Ep 37 | Mike Lee | The Glenn Beck Podcast

My guest on the podcast today has got to be one of the only people in the world who is friends with both me and Bernie Sanders.

We'll talk about that.

We'll also dig into his passion for our nation's founding documents, the lifeblood of America.

He came to his passion, honestly.

When you grow up hearing about the founders and the Constitution around the kitchen table and watching your father argue cases before the Supreme Court, you're probably destined for a law career.

But he is a former federal prosecutor, served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

He was elected to the U.S.

Senate in 2010.

He serves on the Judiciary, Commerce, and Energy Committees.

He is currently the chair of the Joint Economic Committee.

He is consistently one of the most conservative members of the U.S.

Senate and also is one of the nicest and probably most well-liked on both sides.

He's also the New York Times best-selling author of three books, including his latest, Our Lost Declaration, America's Fight Against Tyranny from King George to the Deep State.

We talk about Thomas Jefferson and the Constitution all the way to John Roberts on the Supreme Court, and I saw a side of Mike Lee I haven't seen before, and also the socialist Democrats that are running that he works with in the Senate, and Donald Trump, surprising interview with Senator Mike Lee.

Mike,

the words, we hold these truths to be self-evident

has really bothered me lately

because I'm not sure

that we have any truths that we find self-evident anymore.

If those aren't self-evident, what is?

But you know,

because I used to think

you could wake anybody up in the middle of the night.

You would say, hey, should you be free?

Of course.

Should the government pick you up in the middle of the night?

Of course not.

Should you be able to write your own destiny?

Should somebody be able to

take your life on a charge and you don't have a way to respond to it?

In the middle of the night,

people could be woken up and they'd be like, what are you talking about?

Of course not.

That's okay.

But that's not true in China.

I could wake people up in China and they won't answer it the same way.

And we are losing

our grasp on so much truth.

Should somebody have a chance to defend themselves and not be called in front of a tribunal for a witch hunt?

I would hope most Americans would get that one right, even in the middle of the night.

With some reliability.

Are we?

Look at Me Too.

Look at Kavanaugh.

Look at some of the things that we're doing right now.

You don't get a trial.

You're just guilty.

Yeah.

So we've accepted the fact that in a formal legal proceeding, you have a presumption of innocence.

We've started to stray from it in our interpersonal interactions and in even our public interactions.

So that is a disturbing trend.

A chill wind blows.

We will generally answer the question right when asked the question in the right way.

But I worry that cultural norms are eroding our concept of what it means to have a presumption of innocence.

So can a society have two standards?

No, and it shouldn't.

And I think it's one of the reasons why in China for so many decades

they've been really bad and gotten away with being really bad and mistreating their people.

I don't think there was the same type of

cultural resistance to that sort of thing.

I don't think the Scottish Enlightenment had a chance to work its will on the Chinese people in the same way that it did on the American people prior to the American Revolution.

So we come from a different starting point, and that's one reason why we should expect more of ourselves.

But our starting point really is the starting of everybody's life.

You know, if you're not trained this way, if you're not brought up this way, we've done such a horrible job at teaching our children, oh, they know about rights, but how many know about responsibilities?

How many know why those rights?

How many can actually name just the five rights in the First Amendment?

I suspect that most can't.

And in fact, I saw one statistic suggesting there are maybe as many as 40%

of Americans can't identify which rights are protected by the First Amendment.

That's troubling.

And I think one of the things that causes us to steer away from that is that we have diluted the word right.

We have started to embrace just in our language, in our day-to-day conversation, we tend to associate the word right with things that we like.

I have a right to be happy

is different than the fact that I have a right to the pursuit of happiness.

Those are two different things.

Rights typically are things the government can't do to you.

They are not things that someone

has the right to take away from someone else in order to give it to you.

Is it healthcare right?

Well, no, because health care is something that you consume.

It's necessary, just like food is necessary, just like like a lot of things are necessary, but they are not the government's responsibility to provide for you.

And if the government takes away from A to give to B, that's not a right.

That's the transference of

something, of a good or of a service.

So wouldn't, let's say food, health care.

Health care is not a right.

You have the right to access health care, right?

Sure.

You certainly should have the right to be able to access health care and to not have the government interfering with your ability to access health care.

And you should have the right to not be systematically discriminated against in your access to that or any other service based on your skin color, for example, or based on who your parents were.

So I remember reading a story, and I don't even remember where this was from.

It's either in the Northwest or the Northeast.

A guy who was living on the land.

And he was fishing, and he didn't want a fishing permit or a license.

And he said, I have a right to access this river because he was, that's how he lived.

I have a right to access this river and pull fish from this river without government interference.

Does that right exist?

Is that a right?

I would ask who owns the waterway, who owns the bank on the river, what is his concept of ownership there?

I don't know that you can consider that a right if someone else owns it, if somebody else owns that property.

Some of that requires us to look at property rights and at laws governing who owns what.

Well, if it's private property, but if it's not private property, you know, if it's, I mean, government public land,

don't you have a right?

The theory behind government public land is that it should be public.

It should be made equally available to all.

And so if government owns a parcel of land and it gives some people preferential access to that and denies all others access to that, that's a problem.

I still don't know that that's necessarily properly considered a right because it's more of a license, it's more of an access.

But it's also one of the reasons why we ought to question why the federal government ought to own roughly 30 percent of the land mass in the United States.

Because when the government owns that much land, then it's the government deciding who gets the benefits, it's the government granting as if they were rights

something else.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we have a right to privacy, but we do have an inherent right to privacy in some regard.

We have a right to be secure in our papers.

But just because they said papers,

don't we have a problem with things like the NSA, even just collecting, not even listening, just collecting.

I'm not secure in my own papers.

Right.

And you should be.

You do have a right to that.

You have a right to have the government not interfere with your communications or even intercept them.

Your papers,

your house, your personal effects, those are things that don't belong to the government.

They belong to you.

And they're not supposed to gain access to them without a warrant predicated on probable cause.

Have you seen the legislation

out of Europe that is the right to be forgotten?

Yes,

I've heard about it.

So the right to be forgotten, as I understand it, is

You know, you have a natural, you know, you make a mistake, and there's a natural period where everybody might know about it.

But after 10 or 20 years it nobody really remembers that but because of the internet it is a time machine and so every mistake that you've ever made is there forever and they're like you know this isn't fair I have a right to be forgotten

They're declaring that right.

Now, look, if you interact with someone, if you go into a local grocery store and you buy your groceries there, presumably they can decide what they do with their own business records with when you bought a tube of toothpaste and what tube of toothpaste you prefer.

I don't know that I would call that a right, a right that the government can compel them not to keep track of what kind of toothpaste you like.

But it does become a problem the minute the government itself starts collecting that information or using others as agents to collect the government

for the government information about you.

So let me go one more place on this, then we'll change.

The right to to privacy, the right to

be secure in your own papers, I personally would like the president to be transparent, but

can he be compelled or is it right for the government to release information about his taxes because the people or the House demands it?

No.

In fact, I think it's a terrible idea.

I think it's a terrible precedent.

I think it's a precedent that, if set by the Democrats, many of whom want to get access to this, I think they'll come to regret it in time.

