Sen. Mike Lee: Witnessing Biden’s Decline, and Obama Seizing Power From the Shadows

Here's the latest. So did you read the Cy Hirsch piece about how Biden was driven out of his job?

Then tells, I mean, that's what the piece says, tells Kamala Harris, okay, you're going to be the nominee, but if you don't gain traction, if you're not popular, we're going to take.

But if it's not extortion, it's just a very underhanded manipulation of the process.

They didn't do anything about it. All of a sudden, when they decide the timing is right, perhaps because of his debate performance, which I suspect they had a hand in planning, because they knew how it would turn out. At some point they said, okay, the time is right now. Now we're going to show the world that he can't handle the job. But I find it difficult to believe that they didn't do it at all.

This has the feeling of being planned in advance. They knew what was going to happen. And when else, Tucker, have you seen a presidential debate between two general election opponents occur that early in the year? Before? either nominee has had convention, before?

either nominee is technically fully the nominee. Right. I can't recall a time when that has happened. And so why, then? It seems awfully curious that the Biden campaign team agreed to that.

And the only rational explanation I can think of was the one that we're alluding to here.

It lowers us. The sitting president shouldn't have to debate a guy charged with crimes. They were saying that. And then, in a day, they're just like, oh, yeah, of course, we're going to have this debate really early. What is that?

But they realized they couldn't keep that contained much longer. And so they said, all right, let's agree to a debate. And if things don't go as they should, inevitably knowing how things were going to go, then we'll do what we've got to do. My very first reaction, one of the first tweets that I sent, I think it was driving my wife nuts because I was live tweeting commentary during the debate. One of my first tweets was, it looks to me like they gave him the wrong shot.

Because a lot of times when he comes in to do the State of the Union, he's really, really up. Sort of like he's just consumed like six Red Bulls at once and amped up and kind of angry. He was really low energy from the very outset. Anyway, it makes me wonder all kinds of things, right down to how they prepared him.

Tucker, can you imagine the kind of absolute venom that would be released against Republicans if we pulled a stunt like that? I can't even begin to imagine how that would take us down. But it's not even touching them, because the media choose not to report on it. Not even to mention.

When she starts shuffling, kicking her feet forward rather than walking in a fluid, smooth motion like she always has. You'll know that things are progressing quickly and that that is an outward manifestation of what's going on inside of her mind. And I saw that same gait and posture in President Biden during his first term in office. I don't remember exactly when it was in 2021 that I noticed that, but it was sometime during his first year. Now, obviously, there are other reasons why someone could have that happen, where it wouldn't necessarily be reflective of his cognitive decline.

But then I saw plenty of reasons to believe there was cognitive decline happening as well. Yes. They kept him shielded not only from the public and from non-friendly press, but also from members of Congress. Now, remember, look, I've been in the Senate for 13 and a half years. I've served while we've had three different presidents, you know, Obama, Biden as his vice president, and then, you know, Trump, and now Biden as president.

We have seen a lot more of other presidents. Trump was a lot more gregarious. He was a lot more willing and eager to engage with rank-and-file members in Congress than Obama was. But Obama was still up on the Hill a fair amount. I mean, one time in Perthshire, I remember walking in the basement of the Capitol, I was turning a corner and bumped right into President Obama.

And we had a great little chat, oh, Mike, good to see you, let's talk soon about criminal justice reform. It was great. We'd run into him. He would call from time to time just to check in on things that we agreed on, projects that we were working on together.

Trump, of course, was very active. Members of Congress could call him and get him on the phone very, very quickly. He was very engaging. With Biden, it hardly happens at all. Really?

Like, they shielded him from us. In some ways, my wife, I think this was in maybe the first half or the first quarter of 2022, went over to an event at the White House for Senate spouses hosted by the First Lady, who was herself a longtime member of the Senate Spouses Organization. And while they were there, President Biden just kind of came wandering in. I think they were in one of the ballrooms. Kind of came wandering in.

She said there was no Secret Service with him, no staff with him. He just kind of walked in. She said instinctively, I just said, oh, hello, Mr. President, it's good to see you. He asked her, do you work in the East Wing?

And she said, no, no, Mr. President, I'm Sharon, Sharon Lee, Senator Mike Lee's wife. He swore me into the Senate twice, first in 2011,, then in 2017, just before he left the vice presidency. And we had interacted with him a lot, and she thought that would take care of it. He looked confused.

