's too early for us to say that he is outside of that
00:53:12.460
fold. Uh, I hope he is squarely within it. I mean, I believe he is. Um, um, so let's, let's hope that
00:53:21.000
holds. Can, can we, let's talk about the declaration of independence? Sure. Cause that's the name of
00:53:25.140
your, your, your book is the lost deck declaration. Why the lost declaration? Because we've lost not
00:53:32.420
the physical document itself. Um, um, but we've lost some of the concepts in it. We've lost the language
00:53:38.680
of it. There are a lot of people who are unfamiliar with what it says, what the message is behind it.
00:53:44.980
A couple of years ago, NPR tweeted out line by line, a series of excerpts from the declaration of
00:53:51.300
independence. A lot of people freaked out, uh, thought that it was, um, uh, referring to the
00:53:57.040
president of the United States rather than King George the third, but more importantly, they didn't
00:54:00.420
recognize it as our founding document. That is itself troubling because the declaration of
00:54:05.520
independence informs us of who we are. It, it provides this, the, the concept essential to
00:54:12.040
our constitutional system called it the mission statement. It's the mission statement. It's who
00:54:16.260
we say we're going to try to be. Yes. Um, I just, I love the first two paragraphs of this document.
00:54:25.500
I think it's the most beautiful thing I think I've ever read. I mean, I think it's
00:54:30.300
Annabelle Lee by Edgar Allen Poe is just beautiful to me. I think this is poetry, um, the way it was
00:54:39.320
written. Now tell me about this copy here. So this is the copy of, this is the first draft of the
00:54:47.100
declaration of independence. I'll show it to you. Um, what's amazing is, uh, it's written and wherever
00:54:54.400
it is taken out, you will see a little notation. I think that says Franklin. Wow. Okay. Adams. And
00:55:02.720
what they did is they scratched it out and Franklin made that and he had to just, it's, it's kind of
00:55:07.720
like a shared word doc where you have to say, okay, I made this, this change. Wow. Okay. Do you get
00:55:14.300
this? This is an original from a guy named Mark Hoffman. No, I did not. Uh, this is, this is a 1830
00:55:20.980
engraving of the, uh, of the first draft. I think this is what needs to be studied and I'll show you
00:55:29.480
why notice, notice when you look at these two pages, what is capitalized? The United States of
00:55:38.580
America. That's it, right? Yeah. Nothing else. There are two words in the four page version that add to
00:55:47.700
those. And it is fascinating. Uh, see the word men is in all caps. Yes. Um, there's another one that
00:55:55.380
is, is not caps, but it is printed. Christian. Christian. Read what that's about. Notice that
00:56:03.920
the chain, the handwriting changes here from anything else in this document in Jefferson's
00:56:11.520
own hand. What's it say? Can you read it? The opprobrium of infidel powers is the warfare of
00:56:18.200
the Christian King of great Britain. Okay. He's talking here about what he does is he takes,
00:56:27.800
let's see here. He, uh, um, he has determined to keep an open market where capitalized, where
00:56:35.260
men should be bought and sold. So he is directly tying back to the front. All men are created equal
00:56:44.220
and he is capitalizing the words men. Slaves are men. This is Jefferson. Yes. This shows Jefferson was
00:56:55.900
passionate about this. This was his clause that he put in. And he's basically saying, how dare you call
00:57:04.720
yourself a Christian? This is a Christian King where he will put men for sale in the open market. And
00:57:13.580
then he goes on. It is, it is an excoriation. You think the long list of, of, uh, your usurptions are
00:57:22.180
bad. You add this one in. It is the longest paragraph of the usurptions. And he talks about how we've been
00:57:30.400
trying to stop it. And he stops us every step of the way. And then this good Christian King comes
00:57:36.400
around and what is he doing? He's violating them twice. He stole them from another land and sold them
00:57:43.280
into slavery. And now he's now paying them and trying to coerce them to go kill the people who are trying
00:57:53.340
to free them. It's awesome. It's a pretty darn good indictment. And, and this from a guy who owns
00:58:01.840
slaves, right? This from a guy who was from a slave state and he was putting a lot on the line
00:58:07.980
in the first place. Uh, one of the things I discuss in, uh, our last declaration is the fact that,
00:58:15.100
um, he like all of them really was putting not only his reputation, but his life and his fortune
00:58:23.020