This isn't a good place to go.

When you say that we're going to subject someone merely by virtue of the fact that they serve as President of the United States to have disclosed to the entire world documents that the government has considered private, that seems like a very foolish mistake.

So let's change topics here to something a a little more fun.

We have Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden.

Anybody else from the Senate that is running?

Kirsten Chilbren.

Okay.

All right.

So those are the candidates, and you are so polite, and

you love everybody, I know.

But let me just ask you, if you had to pick one, just one,

to spend the weekend just goofing off with.

That's a tough call, actually, because I really like a lot of these folks.

It might well be Corey.

It might well be Corey Booker.

He and I get each other.

We get each other's sense of humor.

And

did you laugh at the I am Spartacus?

I mean, that was so

over the top, ridiculous.

Yeah, but we're politicians.

All politicians occasionally do things that are over the top.

And

I harass them about it from time to time.

If you had to work on legislation protecting constitutional rights,

which one of those?

Amy Klobuchar has a pretty firm grasp of the Constitution, even though she and I disagree on a number of issues, including some issues of constitutional interpretation.

I feel like among the Democrats running for president in the Senate,

she's one who I can communicate pretty easily with on matters of constitutional construction.

That's interesting because you have done two things with Bernie Sanders

and

really the one in Yemen is about the Constitution.

Yeah.

I suppose it would depend on which part of the Constitution we're talking about.

I've worked closely with Bernie Sanders on the war powers issue.

He and I feel very strongly that the U.S.

government has no business fighting a civil war in Yemen as co-belligerents for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and that this is an undeclared war.

It's therefore an unconstitutional war.

It's very unwise, not to mention illegal for us to be involved in it.

So the House passed and said, we're going to stop this.

The Senate passed and said we're going to stop this.

The President vetoed it.

I was trying to figure out that day, and I still wanted to call you, but I leave you alone as much as I can with stupid questions, especially.

I wanted to know what good is the power of the purse from the House if they can't by themselves on something like war powers, say,

sorry, dude, we're cutting you off.

What good is the power of purse and

anything to do with war powers if they can't stop it?

It's not, because that's ultimately the power that we have as a Congress.

The President can't spend any money without an appropriation from Congress.

But if you can't override a veto,

then that stands?

Yes, but we could refuse to pass the next spending bill if that spending bill includes funding for said war effort.

Nobody's going to do that.

But this leads to the problem of the shutdown, because in this day and age where we tend to consolidate most or all government spending decisions into a single bill,

anytime you say, let's defund this or that, you're accused of causing a shutdown.

They're saying you're flirting with a shutdown.

You're threatening the lives of all these Americans who depend on this funding stream based on your petty political concerns.

So besides dishonesty, why can't we separate those things out?

Why can't we separate them at least by category?

We can, we should, and I wouldn't even put it in the category of dishonesty.

It's almost too deliberate

for that.

It's almost

deliberate neglect.

It's a deliberate refusal to go through what would otherwise be a very lengthy, painstaking process.

It's easier to wait until the majority and minority leader of the Senate and the Speaker and the minority leader of the House all come together and come up with some bill.

They bring it forward, sometimes with only hours or days left in the spending period, and say, Here you go.

You either vote for all of it or none of it.

You either vote for this reckless government spending package or you vote to shut down the government.

Which one do you want?

This is the first time that I think the founders

were blind.

The very first time.

They didn't see

a group of of people willing to give up their own power.

Yes, I think that's right.

I would rephrase it slightly.

I'm not sure they were blind.

I think they were correct in their assessment of the culture and the nature of human beings at the time.

For the first 150 years, their predictions were quite accurate about power being made to counteract power.

Something has happened over the last 80 years, roughly,

which members of Congress have become less concerned with defending the prerogatives of Congress and more concerned with avoiding criticism and achieving perpetual re-election.

That's what the founders didn't fully anticipate.

And I understand why they didn't anticipate it, because it wasn't part of our culture at the time.

No, especially with George Washington there.

So

would this be solved by constitutional term limits on you guys?

I believe it would be substantially helped.

And it's one of the reasons why I support the idea of a constitutional amendment that would limit members of Congress to 12 terms in either House.

I wasn't going to go into that.

12 years, sorry.

No, 12 terms.

12 terms.

It's a really long log.

Let me just pursue this here for a second.

My problem with term limits, the only problem I think it's right, the only problem I have is then you've got a bunch of bureaucrats who are serving in the deep state that aren't going anywhere, who say, no, no, no, look, you don't know how this is going.

You just got here.

And you just have another set of corrupt people who are not even voted for, who are really running.

Can you do term limits for ⁇ would it be wise to do term limits for

all

public positions?

I think the best way to solve that problem is to cut back on the administrative bureaucracy itself and to cut back on the amount of power and discretion they have.

There would be no need to limit all of their terms if we didn't have so many and if they didn't have so much power.

That's the Reigns Act.

Yep, that's the Reigns Act.

You know, for the last 80 years, Congress has been passing law by

platitudinal statements.

We shall have good law in Area X, and we hereby delegate to Department Y the power to make and enforce good law in that area, make it so.

And they go and do that.

It wouldn't be such a problem if we didn't delegate that power to begin with.

And you're right in your concern that there are some downsides to term limits.

It's just that the downsides to the way we're doing things now is keeping us in this very bad path.

The Democratic politician that you would be least likely to appear in a buddy film with.

Appear in a buddy film with?

Yeah.

I don't know.

I don't imagine Elizabeth Warren wanting to appear in a buddy film with me.

That's hard for me to imagine.

It would be a very uncomfortable buddy film.

I wouldn't be unwilling to do so.

I can't imagine that enthusiastic about it.

All right.

Person on the Democratic side that you would be most likely to leave your children with if you had a gun to your head and you had to leave it to one of these people running.

Okay, one of the people, one of the Democrats running for president who were in the Senate.

Yes.

Probably Kirsten Gillibrand.

I've seen Kirsten Gillibrand with her own kids on many occasions, and she's a great mother.

I'm sure they're all great mothers and fathers, those who have kids.

But I've seen her with her kids a lot.

Okay.

And she loves her kids.

She's very friendly to kids everywhere.

She's met my kids.

She's always nice to them.

If you were in the fight for your life

and it all came down to absolutely tell the truth and you were defending the truth and you could pick one person,

who would be the one person that you would pick?

Okay, am I picking them to be president or am I picking them to be the nominee for their party?

No, I'm having you pick one of the people who are running

that you had to, you're in, for some reason, you're in the fight for your life and it has to, the truth has to come out.

Who do you pick to defend the truth with you?

Fight for my life.

For truth.

For truth.

I think I'd go with Klob Ashar.

She's a prosecutor.

She's dealt with the truth.

She's brought out Q ⁇ A through Q ⁇ A, through cross-examination.

I think I can trust her with that.

I want to take a quick pause from the podcast and tell you about something that we've put together, a cruise cruise through history.

I'm going, Bill O'Reilly will be on the boat with me.

That'll be crazy.

Stu, Rabbi Lapin, David Barton, all really focused on history, but we're going to the Mediterranean.

We're going to start in Venice, then we go to Croatia, Greece, and Israel.

And this cruise through history is on a beautiful cruise ship.