Moments later, he said, do you work in the West Wing? And he was not quite there. Moments later, someone came up to one of the other Senate spouses, I think it was a Democrat,

and had a phone in her hand and said, hey, my brother-in-law is a big fan. It's his birthday. Well, you would say hi to him. This is Biden's signature move. This is, he's really, really good at this.

I remember when I first came to the Senate, and he would have dinner and other gatherings with senators. He got Pat Toomey's dad on the phone when he found out he had lived in Scranton. And he was like, how the hell are you? This is Joe Biden. I understand you're from Scranton.

By the end of it, Pat Toomey's dad and then Vice President Biden felt like they were old fraternity brothers.

The woman's brother-in-law answered, hello. And then he got a confused look on his face,

held out the phone, hung it up, and handed the phone back. Now that, for Joe Biden, is very significant. Very significant.

Smallest club in Washington, which is a small city. Do people talk about this?

Republicans talk about it a lot, of course, when we talk about it with our Democratic colleagues. There will sometimes be nods and statements to the effect that, yeah, well, there are good days and bad days. And then they try to move on as soon as possible. They don't like to talk about it. I suppose I understand why they don't want to talk about it, but it's a thing that sometimes needs to be talked about.

So was President Trump. And when President Trump was still in office, I talked to him about this a fair amount and to his national security advisor, Robert O'Brien. And what they would tell me is, look, we've got a really good plan to do this. We think we can pull this off by maybe the first or second quarter of 2021.. You know, if he's reelected, there was some prep work that had to be done in the lead up to those months.

They weren't able to pull it off in 2020.. But their plan involved making sure that there was not a single weapon that could fire left in the country. President Trump, I think, took it even further. He didn't want a single nail or a single screw left intact, that any gun that couldn't be exported would have to have its barrel melted down or exploded and rendered unusable. He wasn't going to leave any weaponry behind that could be usable by the enemy.

But with Biden having made this arbitrary decision to withdraw by the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, he didn't back off. Now, why is that? He's the commander in chief, of course, but once he made that arbitrary decision, if he's not in full possession of his faculties, might that explain why he had this dogged determination to proceed with that, even though there were all kinds of warning signs flashing?

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But then again, he was sometimes giving speeches where he appeared to be sort of in control, not necessarily as sharp as he once was, but aware of his surroundings.

I think that's the way it works.

the president of the United States, if we were operating in a manner truly consistent with the structure, text, original understanding of the constitution, the president of the United States would be in charge of the entire executive branch, with the ability essentially to fire anyone for any reason, or no reason at all. And so-.

He- a short time into the phone conversation, I could tell he was reading from a script, and not only reading from a script, but his voice would start to trail off at the end of each sentence. And so, yes, he was scripted. So even-.

if they can tell you to read. Well, it's totally nuts.

this is a massive charade? It's obvious. now. The whole thing is fake. I mean, that's the conclusion that I'm reaching.

Don't? we have a right to know the details?

I mean, you know, one of the problems, of course, is that we've made the federal government as a whole more powerful than it was ever designed or intended to be. Remember, we've got three lawmaking functions, or three functions of government, rather. You've got the lawmaking function performed by Congress, that's the most dangerous power. It was therefore given to the most dangerous branch. under circumstances where that branch, the legislative branch, Congress, where I work, you can fire every member of the House every two years and one third of all the senators every two years, because we've got the most dangerous power.

Then you've got the executive branch, headed by the president, whose job it is to enforce the laws. And then you've got the judicial branch, headed by the Supreme Court, whose job it is to interpret the laws and resolve individual disputes that arise about what the law put in place, either by Congress or through the Constitution, means. So legislative power is by far the most dangerous, but what's happened over the last 80 years or so, 85 years, basically, since the New Deal era, Washington, D.C. got immensely more powerful, starting on April 12th, 1937.. That's the day the Supreme Court decided a case called NLRB versus Jones and Laughlin Steel Company.

I regard that as the switch in time that saved nine. Remember this, FDR's court, I wrote a book about this a couple of years ago called Saving Nine. FDR's court packing plan was moving forward and the justices panicked, it was two years to the date, after they had moved into their new building, when they issued this decision, in which Associate Justice Owen Roberts joined the court's liberals and came up with a new definition of the Commerce Clause. Commerce Clause gave Congress the power to regulate interstate commercial transactions and channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce.