all on the line to do this. So what is his initial draft? It made a lot of sense that as long as he
00:58:29.180
was going to put that all on the line, why not go all the way and, and, and put slavery on the
00:58:34.480
chopping block as well. He had done that as a young lawmaker as well in, in the, uh, Virginia
00:58:40.100
colonial legislative body. Um, sadly it didn't survive, didn't survive his effort in the
00:58:47.560
legislature. It didn't survive his effort in the declaration, but I have to respect the fact
00:59:10.100
It's a civil war inevitable after the constitution was drafted and we didn't, we failed to correct
00:59:20.180
it here. And then we failed to correct it a second time with the constitution. This time
00:59:26.140
when they didn't do it, they said, because the King would tear us apart. The second time
00:59:31.900
they failed to do it, they just didn't really want to lose those two States or three States
00:59:36.900
at the time, um, because they were the economic powerhouse. It's harder to excuse it at the
00:59:42.080
constitutional convention. Um, but their excuse again was, well, we are, we're being progressives.
00:59:49.920
We're taking a little baby step and we're outlawing the slavery market, uh, for new slaves. You
00:59:59.160
know, what was it? 1807 was the civil war inevitable.
01:00:03.140
Some type of conflict, uh, bringing about the end of slavery was inevitable. I don't
01:00:10.080
think it had to culminate in a war. I don't think it had to last that long at any given
01:00:14.920
moment. It could have been prohibited. It could have been banned. I wish it had happened at
01:00:20.860
the declaration stage. It didn't. I wish it had happened at a constitutional convention
01:00:24.700
stage. It didn't. Um, we did end up banning us, banning it, but it took a lot longer than
01:00:31.080
that should have. And Abraham Lincoln is killed right after. And nobody wants to talk about
01:00:37.520
it. Nobody wants to, nobody wants to Abraham Lincoln. We're losing every battle, uh, until
01:00:44.480
about halfway through. And he said, God, what do you want? And he's reading the scriptures
01:00:49.900
and he realizes this isn't about saving the union. This is about slavery. And so he declares
01:00:56.160
a day of fast mourning prayer and repentance, humiliation, I think is the word he used,
01:01:03.220
uh, where we all had to beg for forgiveness. And he said in, in his inaugural address, if,
01:01:09.320
if the Lord deems that all of our treasure be piled up in one heap and it's all gone because of
01:01:15.440
slavery, so be it. He's killed after that. And we look the other way and we, we let the infection,
01:01:25.520
don't we just, we're so close. We've lanced it. And then we let it just kind of heal back
01:01:30.820
because we don't push the poison out. Same with Martin Luther King. We don't push the poison
01:01:38.280
out. We're so tired of the killing and the riots and everything else. Does America have
01:01:44.340
to have a moment of, of struggle and then pushing that poison out? Sometimes it does. Uh, sometimes,
01:01:57.340
uh, human beings being fallible, being self-interested, being covetous, sometimes have to be brought
01:02:04.720
to a level of humility by forces external to themselves. Uh, sometimes by force and sometimes
01:02:11.460
by privations of every sort. Uh, it's unfortunate that it took, uh, the civil war in order to bring
01:02:19.380
about that next phase. And it's also unfortunate that it took another a hundred years, uh, beyond
01:02:24.300
that, uh, to get beyond Jim Crow and, and to, uh, bring about really what was the vision
01:02:31.640
of the civil war amendments, uh, adopted in the wake of that conflict. But we got there. It says
01:02:38.940
something about human nature that sometimes it has to get that bad and people have to be brought
01:02:44.860
to a state of poverty and humility before they can make the right choice. It again goes to the
01:02:50.600
brilliance of this document because it says prudence indeed will dictate that governments long
01:02:58.520
established should not be changed for light and transient causes. And accordingly, all experience
01:03:02.840
has shown that mankind more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than write themselves
01:03:09.880
by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed to. But after a long train of abuses, I mean,
01:03:16.160
it's saying that we don't, we won't do these things. We won't do the hard things unless we are just
01:03:21.720
punched in the face repeatedly. Right. I've always appreciated the fact that he emphasized the fact that we
01:03:26.620
don't do this sort of thing for light and transient reasons. This isn't something to be done casually.