It happens next spring.

We are going to spend time.

time learning about, you know, what made the Dark Ages end and bring into the light and reason and what is a republic in Greece and Athens and what is our faith really all about it's going to be an amazing trip all you have to do is go to the website come sailaway calm find out all about it happens next year please join us comesailaway calm so Mike I want to turn to the Green New Deal

or

this this report on global warming and this is

the resolution here I'll give you a copy of it the resolution here here for the Green New Deal.

And I want to just ask you a couple of things.

First of all, you've read it?

No, no.

I'm familiar with what it does, but I have not read the...

If you look on page five,

paragraph E,

to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous people, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.

What does just that paragraph do to us?

Well, first of all, I am confused because I thought we were talking about climate change.

I thought we were talking about global warming.

This seems to be talking about something very different than different.

This is different than the talking points from which I've gleaned many of

their own talking points, FAQs on this.

This seems to be talking about something different, a type of social justice

effort rather than simply a climate effort.

If you believed that the world was going to end in 12 years,

11.

11 now,

would you be worried about any of those things?

What would you be doing if you were really, truly, if you really, truly believed we had 11 years to fix this problem, what would be your priority?

Well, okay, so if I believe the world was going to end as we know it within 11 years unless we put in place some drastic

greenhouse gas emissions legislation, I think it would focus on getting that enacted into law as quickly as possible.

I'm not sure that I would focus on the secondary social justice ramifications of that because I'd probably be more concerned about saving the planet, saving human lives.

If they do believe that, I understand a lot of their passion that goes into this.

And yet I find it difficult to believe that any law that government, any law that Congress can pass is going to make the difference between us existing and ceasing to exist in 11 years.

I can't imagine it.

To achieve the new Green Deal goals and mobilization, a Green New Deal would require the following goals and project.

Providing and leveraging in a way, this is on page 10, providing and leveraging in a way that ensures that public receives appropriate ownership stakes and returns on investment.

Adequate capital, including community grants, public banks, and public financing, technical expertise, supporting policies, and other forms of assistance to communities, organizations, federal, state, local government agencies, businessmen working on

the Green New Deal mobilization.

Does that mean we're all becoming shareholders?

I think so.

Now, they're using some terms in here here that I'm not familiar with.

Public banks.

What's that?

That's sort of like a municipal church or a

federal family?

I mean, these are concepts that don't really exist in our system of laws and within our constitutional structure.

Public bank?

That wouldn't even be the Fed, would it?

Yeah, it sounds to me like it's some sort of government office that redistributes...

wealth, perhaps.

Is there any doubt in your mind, Mike, that the people that we're talking about that put this together, all of these people who are running, endorse this?

Are they serious?

I don't think they can be serious about endorsing this because at least the colleagues who you referenced who are currently serving in the United States Senate, not one of them voted for it.

We brought up the Green New Deal bill for a vote.

in the Senate.

And in fact,

this is the one we voted on if this is the same

bill that was introduced in the...

What kills me is

they said by you saying let's vote on it that you were all just playing a game with them and tricking them.

Oh no, quite to the contrary.

We were wanting to demonstrate that legislation isn't a game.

That's not a game at all to say, okay, you've proposed this.

Those of you who say you support it, which as I understand it, all of them do,

ought to be able to tell us whether or not you'd be willing to actually vote yes.

Not one of them did.

Not one of them.

But is that because they're wearing a mask?

I mean, you don't draw this up if you're not serious.

One would think so.

Although many of them responded to it by saying

that this, yeah, this is the Ocasio-Cortez bill, just to be clear, and this was the one we did vote on.

I think they're saying we agree with the concept, but we're not ready to vote on it because maybe it's not yet ready.

But I don't really know what that means.

If they support the concept, then why wouldn't they vote for it?

I don't know.

Tell me about your ⁇

tell me ⁇ first of all, tell me,

can America

be a socialist

country?

and still be constitutional?

I don't think so.

But let me qualify that by saying I think within our constitutional structure, you probably could have a state or its political subdivisions choosing to go in a different direction, choosing to go in a more collectivist direction, at least having much higher tax rates and things like that.

Within our constitutional structure, they couldn't deprive people of

their fundamental rights.

They couldn't deprive people of property and take that for public purposes without just compensation.

But I think there is probably some more room to move in a progressive direction at a state and local level than

there is at the federal level.

Because

in addition to any due process and property rights type protections that we have in the Constitution that apply to governments generally, we have additional restrictions that apply to the federal government.

Restrictions that say you basically have to have an affirmative grant of authority within the Constitution for the federal government to act at all.

Most of those authorities are found in one part of the Constitution in Article 1, Section 8.

And if it's not in one of those 18 clauses

or in one of a few other affirmative grants of authority to Congress within the Constitution, we can't do it.

There's nothing in there that I see that says that the Congress should have the power to make things equal, to provide, to be the health care provider or the insurer of first or last resort.

It doesn't work.

And I don't mind,

I mean, I don't like it, but I don't don't mind if California wants to be crazy and do all of those crazy things.

Okay, well, I'm not going to live there.

But why is it that they won't do these things on the state scale?

They insist that everything be done on the national scale.

Because they're winning.

They're winning on the national scale, and they have been since the 1930s.

Since April 12, 1937, when the Supreme Court decided a case called NLRB versus Jones and Laughlin-Steele.

Basically anything that Congress can dream and Congress can articulate in a way that satisfies this very loosey-goosey formula, if they're regulating something that affects interstate commerce in a substantial way,

then the sky's the limit on Congress's ability to regulate it.

And so why wouldn't they continue with that?

They've had a real nice, long, progressive winning streak by nationalizing everything.

It would be one thing if they had been losing at the federal level, then it would make sense for them to play it state by state.

But I think deep down they know, number one, that they're winning.

Number two, that if states have a chance to compete, people will vote with their feet.

They're already doing it.

And that will make a difference.

But I've said for a long time, I think it'd be better for everybody.

Most of the people in Vermont would prefer a single-payer health care system.

Let them knock themselves out.

Let them do it.

They could do so a lot more quickly and effectively and efficiently at a state level than at a national level.

We ought to let them do it.

So I am totally for that.

I am a 10th Amendment guy.

You can do whatever you want in your state.

Here's the rule, though.

You can't force me in another state to pay for your mistakes.

Right.

And, you know, is there any role for

all government, you know, federal government rolling all these things out?

Because they know it will fail

on a state level and they will not be able to afford it and they'll be held for it.

So

bump it up to the federal government because the federal government can run deficits and just print money.

And And that is effectively what we do.

That is effectively what has been happening now for decades.

And it's very sad because

within our federal system,

we know that people can't just move to another state and avoid all of this.

And we also know that we're better off in the United States than we are in most other countries.

Most people aren't going to move to another country over this.

But it still means that we're falling short of where we could be, and we're still holding people back.

And I think at the end of the day, ironically, Glenn, this disproportionately adversely affects America's poor and middle class more than anyone else.

The poor and middle class are those who are being most harmed by this mindset that says, if anything in government is going to happen, it has to be at the federal level.

We're all worse off as a result, but especially the poor and middle class.

It was in 2005.

I think, maybe 2004, that I did an interview with your former senior senator, Oren Hatch.

