Ted Cruz and Mike Lee explain why they didn t get invited to the Senate lunch, and why they think it's time to go back to the days of unlimited debate and unlimited amendments in the United States Senate. Plus, Ted explains why he thinks kittens should be included in the Constitution.
00:07:21.340So he came by, we went down to my office that was then in the basement of the Russell Building.
00:07:30.780And he confided in me that he was thinking about running for the United States Senate from Texas in 2012.
00:07:36.580And I said, okay, in that case, we need to talk.
00:07:40.980So we went on a walk around the Capitol grounds, talked about every conceivable legal, political, and constitutional issue for the next two hours.
00:07:48.640And at the end of it, I said, look, it's highly unlikely that I will ever in this lifetime meet somebody who is this close to being my ideological twin.
00:07:58.160If you run for any federal office, I will endorse you.
00:08:01.540That's, you know, actually, you bring up this point that I was thinking about with both of you.
00:08:05.480You both came to real national prominence in the days, those wonderful old days of the Tea Party movement, when there was so much energy behind the conservative cause, and specifically a pro-liberty, pro-constitutional cause.
00:08:21.600Because, you know, as you talk about discussing all these court cases and all these sorts of things, I don't think every one of our politicians necessarily does that.
00:08:57.800Mike, when he was elected, so Mike was elected to the Senate two years before I was.
00:09:00.700Mike Lee was the first U.S. Supreme Court clerk in the history of the United States of America to be elected to the Senate.
00:09:07.980He actually was elected simultaneously with the other first clerk, which is Richard Blumenthal, who had clerked for Brennan on the Supreme Court.
00:09:14.900So the two of them together became the very first clerks ever.
00:10:18.040You were filing your form requesting what committees to be on.
00:10:21.340And so I walked with Mike while he, you know, why he's on Judiciary Committee, because he filed that form saying I want to be on Judiciary Committee.
00:10:28.200And we talked about all sorts of legal issues.
00:10:31.340I remember the issue, though, at the time there had been, I think it was a GAO report that had come out just recently that said the total value of all federal land was $14 trillion.
00:10:42.920Now, at the time, the national debt was also $14 trillion.
00:10:48.380It says something that that was $8 trillion ago.
00:11:46.840He was the U.S. Solicitor General under Ronald Reagan's legendary Supreme Court advocate, one of the finest Supreme Court advocates to have ever lived.
00:11:54.700What was it like growing up in Rex Lee's house?
00:12:06.800The American Bar Association Journal did a piece on him while he was Solicitor General and described him as Huck Finn in a morning suit because he was folksy.
00:12:38.000You know, we talked about these things.
00:12:40.580I remember when my dad first explained Roe v. Wade to me.
00:12:43.900And I was about 9 or 10 years old, and I asked him the question, okay, so separate and apart from what gives them authority as federal judges to make this determination, why is this a federal issue rather than a state issue?
00:13:00.560And I thought my dad was going to tear up right then.
00:13:07.120Got one child who listens out of seven.
00:13:10.220Wow, that's, I mean, that's a tremendous formation.
00:13:13.000And then you go and you clerk at the Supreme Court.
00:13:15.920And you do need to, before the clerking, I want to take an even greater digression and understand that as honorable as the lineage is, that there also is some murky, so in your ancestry is the story of murder.
00:13:29.600Yeah, look, I could write volumes on this one.
00:13:35.340My great-great-grandfather was a guy named John D. Lee.
00:14:54.460You know, on the point, not the victim of the murder, but on the murderer question, I will admit on this show, since we're just among friends,
00:15:02.780I, too, have a murderer in my family line.
00:16:41.460So, I don't know what happened, but Darby got out of the boot making business, and I never got the boots that I had planned to buy from the prison.
00:16:58.040I'm glad not to have been shanked on my trip to the prison.
00:17:02.340You know, I would like to take this question from the literal killing to a more metaphorical killing for a moment, because I'm not a lawyer.
00:17:36.920There's one day that, for me, stands in infamy in American history.
00:17:43.380Now, look, there are a lot of infamous days in American history, but there's one that I think, relative to its importance, doesn't get the coverage it deserves.
00:17:51.280So, April 12th, 1937, two days, two years to the day after the Supreme Court had moved into its gigantic marble palace that it's occupied since 1935, the Supreme Court decided a case called NLRB versus Jones and Laughlin Steel Company.
00:18:06.420It effectively, through a vote of five black-robe-wearing lawyers, amended the Constitution without going through the Article 5 process of actually amending it and changed the Commerce Clause, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3, from the provision giving Congress to regulate actual interstate commerce, channels, instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and things and persons moving in interstate commerce, to the substantially affecting interstate commerce,
00:18:32.580or the things that might, in the aggregate, have an economic impact that might, in turn, be interstate in its effect.
00:18:40.920That was a dramatic transformation away from the structural protections of federalism and separation of powers.
00:18:47.380It eroded federalism by giving more power to Washington, D.C.
00:18:50.780It culminated, over the next few years, inevitably, in Congress all of a sudden saying,
00:18:55.080oh, my gosh, we've now got all this power over all these regulatory issues like labor, manufacturing, and agriculture, and mining,
00:19:01.140that while economic and nature take place in one state at one time, all of a sudden they couldn't handle it,
00:19:06.220so they delegated all of it out to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, thus eroding separation of power.
00:19:11.380Senator Lee, I hope you forgive me for laughing during that answer, because this is why I'm glad that I asked you the question.
00:19:17.760If you had asked me to pinpoint that, I don't think I would have been able to pinpoint that moment,
00:19:21.660and yet, what you're describing is a major change in how power moves in the country.
00:23:01.980They want to be celebrated by the newspaper, by the academy.
00:23:04.180The way you do it is you move left, left, left, left, left.
00:23:06.400When I'm looking for a judicial nominee, give me someone who's been through the battles, has been vilified, and hasn't blinked and has been faithful to the law and Constitution.
00:23:34.720Uber Eats has now declared in this moment of the protests and Black Lives Matter that they're going to waive delivery fees for black-owned businesses, however that is determined.
00:23:45.020And they're going to continue to keep delivery fees for white-owned businesses, however that is determined.
00:23:51.440Seems to me, look, I'm not terribly educated on the law.
00:24:00.380I think they will be sued, and they will lose every one of the lawsuits.
00:24:03.540You cannot discriminate under federal civil rights law, explicitly discriminate based on race, and charge one set of prices to one race and another set of prices to another race.
00:24:13.900That is against the law, and it's a good example of how these guys, look, they want a virtue signal.
00:24:20.780This is going to be a very expensive virtue signal because there are going to be some class-action lawyers ready to sue them, and they got no defense.
00:24:29.500They are openly, willfully, defiantly ignoring federal civil rights laws.
00:25:06.480But federal civil rights law draws a pretty bright line around race.
00:25:11.600If you were to switch the races out and say, I'm going to offer this price to this race and that price to another, that would be problematic.
00:25:39.280But now that we've covered the law, we've covered politics, we've covered the Constitution, I need to get to a philosophical question that was asked urgently by one of our viewers.
00:26:12.260And get chili cheese dogs because I can't stand people who are pretentious and it's impossible to be pretentious when you've got cheese dribbling down your shirt.