01:03:31.800
And in my view, while we struggle with things in our society and our government today,
01:03:38.860
we're not dealing with the same sorts of things that they were dealing with and that we have a
01:03:42.920
structure, we have a culture, we have a system of laws that if we will stick with, it can do the job
01:03:51.280
of restoring and protecting the dignity of the human soul. But we've got to do better.
01:03:57.040
So the concept of the Declaration of Independence is who we try to be. Constitution is telling us how
01:04:06.520
to the framework that is will best support this idea. Right. Correct. Right. Yeah. The Constitution
01:04:13.220
is the picture frame. The Declaration is the picture. Okay. So can you just go over the second?
01:04:19.880
Yeah. Yeah. The paragraph of this. I'd love to go over it with you really line by line and
01:04:25.460
just get your thoughts on what everything means. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men
01:04:30.780
are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable, it says inherent, crossed out
01:04:37.680
inalienable rights. And among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Tell me, tell me things
01:04:44.820
that we should learn from that. It's a Lockean principle. A lot of this derives from the teachings
01:04:51.700
of John Locke and a lot of it's an outgrowth of the Scottish Enlightenment.
01:04:55.920
Tell people who John Locke is. You don't know who John Locke is.
01:04:58.240
John Locke was an English political philosopher who talked a lot about the inherent rights of human
01:05:06.780
beings in necessarily entailing life, liberty, and property, and that governments are there to
01:05:12.940
protect life, liberty, and property. Jefferson, in his rhetorical flourish, made the choice to
01:05:19.880
cast that as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which actually has a catchier ring to
01:05:24.600
it in some ways, especially since we're talking about the picture rather than the frame.
01:05:28.180
We'd be a lot different if it was property, though.
01:05:30.300
Well, but we used property in the Constitution, and we framed it in terms of property. I don't
01:05:35.220
think we lose anything by virtue of the fact that he said life, liberty, and the pursuit
01:05:38.220
of happiness. What we do sometimes lose is when people confuse the Constitution with the
01:05:42.720
Declaration and like to use the pursuit of happiness as if it were whatever progressive
01:05:50.160
dream the Speaker has in mind at the moment, and then say this means that we are entitled as
01:05:56.220
a Congress to commandeer the nation's health care system or something like that.
01:05:59.440
Anyway, so what Jefferson was giving voice to was this belief, this understanding that many of us
01:06:08.100
now take for granted, but that's been an important part of our culture, of Anglo-American law
01:06:14.100
and constitutional structure for hundreds of years, that people have rights that are given to them by
01:06:21.340
God. They exist before the state. They exist before any government comes about and separate and apart
01:06:28.020
from that universe. That's a sphere. It's a it's a cell that cannot be penetrated by government.
01:06:33.600
Talk to somebody who doesn't believe in God and tell me how I mean, because
01:06:40.500
I believe in God. So it's easy for me to say, no, those are divine. They do not come from man. And so
01:06:48.800
it's easy for me to order things. Yeah. God, man, government. Yeah. But if you don't believe in God,
01:06:56.060
how do you make this case that these rights belong to you and you are over the government?
01:07:05.880
Most people I know, at least most Americans I know who themselves don't believe in God
01:07:11.240
have a pretty easy time grasping this, even in the absence of their belief in God, even if they're
01:07:18.460
agnostic or or atheist, in part because it's become part of our culture to understand that
01:07:23.720
you have worth because you exist, regardless of whether God exists and regardless of what
01:07:29.620
your vision of God is or how you understand God to exist. You have worth because you live
01:07:36.100
and you breathe. We as a society still accept and embrace that. I don't know that we realize
01:07:41.700
the extent to which that's rare, even in today's world. And even though it has been eroded in American
01:07:48.360
culture, it's still more a part of us than it is in most countries throughout the world.