And we were talking about the border, and he was given the usual blah, blah, blah about the border security.

And I said to him at the time, I said, you know, senator,

there's going to come a time

where

people

will be sick of this.

You have to come through

at some point.

And he said, oh, I know, I know, I know.

people are getting upset and i said no no no

there's coming a time to where they'll come for you

and whether that's at the election box or with torches around the capital they'll come for you because you can only be lied to so many times

if you see what's happening did did you see the election in in ukraine the new president Tell me about that.

He's a comedian.

He played a comedy president on on their television set.

The people were so sick and tired of the politicians.

He ran.

He gave no proposals.

He had no policies, gave almost no interviews.

Any interviews he did give, he wasn't serious.

He had the two competing, you know,

interviewing newspapers or television stations.

They had to play ping-pong, and the one who won the ping-pong battle got the interview.

He won

75% to 24%.

Wow.

Do you sense

that the people are,

not you,

do the people in Washington, are they getting the understanding at all that the people are sick and tired of this?

In a sense, yes, because we're all keenly aware of the fact that as an institution we have an approval rating that hovers between 9 and 11 percent, which makes us less popular than Fidel Castro in America and only slightly more popular than the influenza virus, which inexplicably is gaining on us as we're falling.

So, yeah, they get it.

But I think there is a tendency to think, well, we're just going to have to do more good stuff then,

neglecting the fact that Part of the reason why we're held in such low esteem is because so much of what we touch has the opposite of the Midas effect, the reverse Midas effect.

Things we touch sometimes turn out very, very badly.

Some of them view it, though, as let's touch more things.

Let's get the federal government more involved.

And I think that's what we're failing to grasp.

It's the concentration of power in Washington and then the delegation of power within Washington from the people's elected lawmakers to unelected accountable bureaucrats that's making everything worse.

And at the time when the people are fed up with that, we're doubling down.

We're stepping on the accelerator, and that's going to create problems.

So

let me go back to the border here.

I think that the border,

the cry for a border wall, it's not racism.

It's not.

It is

not even about security, really.

It's about

they've been asking.

They've been asking politely.

They've been asking, can somebody care about these things?

Because we really do care.

They've been told now by both sides that they do care about that.

And yet they've been shown by both sides, no, they don't.

Not at all.

And so the border wall is the American people saying, enough with you.

Enough with you people in Washington.

I want something permanent because you guys tell us one thing and then you do the exact opposite.

I want a wall.

That wall is a demand and a statement to Washington.

It's not about Mexico.

I don't trust you.

If we have a wall, it makes it harder for people to look the other way.

It makes it harder for people to sneak across the border, for drug cartels and people otherwise who do not wish us well outside of our country.

You lived on the border for two years.

I did.

I did.

And what I experienced down there, and this was 25 years ago,

when the

caravans didn't didn't exist like they do today.

But even back then, I sensed that those who were most impacted most personally, most adversely, by uncontrolled illegal immigration were

poor people, consisting in many cases of recent immigrants whose jobs, whose livelihoods, whose neighborhoods were all put in jeopardy potentially as a result of uncontrolled illegal immigration.

Today, the problem is so much worse.

And we've got drug cartels, we've got people who want to subvert our form of government bringing people across the border.

We've got people engaging in human trafficking of children across the border.

And we're not stopping it.

That's to our everlasting shame, unless we fix that promptly.

You and I felt very much the same about Donald Trump, I think.

I was concerned, and I'm still concerned, about the

public behavior of the president.

However, I will tell you, at times it feels really good to see him just punch people in the face, you know.

And that's not, I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it it you have that human reaction.

When I was judging him for the election, I was judging him on that and what record he did have, and none of it was conservative.

The president's not a conservative, but he has done and accomplished some amazing things,

Israel probably being paramount on that.

How is your relationship with Donald Trump?

How do you view him now going into this next election?

You're exactly right.

I had some concerns with him, and I was probably more vocal

than many would have been at the time at expressing those concerns.

I have been pleasantly surprised at what he's done.

Now, I don't agree with him on everything.

There are some things he says that make me nervous.

I disagree with him, for example, on trade policy.

Big time.

But I have great respect.

for the fact that he came to Washington and actually did what he said he was going to do.

Yeah.

More so than any president in modern U.S.

history.

People wouldn't be asking for a wall if more people did what they said they would do.

Exactly.

And, you know, I think I fundamentally misunderstood him at the time.

I think I was viewing him through the same lens that I view other politicians.

He is different.

I still don't agree with him on everything, but he's done exactly what he said he was going to do.

I have a friend who, toward the end of 2016, pointed out to me something that helped me understand the phenomenon.

He said, Imagine that we're all in a bar and everybody senses that a bar fight is about to break out.

And all of a sudden,

there's one guy who's big and strong and tough, and he takes out a beer bottle and he breaks it across the table and he holds it up and

brandishes it against those who are opposing it.

Everybody has to decide which person to line up behind.

They're probably going to line up behind that person.

I think

that resonates with what happened in 2016.

I think people had had enough, and they wanted somebody who would go in and knock over a few tables.

And I think that's where the left is now.

I mean, the right is still there, but the left is there now, too, saying we need a bottle breaker.

Right.

Right.

And which makes for an interesting inflection point.

We've got a choice.

And I think that choice is going to force us either to become a more conservative nation, a nation that recognizes and trusts in the dignity of individual human beings and communities and churches and neighborhoods and synagogues and civil society, or a government that marches to the progressive drumbeat, federalizes more power, decentralizes more power in Washington, D.C.

That will be the choice that we've got to make in our next election cycle, and I hope we choose

the right option.

Are you willing to say you would or would not vote for Donald Trump?

Oh, I'm going to vote for him.

I'm going to vote for him.

I'm going to support him.

I think he has

proven that he's willing to drain the swamp even when it doesn't want to be drained.

And so it makes me more comfortable with him than I was in 2016.

I didn't really know him at the time.

I've gotten to know him since then.

We've actually become friends since then.

We talk on a very regular basis.

And, you know, for the first year, he would routinely remind me of the fact that I was hard on him in 2016.

It finally stopped toward the end of 2017 when I said, look, that's behind us now.

We've worked together a lot, and he doesn't bring it up anymore.

Let's talk about judges a bit, because I know you and Ted Cruz have been instrumental in

helping shape the judiciary beyond the Supreme Court, if I'm not mistaken.

And that has been pretty remarkable.

He has, because Obama did not fill a lot of the judgeships, is that the right word?

Judgeship?

Because he didn't fill a lot of them.

I think he came into office with 150 openings.

Is that right?

For federal.

It was a lot.

It was a lot.

And I think he's going to have the opportunity to appoint more judges on the lower bench than anybody else in history, exception maybe of FTR, who had four terms.

When you're looking at that,

tell me the effect of the

appointees that he has made

and what it means

for

the future.

One of the things that I love most about this country is its judicial system.

When I speak to people across the country and even in other parts of the world, I like to point out that despite its flaws,

the federal court system is one that I would put up against any of its counterparts anywhere in the world, and it would stack up favorably, warts and

We are making it better.