All of a sudden, on April 12th, 1937,, the Supreme Court rewrote that so that the Commerce Clause also gave Congress the power to regulate anything and everything that, when measured in the aggregate, if it's economic in nature, has a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Now, Tucker, what that means is Congress can regulate anything it wants. So all of a sudden, Congress went from a limited, narrow purpose legislative body to an open ended one, rendering the 10th Amendment almost a nullity. because if any of the 18 articles of Article 1, Section 1,, I'm sorry, Article 1, Section 8, if any of those clauses are open ended and limitless, the 10th Amendment means nothing. So Congress found itself newly possessed of the power to regulate labor, manufacturing, agriculture, mining, health, safety, and welfare, not just in the District of Columbia or on federal land or with federal funds, but anywhere, everywhere, as long as they said the magic words and connected it somehow to an impact on interstate commerce.

Newly possessed with this power, Congress realized, oh my gosh, we're going to be a lot more accountable. We're going to have to do a lot more work. So to a degree, they stopped passing laws and started passing a lot of platitudes. We shall have good law in Area X and we hereby delegate to Agency or Department Y the power to make and interpret and enforce laws, carrying the full force of the federal government to enforce them in Area X. And from that moment forward, we delegated all this lawmaking power over to unelected, unaccountable agencies.

This made the presidency and the executive branch vastly more powerful than it was ever intended to be. So what we've seen here, Tucker, is that the aggregation, the accumulation of power in the hands of the few. It's exactly why we have a constitution and exactly what our constitution has a belt and a set of suspenders, and another belt and another set of suspenders. in order to avoid. So, power has been taken away from the American people in two steps.

First, from the people to Washington, D.C., where we federalized previously non-federal power. Then, within Washington, D.C., we've taken the lawmaking power, the most dangerous power of government, away from the people's elected lawmakers over to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, ostensibly serving under the leadership of the incumbent president.

So, but here's what I... And I say this with respect, but I've never understood this. in the 35 years I spent in Washington. I saw Congress get less powerful every cycle and the executive get more powerful under Republicans and Democrats. And you sort of wonder like, where's the self-respect of Congress?

They can just legislate because they feel the need to. We can't, at least we're not supposed to. We're supposed to be dealing with interstate and foreign trade or commerce, immigration laws, bankruptcy laws, uniform system of weights and measures, declaring war, granting letters of mark and reprisal, laws governing the disposition and use of federal land, army, navy, how we coordinate national guards or militias, as they're described in Article I, Section 8, and so forth. But there is no general purpose, legislative power. There is nothing in there that says Congress shall have the power to enact laws to make life better for the American people, or enact such laws as they deem appropriate for national legislation.

Nothing of the sort. So we've drifted so far from that. And once we drifted from that, which I believe occurred, sort of by the extortive threat of the court packing plan on April 12th, 1937, once we ceased to be a power, a legislative body of limited, enumerated powers, the die was cast because Congress knew we can't keep up with all that anyway. And even if we tried to, remember, Tucker, whenever you make a new law, a national law especially, you're going to make one group of people happy, you're going to make a whole lot of other people very unhappy. And so this was an easier way, toward the interest of a drive for perpetual or long-term incumbency, to make it easier.

So imagine, for example, you're one of the people who voted for the original iterations of the Clean Air Act, which, to put it in oversimplified terms, we shall have clean air. What idiot's going to vote against that? And we hereby delegate to the EPA the power to make and interpret and then enforce laws carrying the force of generally applicable federal law, regulations carrying the force of federal law, but decide what clean air is, what pollution is, how much you can pollute and how much you'd be fined if you do.

Years go by and the same people who voted for that see the EPA come out with some crazy ruling. To cite one example that we've seen at times in my state, they'll identify this region or that region of the state and say, all right, here are your ozone limits in that area. And you're going to have a really hard time getting permitting of any sort if you're out of compliance with ozone. But they'll set the ozone level sort of below or at the rate where Mother Nature herself has set them, so that it's impossible to comply. Now, a Congress wouldn't do that.

And if it did do that, it would be problems. People would be held accountable for that. But when EPA does it, members of Congress have this way of saying, ah, to their constituents who come and say, this is shutting down my business. We can't operate this way. You got to fix it.

They'll say, yeah, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to write them a strongly worded letter. I'm going to tell them that I mean it. Hey, guys, knock this off. It's like the Robin Williams used to describe the unarmed English Bobby who, being unarmed upon seeing the commission of a crime, would yell on this very British accent, stop, or I'll yell stop again.