01:07:53.580
We should be grateful for that. We should celebrate it. But as much as anything, we need to protect it.
01:07:57.880
And that's one of the reasons I wrote our last declaration is I want to give
01:08:01.220
I think most parents and grandparents today understand that their children and their
01:08:06.020
grandchildren aren't being educated in the same way they were, that they're not being taught civics.
01:08:11.140
They're not being taught these basic principles about life, liberty and property or the difference
01:08:15.620
between life, liberty and property and the articulation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
01:08:20.940
They want their kids to be able to learn that. And so it's one of the reasons I wrote this book.
01:08:25.120
I want to make sure that we don't lose it. It's like a torch. It's like a flame that once it's
01:08:30.260
extinguished is very difficult to reignite. But it's also easy to keep it lit if we just
01:08:35.560
keep it intact. That governments are instituted among men. That's a totally different idea from
01:08:44.960
anywhere else back then. Never. Nobody had ever done that, right? Right. In fact, it was directly
01:08:51.060
contrary to it. As I point out of the book, they believed in the divine right of kings. The king
01:08:56.300
of England, including King George III, believed that he had been divinely appointed by almighty
01:09:01.520
God himself to rule. So governments were instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the
01:09:08.780
consent of the governed. Another wild concept. Here's where I want you to comment on that whenever
01:09:16.560
any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or
01:09:24.260
abolish it. Now there's a comma here, but I'm going to stop. What does that mean?
01:09:28.800
It means when government mistreats you, especially when informed by the language that we see later in
01:09:34.500
the declaration about the fact that you don't undertake these things for light and transient
01:09:38.580
reasons, when government becomes destructive of these ends of, of protecting these inherent inalienable
01:09:44.700
rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that continues all over a long period of time.
01:09:48.300
It is the right of the people to get rid of that government. So explain why people say that secession
01:09:54.740
is not possible and it's settled law because of the civil war. Yeah, I don't, I don't know what that
01:10:01.820
means. The fact that they would say that any government has the right to exist in perpetuity and not be
01:10:09.340
thrown off, even if it interferes with the rights of the people and degrades them and erodes them.
01:10:16.800
That's nonsense. And it goes against everything we understand. Governments are themselves earthly
01:10:22.220
institutions. We made them. Correct. Even though you and I weren't alive, at least I wasn't,
01:10:27.560
uh, uh, the time this came around, um, we, we, uh, inherit a land that, that, uh, where people entered
01:10:36.880
into this covenant with their government, but it's an earthly construction. It's not an eternal one.
01:10:42.960
It's not created by God. And so the people themselves necessarily have the right to throw
01:10:48.840
that off. Okay. So it's a comma here, the right of the people to alter or abolish it comma and to
01:10:57.200
institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such
01:11:02.360
a form as to them will seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Is that comma and
01:11:09.580
as important as I think it is? It means to me, we can't just abolish people who say we got to tear
01:11:17.240
the system down, just tear it up. No, no, no, no, no. You have the right to abolish it or to change it,
01:11:23.700
but you have the responsibility to come up with the system that will better enhance the security
01:11:32.360
of these rights because that's what they did. The end is very important in that sentence.
01:11:39.760
I think it would still have the meaning without the comma, but the comma followed by the end
01:11:44.420
makes clear that it follows in that order. You don't just throw it off. And like that scene in
01:11:50.480
the lion king where they say, no king, no king. You've got a responsibility at that point to put
01:11:57.100
together a new system of government, one that takes into account the practical realities on
01:12:01.240
the ground and one that's most likely to ignore to the happiness and wellbeing of the people.