President Trump is making it better and the judges that have been confirmed to those positions and the justices confirmed to the Supreme Court are making it better by doing a very simple thing, which is focusing more attention on finding those who actually want to judge rather than engage in social policy.

Those who want to use the judicial robes as an opportunity to be social justice warriors.

We just want judges who will read the law and interpret the law based on what the law says.

There are tools judges have,

canons of statutory construction and constitutional interpretation that help guide

their reading of the law.

And that's all we want, are people who are willing to say the law says X, it should do X, and decide what that law actually means rather than what they wish it meant.

Right.

And if you don't like it, then people go work to change it.

Exactly.

And as simple as that sounds, it is somewhat revolutionary in that

a few decades ago, this sort of thing.

What I've described is essentially what we call textualism and originalism.

These concepts were somewhat foreign 30 years ago.

Now they're commonplace.

And in fact, in this administration, they're more or less prerequisites for getting a robe on the federal bench.

The United States will be better off as a result.

I'll just throw this out at you.

I think that John Roberts should be impeached.

And here's why.

If something wasn't right on that decision about Obamacare, it's just you could see it.

You could see it.

You could read it

in his decision.

You can see there was a last-minute flip.

I mean, it didn't even make sense.

And then we find out, just here recently, that if your gut said that, it was right.

And he went in and he bargained and horse traded and he was trying to save the reputation of the Supreme Court

that is not the job or the role of a Supreme Court justice is it it's not in fact it's directly contrary right to the oath he took to administer the law even-handedly and without regard to external considerations so shouldn't he be impeached

it's hard for me to draw the line between him and other members of the court who have also made decisions that I would consider wrong.

But if we don't start impeaching people, I mean, I don't think the impeachment process, especially for the Supreme Court, was meant to be as hard as

it looks.

You never hear about impeachment for judges.

When these judges go offline, you know, I'd like, quite honestly, there's several people in the Senate and the House that I wouldn't mind impeaching because you are violating your oath.

You are to protect the Constitution Constitution against all foreign and

domestic enemies.

I see people making decisions all the time that is absolutely unconstitutional.

But when you have a sitting judge and it is revealed the horse trading that went on,

that's just another political house now.

It's wrong.

And that's one of the things that differentiates that from just other members of the court with whom I sometimes disagree in their interpretation of the statute or the constitutional provision before them.

In this instance, we now have evidence.

I widely suspected at the time, wrote and did extensive media interviews about it at the time, that something had gone terribly wrong.

I wasn't sure what it was.

But now we know.

But now we know.

Right.

So you can't say, well, this is a difference of opinion or maybe we now know.

Shouldn't he be impeached?

Perhaps he should.

I have never given serious consideration to that until this very moment.

It's something worth considering, except for the fact that it'll never happen.

I mean, first of all, this House of Representatives impeachment proceedings are initiated in the House, and then they require a two-thirds supermajority to bring about removal.

It'll never happen.

Isn't it worth having the conversation about

for a definition of what it means?

Maybe so.

Maybe that would send a signal that needs to be sent that if you engage in

consideration of extraneous factors that are inappropriate to be applied in that case, if you rewrite the law not once but twice to save it from an otherwise inevitable finding of unconstitutionality, you are a political branch.

That's what he's done.

He's made it a political branch.

It is not a political branch.

These are unelected officials that are acting like politicians.

That's not their job.

And in fact, it so slaps America and the Constitution across the face, it's obscene.

It's in some ways much more obscene than what the Democrats and the Republicans have done with health care, because, I mean, at least that's dancing around the edges.

This is completely foreign.

Right.

And I think what bothers me the most about it, Glenn, is the fact that at the time he did this,

it brought him praise, not just from the left, but from many.

who call themselves Republicans, or at least or not avowed leftists.

People who said, oh, this was so statesmanlike, so strong of him to do that.

But in calling it statesmanlike, they unwittingly described it as exactly what it was.

Yes.

It was an act of political insurrection.

It was an act against the legislative branch and against the Constitution.

And you couldn't say, I mean, I said, when that happened, I'm like, that doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make any sense.

And then we saw

his decision.

We're like, this looks like it was rewritten in haste.

This is not what his decision was.

What happened?

Because it was.

And having clerked at the Supreme Court and been involved in assisting Justice Alito with drafting opinions, I've seen the way this works.

And that

what came out as the dissent read like a majority opinion.

Read like a majority opinion that in the final days or weeks before it was released suddenly had to be turned into a dissent.

So then don't we, if we don't stop this,

and I have to tell you, I disagree with Justice Ginsburg and she has said, and I think this is an impeachable thing, but she said, I don't look to just our Constitution.

I look to the new African Constitution, which is now

grabbing land from people.

Well, that's not your job, Ruth.

You're not supposed to look at the African Constitution.

You're supposed to look at our Constitution.

I didn't come on here to defend her point of view.

I think in that circumstance, she said if I were drafting a new Constitution, I wouldn't look to the U.S.

I would look to the South African Congress.

I'm actually defending her in some way.

I can't, I have not seen something

where

she didn't have some sort of constitutional underpinning that I think is screwed up, but it's underpinning of the Constitution.

I have not seen anything like that.

This one is.

And if we don't stop this now, dead in its tracks, with this evidence, you're creating a new political branch that is the most powerful of the three

and it's political and unelected.

That is a fair point and worthy of consideration.

I doubt that it will ever come to fruition with that,

but it's worthy of consideration.

It's also worthy of bringing up in connection with future nominees to the lower courts and especially to the Supreme Court.

I think it's significant that since then, when Donald Trump ran for president, for example, he ran by saying, I'm going to appoint people in the mold of Anthony Scalia, of Samuel Alito, in the mold of Clarence Thomas.

And he did not say of John Roberts.

That by itself will have an impact.

And I think that by itself will help deter future Republican presidents from putting someone on the court who would do that

for the sake of political expediency or whatever it was that was motivating him there.

Last question on the Supreme Court.

Why was Kavanaugh added to this list at the last minute?

I don't know.

I want to get back to the South African Constitution thing for a second.

The fact that she said she would look to the South African Constitution is itself very disturbing.

I point that

only to clarify what she was saying.

If you read the South African Constitution, which I did a short time after she made that statement, you'll understand why it's very disturbing.

It has a whole lot of concepts that are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of government.

South African Constitution, which is like, I mean, and I believe it's been changed since then.

It's very different from our own.

Yes.

We'll just say.

As to why Kavanaugh was put on the list, I don't know.

I know that a number of people

within the White House and those advising the President knew him and thought well of him.

He had clerked for Justice Kennedy, and

perhaps they wanted to make sure ⁇ this is rank speculation on my part.

I don't know this and I can't know.

But I wonder whether they wanted to find somebody who

would make Justice Kennedy feel uncomfortable, feel comfortable with the decision to retire.

If he knew that whoever they were replacing him with was someone he knew and trusted, maybe that made him feel happier about stepping down.

Is that the right thing to do?

No, but I you're not in the circle.

You asked for my speculation, I offered it.

And I want to be clear, it is nothing but speculation.

I know of no reason to believe that's what happened.

So

I'm concerned.

Are you concerned by the way he's been voting and he's kind of like teaming up with Justice Roberts at all?

Did we blow an opportunity?

I think it's way too early to predict that.

Will they never get more conservative?

That's right.

But even still with Justice Kavanaugh, he hasn't been on there long enough for us to have a fair snapshot.

In many instances, it takes years,

some would say a decade or more, to be able to get a clear picture of where they are.

Remember when David Souter was put on the Supreme Court, a lot of people said he was a conservative and continued to insist that he was a conservative.

He turned out not to be.

So is there anything in Kavanaugh's record at this point that make you concerned at all?

There's nothing in his record at this point that causes me to believe that he he will not fall under the category of Justice Alito, Justice Thomas, Justice Scalia,

and so forth.

It's too early for us to say that he is outside of that fold.

I hope he is squarely within it.

And I believe he is.

So let's hope that holds.

Can we let's talk about the Declaration of Independence?

Sure.

Because that's the name of your book is The Lost Declaration.

Why?

The Lost Declaration.

Because we've lost not the physical document itself,

but we've lost some of the concepts in it.

We've lost the language of it.

There are a lot of people who are unfamiliar with what it says, what the message is behind it.

A couple of years ago, NPR tweeted out line by line a series of excerpts from the Declaration of Independence.

A lot of people freaked out,

thought that it was

referring to the President of the United States rather than King George III.

But more importantly, they didn't recognize it as our founding document.

That is itself troubling because the Declaration of Independence informs us of who we are.

It provides

the concept essential to our constitutional system.

They've called it the mission statement.

It's the mission statement.

It's who we say we're going to try to be.

Yes.

I just...

I love the first two paragraphs of this document.

I think it's the most beautiful thing I think I've ever read.

I mean, I think it's

Annabelle Lee by Edgar Allan Poe is just beautiful to me.

I think this is poetry the way it was written.

Now tell me about this copy here.

So this is the copy of this is the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.

I'll show it to you.

What's amazing is

It's written and wherever it is taken out, you will see a little notation.

I think that says Franklin.

Wow.

Okay.

Adams.

And what they did is they scratched it out, and Franklin made that, and he had to,

it's kind of like a shared Word doc where you have to say, okay, I made this

change.

Wow.

Okay.

Did you get this?

This is an original.

I went from a guy named Mark Hoffman.

No, I did not.

This is an 1830 engraving of

the first draft.

I think this is what needs to be studied, and I'll show you why.

Notice when you look at these two pages, what is capitalized?

The United States of America.

That's it, right?

Yeah.

Nothing else.

There are two words in the four-page version that add to those, and it is fascinating.

See, the word men is in all caps.

Yes.

There's another one that is not caps, but it is printed.

Christian.

Christian.

Read what that's about.

Notice that

the handwriting changes here from anything else in this document in Jefferson's own hand.

What's it say?

Can you read it?

The opprobrium of infidel powers is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain.

Okay, he's talking here about what he does is he takes, let's see here,

he has determined to keep an open market where capitalized, where men

should be bought and sold.

So he is directly tying back to the front, all men are created equal.

And he is capitalizing the words men.

Slaves are men.

This is Jefferson.

Yes.

This shows Jefferson was passionate about this.

This was his clause that that he put in.

And he's basically saying, how dare you call yourself a Christian?

This is a Christian king where he will put men for sale in the open market.

And then he goes on,

it is an excoriation.

You think the long list of

usurptations are bad?

You add this one in.

It is the longest paragraph of the usurptations, and he talks about how we've been trying to stop it, and he stops us every step of the way.

And then, this good Christian king comes around, and what is he doing?

He's violating them twice.

He stole them from another land and sold them into slavery, and now he's now

paying them and trying to coerce them to go kill the people who are trying to free them.

It's awesome.

It's a pretty darn good indictment.

And this from a guy who owns slaves.

Right.

This from a guy who was from a slave state.

And he was putting a lot on the line in the first place.

One of the things I discuss in our last declaration is the fact that

he,

like all of them, really was putting not only his reputation, but his life and his fortune all on the line to do this.

So when his initial draft, it made a lot of sense.

As long as he was going to put that all on the line, why not go all the way and put slavery on the chopping block as well?

He had done that as a young lawmaker as well in the Virginia colonial legislative body.

Sadly, it didn't survive.

It didn't survive his effort in the legislature.

It didn't survive his effort in the Declaration.

But I have to respect the fact that he tried.

He tried to get it in there.

Is the Civil War inevitable after the Constitution was drafted?

And we didn't, we failed to correct it here, and then we failed to correct it a second time with the Constitution.

This time when they didn't do it, they said because the king would tear us apart.

The second time they failed to do it, they just didn't really want to lose those two states or three states at the time because they were the economic powerhouse.

It's harder to excuse it at the Constitutional Convention.

But their excuse again was: well, we are

being progressives.

We're taking a little baby step.

And we're outlawing the slavery market

for new slaves.

You know, what was it, 1807?

Was the Civil War inevitable?

Some type of conflict bringing about the end of slavery was inevitable.

I don't think it had to culminate in a war.

I don't think it had to last that long.

At any given moment, it could have been prohibited.

It could have been banned.

I wish it had happened at the Declaration stage.

It didn't.

I wish it had happened at the Constitutional Convention stage.

It didn't.

We did end up

banning it, but it took took a lot longer than it should have.

And Abraham Lincoln is killed right after.

And nobody wants to talk about it.

Nobody wants to.

Abraham Lincoln, we're losing every battle

until about halfway through.

And he said,

God, what do you want?

And he's reading the scriptures, and he realizes this isn't about saving the Union.

This is about slavery.

And so he declares a day of fast, mourning, prayer, and repentance, humiliation, I think is the word he used,

where we all had to beg for forgiveness.

And he said in his inaugural address, if the Lord deems that all of our treasure be piled up in one heap, and it's all gone because of slavery, so be it.

He's killed after that.

And we look the other way.

And we...

We let the infection, we just, we're so close, we've lanced it, and then we let it just kind of heal back because we don't push the poison out.

Same with Martin Luther King.

We don't push the poison out.

We're so tired of the killing and the riots and everything else.

Does America have to have a moment

of

struggle and then pushing that poison out?

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes human beings being fallible, being self-interested, being covetous, sometimes have to be brought to a level of humility by forces external to themselves,

sometimes by force and sometimes by privations of every sort.

It's unfortunate that it took the Civil War in order to bring about that next phase, and it's also unfortunate that it took another 100 years beyond that.

to get beyond Jim Crow and to

bring about really what was the vision of the Civil War amendments adopted in the wake of that conflict.

But we got there.

It says something about human nature, that sometimes it has to get that bad, and people have to be brought to a state of poverty and humility before they can make the right choice.

It again goes to the brilliance of this document because

It says prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed light and transient causes and accordingly all experience has shown that mankind more disposed to suffer while evils are suffer sufferable than right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed to

but after a long train of abuses I mean it's saying that we don't we won't do these things we won't do the hard things unless we are just punched in the face repeatedly right I've always appreciated the fact that he emphasized the fact that we don't do this sort of thing for light and transient reasons this isn't something to be done casually.

And

in my view,

while we struggle with things in our society and our government today,

we're not dealing with the same sorts of things that they were dealing with.