01:12:05.800
Of the people, not the, not the principles here, not the liberties and well of, of the people
01:12:11.380
taking into account those principles. In other words, um, uh, for a second, I thought you were
01:12:16.260
asking about principles with an, with an AL. No, I mean, no, no, no. I mean you, that you have
01:12:22.880
to, uh, replace it with a government that will best protect those life, liberty and pursuit of
01:12:30.120
happiness, those human rights. And you can come up with a government that will most secure those
01:12:36.540
things, your happiness and your safety. All right. That is the whole point of government. It's the only
01:12:42.140
reason we have it. It's the only reason we tolerate it. If you think about it, Glenn, governments
01:12:46.960
are nothing fancy and we do ourselves a disservice when we try to convince ourselves that there's
01:12:52.520
something omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent about governments. We, we, we actually slouch
01:12:59.040
towards Gomorrah when we do that. We actually start engaging in a form of idolatry when we engage
01:13:04.400
in state worship, when we, in effect, reverence government as though we're some holy institution.
01:13:10.480
Sure. It's to be respected and honored as far as it goes, but it's an earthly creation. We must never
01:13:17.280
lose sight of that. We must never worship it. And we must never conclude that it's not there to serve
01:13:23.240
us. In writing the book, what's the biggest surprise you, you felt? What was the thing that you went,
01:13:49.880
like when I found this, I'm looking at it one day and somebody, Stu came up behind me and he said,
01:13:56.680
where are those words capitalized? And I said, gosh, I don't, oh my gosh.
01:14:04.740
What was the thing that you took away in your research of the, for our lost declaration that
01:14:11.100
you thought this is game changing? Yeah. I think for me, uh, uh, there were a couple of things.
01:14:17.680
First being the extent to which Jefferson really did try, uh, to work this into the declaration
01:14:24.780
itself and was pushed back. I knew that he had reservations about it. I didn't know the extent
01:14:29.660
to which he had tried in the Virginia legislature. And again, in the declaration, I was also, um,
01:14:37.280
quite inspired to learn a little bit more about Thomas Paine. Uh, uh, develop a lot of the discussion
01:14:43.020
in parts of the book around Thomas Paine and I learned more about his background. You know,
01:14:48.320
he grew up in a community in England where he routinely saw acts of government overreach,
01:14:54.800
not just of a bureaucratic sort, but really nasty, ugly stuff. He routinely saw people
01:14:59.960
being executed by servants of the King. He routinely saw women being stoned.
01:15:04.820
And he was tortured by these thoughts when he, he was encouraged later in life, um, to come to
01:15:14.900
America, encouraged by Benjamin Franklin himself. He took this long voyage over. I, I imagine what
01:15:19.960
might've been going through his head as he was on this horrible journey over to the United States.
01:15:24.120
Once he got to the United States, he still had within his soul, this yearning for freedom and this
01:15:33.280
resentment for the kinds of abuses, uh, against everyday citizens in England by King George III.
01:15:41.600
He knew he had seen behind that curtain. He'd seen there was nothing magical. There was nothing
01:15:46.820
mystical. There was just a guy pulling some levers and that guy was a fallible, flawed mortal. He
01:15:53.340
wasn't willing to give the God save the queen, uh, uh, reference too much reverence. And so he wrote
01:16:01.440
common sense. And I think common sense has much to do with the, uh, American revolution and with the
01:16:07.840
declaration of independence as any other single document. Oh, I agree. You know, his, um, his book,
01:16:15.160
is it rights of man, the one that he supposedly declares there is no God and all of this. It's in
01:16:23.380
one of his documents where he is, he's defending the French, French revolution. And, um, and people
01:16:31.000
say that he's an atheist. We found and have a document in his own handwriting that proves that's
01:16:41.400
not the case. He was against religion. He was not against God. And he, and he's, he's writing this
01:16:49.980
beautiful, impassioned letter to Benjamin Franklin. And he says, you, I've been hearing the things that
01:16:57.820
are being said about me. It's untrue. He said, you have to understand in France, they hate the church.
01:17:08.380
They hate it because it's been used as a lever to oppress them. And when they were going after the
01:17:16.860
church, I kept saying to them, I agree with you, I agree with you, I agree with you, but don't throw
01:17:25.720
God out, separate those two. It's, it's phenomenal. And in some ways, the way I feel about our own
01:17:40.780
churches right now, they're me there, that that's man, that's man and man, it might be doing the best
01:17:47.880
that he can, but separate your church from God. That's different. And certainly separate your God
01:17:57.820
and your faith from the blunt instrument that is government. Government ultimately is force.
01:18:04.740
And, uh, you're exactly right. I think this is one of the reasons why our revolution stuck.
01:18:12.300
And the French revolution didn't. We didn't throw God out.
01:18:16.280
Uh, the French did. And I think a belief in God, uh, benefits society generally. Not that everyone
01:18:24.220
should be coerced by government to do it. I don't think the government should have anything to do with
01:18:28.160
it. When people believe in God, it makes possible for these twin aims, these things that seem to be
01:18:34.800
in conflict with each other, equality and Liberty have to live side by side. They're the yin and yang
01:18:40.360
of the political universe. They keep each other in check. We yearn for equality, but a quality
01:18:47.060
properly understood is equal treatment under a just law. It's not radical egalitarianism where the
01:18:53.000
government makes everyone equal in their outcomes. That kind of radical egalitarianism is like crack
01:19:00.200
cocaine for the political soul and it cankers the soul and it causes equality to swallow Liberty.
01:19:06.400
They can't coexist, but they're much more likely to be able to coexist, to live peaceably together.
01:19:13.200
If the people believe in God, I think that's the problem. Honestly, um,
01:19:17.600
in many ways with race relations, I think, look, once you start saying reparations,
01:19:26.800
it, nobody's going to engage in that conversation. Nobody's going to engage. But if you could convince
01:19:33.620
people, look, I'm not, I don't want anything. I don't want anything. I don't want anything. I don't
01:19:37.040
want anything from you. You don't want anything from me. We just have to have this conversation.
01:19:42.680
That's becomes almost a spiritual cleansing of the soul conversation. And that's a good conversation
01:19:51.760
to have. It is. My, my wife, Sharon, and I were talking recently. She's a very profound person. And,
01:20:01.560
uh, there's a good chance. Anytime I happen to say something profound that it came about it in one way
01:20:07.280
or another, as a result of a conversation with Sharon, she pointed out to me that one of the
01:20:12.880
reasons is so devastating. It's so harmful when governments treat people differently on the basis
01:20:17.860
of the race is that that's one thing in their life they can't control and it makes them feel
01:20:25.220
desperate. And it leads to all kinds of horrible problems when governments pit people against each
01:20:31.720
other on the basis of classifications over which they have no control, have nothing to do with their
01:20:36.440
conduct, with their character, only something that they cannot change. It's a reason to reflect back
01:20:43.420
on the declaration of independence and on the fact that long before we fought and the right side
01:20:49.040
prevailed in the civil war, long before we had the equal protection clause, uh, as part of the 14th
01:20:54.960
amendment adopted following the civil war, we had this principle stated by Thomas Jefferson in the
01:21:00.920
declaration of independence that all men are created equal that helped give birth, uh, to, uh, the system
01:21:08.640
of government that we enjoy today. In many ways, I believe it's entirely possible that our best days
01:21:14.280
are ahead of us. We've made a number of right choices. We've overcome a lot of obstacles that they
01:21:20.160
were still grappling with at the time of the revolution. We just have to complete the project.