And that we have a structure, we have a culture, we have a system of laws that,

if we will stick with, it can do the job of restoring and protecting the dignity of the human soul.

But we've got to do better.

So

the Declaration of Independence is who we try to be.

Constitution is telling us how to, the framework that will best support this idea.

Right.

Correct?

Right.

Yeah.

The Constitution is the picture frame.

The Declaration is the picture.

Okay.

So can you just go over the second

of the paragraph of this?

I'd love to go over it with you really line by line and just get your thoughts on what everything means.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable, it says inherent, crossed out, inalienable rights.

And among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Tell me things that we should learn from that.

It's a Lockean principle.

A lot of this derives from the teachings of John Locke, and a lot of it's an outgrowth of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Tell people who John Locke is.

You don't know who John Locke is.

John Locke was an English political philosopher

who talked a lot about the inherent rights of human beings

in necessarily entailing life, liberty, and property, and that governments are there to protect life, liberty, and property.

Jefferson, in his rhetorical flourish, made the choice to cast that as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which actually has a catchier ring to it in some ways, especially since we are talking about the picture rather than the frame.

We'd be a lot different if it was property, though.

Well, but we used property in the Constitution.

We framed it in terms of property.

I don't think we lose anything by virtue of the fact that he said life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What we do sometimes lose is when people confuse the Constitution with the Declaration and

like to use the pursuit of happiness as if it were whatever progressive dream the Speaker has in mind at the moment and then say this means that we are entitled as a Congress to commandeer the nation's health care system or something like that.

Anyway, so what Jefferson was giving voice to

was this belief, this understanding that many of us now take for granted, but that's been an important part of our culture,

of Anglo-American law

and constitutional structure for hundreds of years, that people have rights that are given to them by God.

They exist before the state.

They exist before any government comes about and separate and apart from that universe.

That's a sphere.

it's a cell that cannot be penetrated by government.

Talk to somebody who doesn't believe in God

and tell me

how, I mean, because

I believe in God, so it's easy for me to say, no, those are divine, they do not come from man, and so it's easy for me to order things.

God, man, government.

But if you don't believe in God, how do you make this case that these rights belong to you and you are over the government?

Most people I know, at least most Americans I know, who themselves don't believe in God,

have a pretty easy time grasping this, even in the absence of their belief in God, even if they're agnostic or atheist, in part because it's become part of our culture to understand that

you have worth because you exist, regardless of whether God exists and regardless of what your vision of God is or how you understand God to exist, you have worth because you live and you breathe.

We as a society still accept and embrace that.

I don't know that we realize the extent to which that's rare even in today's world.

And even though it has been eroded in American culture, it's still more a part of us than it is in most countries throughout the world.

We should be grateful for that.

We should celebrate it.

But as much as anything, we need to protect it.

And that's one of the reasons I wrote our Lost Declaration is I want to give

I think most parents and grandparents today understand that their children and their grandchildren aren't being educated in the same way they were.

That they're not being taught civics, they're not being taught these basic principles about life, liberty, and property, or the difference between life, liberty, and property and the life articulation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

They want their kids to be able to learn that.

And so that's one of the reasons I wrote this book.

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 extinguished is very difficult to reignite.

But it's also easy to keep it lit if we just keep it intact.

That governments are instituted among men.

That's a totally different idea from anywhere else back then.

Never.

Nobody had ever done that, right?

Right.

In fact, it was directly contrary to it.

As I point out of the book, they believed in the divine right of kings.

The king of England, including King George III, believed that he had been divinely appointed by Almighty God himself to rule.

So governments were instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Another wild concept.

Here's where I want you to comment on.

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

Now, there's a comma here, but I'm going to stop.

What does that mean?

It means when government mistreats you, especially when informed by language that we see later in the Declaration about the fact that you don't undertake these things for light and transient reasons, when government becomes destructive of these ends, of protecting the inherent inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that continues over a long period of time, it is the right of the people to get rid of that government.

So explain why people say that secession is not possible and it's settled law because of the civil war.

Yeah,

I don't know what that means.

The fact that they would say that any government has the right to exist in perpetuity and not be thrown off even if it

interferes with the rights of the people and degrades them and erodes them, that's nonsense.

And it goes against everything we understand.

Governments are themselves earthly institutions.

We made them.

Correct.

Even though you and I weren't alive, at least I wasn't

at the time this came around.

we

inherit a land

where people entered into this covenant with their government.

But it's an earthly construction.

It's not an eternal one.

It's not created by God.

And so the people themselves necessarily have the right to throw that off.

Okay, so it's a comma here.

The right of the people to alter or abolish it.

Comma.

And to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such a form as to them will seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.

Is that comma and as important as I think it is?

It means to me we can't just abolish people who say we've got to tear this system down, just tear it down.

No, no, no, no, no.

You have the right to abolish it or to change it,

but

you have the responsibility to come up with the system that will better enhance the security of these rights.

Yeah.

Because that's what they did.

The and is very important in that sentence.

I think it would still have the meaning without the comma, but the comma followed by the and makes clear that it follows in that order.

You don't just throw it off

and like that scene in the Lion King where they say no king, no king.

Right, right, right.

You've got a responsibility at that point to put together a new system of government, one that takes into account the practical realities on the ground and one that's most likely to ignore to the happiness and well-being of the people.

Of the people,

not the principles here?

Not the life, liberties, and...

Well, of the people taking into account those principles.

In other words,

for a second, I thought you were asking about principles with an AL.

No, no, no.

I mean

that you have to replace it with a government that will best protect those life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, those human rights,

and you can come up with a government that will most secure those things, your happiness and your safety.

All right.

That is the whole point of government.

It's the only reason we have it.

It's the only reason we tolerate it.

If you think about it, Glenn, governments are nothing fancy, and we do ourselves a disservice when we try to convince ourselves that there is something omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent about governments.

We actually slouch towards Gomorrah when we do that.

We actually start engaging in a form of idolatry when we engage in state worship, when we,

in effect, reverence government as though it were some holy institution.

Sure, it's to be respected and honored as far as it goes, but it's an earthly creation.

We must never lose sight of that.

We must never worship it.

And we must never conclude that it's not there to serve us.

In writing the book,

what's the biggest surprise you

felt?

What was the thing that you went, like when I found this, I'm looking at it one day, and somebody, it's a stew, came up behind me and he said, Why are those words capitalized?

And I said, gosh, I don't, oh my gosh.

What was the thing that you took away in your research

for our lost declaration that you thought this is game-changing?

Yeah.

I think for me,

there are a couple of things.

First, being the extent to which Jefferson really did try.

to work this into the Declaration itself and was pushed back.

I knew that he had reservations about it.

I didn't know the extent to which he had tried in the Virginia legislature and again in the Declaration.

I was also

quite inspired to learn a little bit more about Thomas Paine.

I develop a lot of the discussion in parts of the book around Thomas Paine.

And I learned more about his background.

He grew up in a community in England where he routinely saw acts of government overreach, not just of a bureaucratic sort, but really nasty, ugly stuff.

He routinely saw people being executed by servants of the king.

He routinely saw women being stoned.

And he

was tortured by these thoughts.

He was encouraged later in life

to

come to America, encouraged by Benjamin Franklin himself.

He took this long voyage over.

I imagine what might have been going through his head as he was on this horrible journey over to the United States.

Once he got to the United States,

he still had within his soul this yearning for freedom and this resentment for the kinds of abuses against everyday citizens in England by King George III.

He knew he had seen behind that curtain.

He had seen there was nothing magical, there was nothing mystical, there was just a guy pulling some levers, and that guy was a fallible, flawed mortal.

He wasn't willing to give the God Save the Queen

reference too much reverence.

And so he wrote Common Sense, and I think Common Sense had as much to do with the

American Revolution and with the Declaration of Independence as any other single document.

Oh, I agree.

You know,

his book is it, Rights of Man,

the one that he supposedly declares there is no God and all of this.

It's in one of his documents where

he's defending the French Revolution.

And

And people say that he's an atheist.

We

found and have a document in his own handwriting that proves that's not the case.

He was against religion.

He was not against God.

And

he's writing this beautiful, impassioned letter to Benjamin Franklin.

And he says,

I've been hearing the things that are being said about me.

It's untrue.

He said, You have to understand in France, they hate the church, they hate it because it's been used as a lever to oppress them.

And when they were going after the church, I kept saying to them, I agree with you, I agree with you, I agree with you, but

don't throw God out.

Separate those two.

It's phenomenal.

And

in some ways,

the way I feel

about our own churches right now,

that's man.

That's man.

And man might be doing the best that he can, but separate your church from God.

That's different.

And certainly separate your God and your faith from the the blunt instrument that is government.

Government ultimately is force.

And

you're exactly right.

I think this is one of the reasons why our revolution stuck.

It is.

And the French Revolution didn't.

We didn't throw God out.

The French did.

And I think a belief in God

benefits society generally.

Not that everyone should be coerced by government to do it.

I don't think the government should have anything to do with it.

When people believe in God, it makes possible for these twin aims, these things that seem to be in conflict with each other.

Equality and liberty have to live side by side.

They're the yin and yang of the political universe.

They keep each other in check.

We yearn for equality, but equality, properly understood, is equal treatment under a just law.

It's not radical egalitarianism where the government makes everyone equal in their outcomes.

That kind of radical egalitarianism is like crack cocaine for the political soul, and it cankers the soul, and it causes equality to swallow liberty.

They can't coexist, but they're much more likely to be able to coexist, to live peaceably together if the people believe in God.

I think that's the problem, honestly,

in many ways with race relations.

I think...

Look, once you start saying reparations,

nobody's going to engage in that conversation.

Nobody's going to engage.

But if you could convince people, look, I'm not, I don't want anything.

I don't want anything.

I don't want anything from you.

You don't want anything from me.

We just have to have this conversation.

That becomes almost a spiritual cleansing of the soul conversation.

And that's a good conversation to have.

It is.

My wife, Sharon, and I were talking recently.

She's a very profound person, and there's a good chance anytime I happen to say something profound that it came about in one way or another as a result of a conversation with Sharon.

She pointed out to me that

one of the reasons it's so devastating, it's so harmful, when governments treat people differently on the basis of their race,

is that that's one thing in their life they can't control.

And it makes them feel desperate.

And it leads to all kinds of horrible problems when governments pit people against each other on the basis of classifications over which they have no control, have nothing to do with their conduct, with their character, only something that they cannot change.

It's a reason to reflect back on the Declaration of Independence and on the fact that long before we fought and the right side prevailed in the Civil War, long before we had the Equal Protection Clause,

as part of the 14th Amendment adopted following the Civil War.

We had this principle stated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal.

That helped give birth to

the system of government that we enjoy today.

In many ways, I believe it's entirely possible that our best days are ahead of us.

We've made a number of right choices.

We've overcome a lot of obstacles that they were still grappling with at the time of the revolution.

We just have to complete the project.

Why has the Senate Senate failed 24 times to pass

a pro-life statement about babies that have been born?

This is one of the great mysteries to me that I find it most difficult to unravel on most issues, even where I disagree strongly with a political opponent.

I can at least explain what their viewpoint is.

I can explain their viewpoint on the Green New Deal, on taxes, on Obamacare, on their role of government in this, that, or the other.

This is one area where I struggle with even finding the right words to explain what could

be their justification.

Are we going to descend to the level of a civilization who worshiping Moloch handed infants over to a red-hot

statue idol

in sacrificing them?

Have we sunk to that level?

I can no more fathom or justify voting against something like this than I can that kind of irrational, hateful society that I described, that we see described in the Old Testament.

I think it is to our everlasting shame that we have not as a society

evolved to the point where we're willing to say,

At least once a baby has been born, that is a human being.

All men are created equal, and that means

and includes babies.

We shouldn't treat them differently simply because they are the most vulnerable among us.

I can't justify that.

I can't even explain it.

I said years ago,

and I still mean it,

if we lose this,

you know,

I happen to believe in God, and I know you do too, and I believe in an opposing force of Satan.

And Satan,

he doesn't have an original idea.

He just perverts that which is good.

He can't create anything.

He can only pervert it.

And the bigger the force for good,

when it falls, the more perverse and dangerous it's going to become.

And I remember saying, if we fall, we are going to make the Nazis look like rookies with our technology, with what we have in our arsenal.

Look out, world,

and look out

our individual souls for allowing that to happen.

And I see this with abortion

to the point where we're not talking 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, and it's separate from mom.

It's no longer part of her body.

It's a baby.

And because I know my history, I know that this exact thing happened in Germany.

And the German people stood up against Hitler and told him no.

It's the only thing that I know of that they said no on, that he listened.

Well, he just went covert with it.

But they were openly doing this to children who didn't have a meaningful life.

And the German people stood up and said, stop that right now.

He continued it in hiding in all of the hospitals, but the people were upset about it.

Mike, where are we?

Years ago, I heard my friend Neil Maxwell say that if

India is the world's most religious nation and Sweden is the world's least religious nation.

America can be analogized to a nation of Indians governed by Swedes.

And I think that's part of what explains what's happening here.

80% of the American people agree with you and me, from what I've been able to pick up.

At least 70%,

probably as high as 80%,

agree with you and me on this issue.

But it's our system of government.

It is, ironically,

that part of our government that has been the source of so much of our strength, that is our independent judiciary, that has manipulated and distorted our Constitution to the point that it not only justifies, but it enables infanticide.

We can't let that bring us down, which is why the people have got to continue to push it forward.

Nor can we afford to sit back and say, oh, those barbaric judges, without us ourselves trying to do something about 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 continue to vote on it again and again and again.

They can only look the American people in the eye so long and say, these aren't people.

They can only look them in the eye so long and say, these people wouldn't have had a meaningful life, so it was okay to let them expire or to facilitate their expiration.

They can't do it much longer.

If we keep voting, we will win.

Mike.

God bless your soul.

God bless your wife.

I know how hard it it is, especially

at least I think our wives are an awful lot alike.

When we get punched, they feel it more than we do, and they want to.

They're bears.

They're bears.

Sometimes they see it coming before we do, too.

I know, I know.

But I have so much admiration for you, and I'm thrilled to be your friend.

And thank you for spending this time.

Thank you.

Likewise.

I appreciate it very much.

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