01:21:25.320
Why has, why has the Senate failed 24 times to pass a pro-life statement about babies that have been
01:21:39.980
born? This is one of the great mysteries to me that I find it most difficult to unravel on, on most
01:21:48.160
issues, even where I disagree strongly with a political opponent, I can at least explain what their viewpoint
01:21:54.160
is. I, I, I, I can explain their viewpoint on the green new deal, on taxes, on Obamacare, on their role
01:22:02.000
of government and this, that, or the other. This is one area where I struggle with even the finding the
01:22:09.340
right words to explain what could there be their justification. Are we going to descend to the level
01:22:16.040
of a civilization who worshiping Moloch handed infants over to a red hot, uh, uh, uh, statue,
01:22:24.160
idol, uh, in sacrificing them? Have we sunk to that level? I, I, I can no more fathom or justify
01:22:32.000
voting against something like this than I can that kind of irrational, hateful, uh, society that I
01:22:40.320
described that we just described in the old Testament. I think it is to our everlasting shame
01:22:46.120
that we have not as a society evolved to the point where we're willing to say at least once
01:22:53.760
a baby has been born, that is a human being. All men are created equal and that means and includes
01:23:02.400
babies. We shouldn't treat them differently simply because they're the most vulnerable among
01:23:07.840
us. I can't justify that. I can't even explain it. I said, years ago, and I still mean it.
01:23:17.480
If we lose this, you know, I happen to believe in God and I know you do too. And I believe in a
01:23:24.860
opposing force of Satan and Satan, he doesn't have an original idea. He just perverts that, which is
01:23:34.780
good. He can't create anything. He can only pervert it. The, and the bigger, the force for good
01:23:43.160
when it falls, the more perverse and dangerous it's going to become.
01:23:53.100
And I remember saying, if we fall, we are going to make the Nazis look like rookies with our
01:23:59.180
technology, with what, what we have in our arsenal, look out world and look out our individual souls for
01:24:10.800
allowing that to happen. And I see this with abortion to the point where we're not talking
01:24:18.040
about, is it a baby or not? No, we know it's a baby and we know it's right there and it's alive
01:24:23.860
and it's separate from mom. It's no longer part of her body. It's a baby. And because I know my
01:24:32.940
history, I know that this exact thing happened in Germany and the German people stood up against
01:24:42.320
Hitler and told him, no, it's the only thing that I know of that they said no on that he listened.
01:24:52.120
Well, he just went covert with it, but they were openly doing this to children who didn't have
01:24:59.960
a meaningful life. And the German people stood up and said, stop that right now. He continued it
01:25:09.300
in hiding in all of the hospitals, but the people were upset about it. Mike, where are we?
01:25:18.260
Years ago, I heard my friend, Neil Maxwell say that if India is the world's most religious nation
01:25:28.060
and Sweden is the world's least religious nation, America can be analogized to a nation of Indians
01:25:34.200
governed by Swedes. And I think that's part of what explains what's happening here. 80% of the
01:25:40.020
American people agree with you and me from what I've been able to pick up at least 70%,
01:25:45.260
probably as high as 80%. I agree with, with you and me on this issue, but it's our system of
01:25:53.320
government. It is ironically that part of our government that has been the source of so much
01:25:59.740
of our strength. That is our independent judiciary that has manipulated and distorted our constitution
01:26:05.820
to the point that it not only justifies, but it enables infanticide. We can't let that bring us
01:26:13.560
down. And which is why the people have got to continue to push it forward. Nor can we afford
01:26:18.920
to sit back and say, oh, those barbaric judges without us ourselves trying to do something about
01:26:24.340
it, which is why I'm glad we've voted on this as many times as we have. And why I hope that we will
01:26:29.500
continue to vote on it again and again and again. They can only look the American people in the eye so long
01:26:35.360
and say, these aren't people. They can only look them in the eye so long and say, these people
01:26:41.000
wouldn't have had a meaningful life. So it was okay to let them expire or to facilitate their
01:26:46.480
expiration. They can't do it much longer. If we keep voting, we will win. Mike, God bless your soul.
01:26:55.840
God bless your wife. I know how hard it is, especially, uh, at least I think our wives are an
01:27:04.800
awful lot alike. When we get punched, they feel it more than we do. And they want to, they're bears,
01:27:11.080
they're bears. Uh, and sometimes they see it coming before we do too. I know, I know. Um, but I have so
01:27:18.720
much admiration for you and I'm thrilled to be your friend and thank you for spending this time.
01:27:23.460
Thank you. Likewise. I appreciate it very much.
01:27:31.120
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