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But I get, maybe what Madison and the other framers never foresaw, when they set up a system that had inherent power struggles, like. that's the point, right? But I don't think they foresaw that there are people who actually don't want power because it comes with too much responsibility, accountability, it's scary to them. And they'd rather sort of pass the buck, pass the power to somebody else. I mean, that's what it looks like to me.

It can even feel like the logical thing to do, to delegate out this decision-making process, or at least a lot of it.

Let me give you some examples of why. In my office in Washington, you should come by sometime, I'll show you my monument to the constitutional problems we face. I keep two stacks of documents in my office in the Russell Building in Washington. One stack of documents is a few inches tall, and it's a few hundred to a few thousand pages long. It consists of the laws passed by Congress in the last year.

Some would argue that that's a few hundred or a few thousand pages, too many, but regardless, those are the laws passed by Congress last year. Then there's the other stack. The other stack, which is printed on double-sided paper, very thin paper, very small print, is the Federal Register. for those people who are unburdened by knowledge of what the Federal Register is. I wish I weren't burdened by it.

The Federal Register is the annual cumulative index of federal regulations as they're announced, first for notice and comment, and then, once they're finalized. They go out, peasants, prepare to be regulated, give us your thoughts on this, so as to replicate some sort of feeling of a democratic input process. They don't really care, at the end of the day, what the public comments and response, and then they finalize it. Those are a hundred thousand pages, more or less, that get issued every year. A hundred thousand pages of federal regulations every year, well, just regulations.

They sound softer than laws. Some cases maybe they are, but those hundred thousand pages are replete with a lot of things that are just law. They have all the incidence of law, other than that they haven't been enacted by Congress.

How many provisions of federal law create a crime? We wanted to know more or less the universe of federal crimes that exist. The answer took a while. When it came back, it was stunning. It said the answer is unknown and unknowable, but it's at least 300,000 crimes.

Crimes. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that this Byzantine labyrinth of federal regulations, about a hundred thousand pages a year, which initially go into this massive document, about a hundred thousand pages per year, called the Federal Register, ultimately they'll be codified into a larger catalog known as the Code of Federal Regulations. There's so many criminal provisions of those regulations that it makes it very difficult to count, but it's at least 300,000..

It is. Yeah.

Yes. They're the most anti-democratic species you'll find in American politics.

It's R-E-I-N-S. It's an acronym that stands for regulations from the executive in need of scrutiny. And what it says, it would require us to follow essentially the existing requirements of Article 1, Section 7.. Remember, Article 1, Section 1, the very first operative provision of the Constitution says that all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in Congress. Article 1, Section 7 makes abundantly clear that there is only one way to make a federal law.

You have to have bicameral passage of the same bill text. House and Senate, most of the time, it doesn't matter in which order, unless it's a revenue bill that has to start in the House. But other than that, it doesn't matter in which order. The House and the Senate have to pass the same text, and then you present it to the president for signature, veto, or acquiescence. That's the only formula by which you can make a federal law.

We've been disregarding that for a long time. So what the REINS Act says is that if there is a federal regulation, on the one hand that operates internally, it's not a major rule, meaning it doesn't impose affirmative legal obligations on the part of the American public and isn't economically significant. Maybe it determines what time the lights go on and off at the Department of Commerce. The REINS Act wouldn't worry about that. But for the outward-facing affirmative legal obligations, economically significant or otherwise, qualifying as what we call a major rule, those rules, those regulations wouldn't be self-executing.

They couldn't take effect automatically. They couldn't take effect, in fact, unless or until Congress affirmatively enacted that regulation into law. And so that way, for those who are concerned about making sure that we preserve the expertise that we've got in these federal agencies, we're not discarding that. We're actually giving them probably more of an advantage than they should have, even under the REINS Act, by virtue of the fact that these things would be considered on a fast-track basis. But the American people would be in charge because they couldn't become law unless both houses of Congress enacted it into law.

I've been trying to get this passed for a very long time. When Trump took office in 2017, I put it into overdrive and went to a bunch of my Democratic colleagues, member by member, saying, I know you must be concerned about this presidency because it's all they talked about. And if you are concerned about it, you really ought to look into the REINS Act, because look at all the control that this president has over regulations. This is something that should not be partisan. It shouldn't be just a Republican thing, even though almost everybody who supports the REINS Act happens to be a Republican.

To a person, they all said essentially the same thing, Mike, we need the expertise of those agencies. To which I'd say, we'd still have it. We still have it. It's just, we would be the ultimate...

What is that?

Now he's kind of soft peddled his way into court packing. Little by little, he's getting there. He keeps talking about Supreme Court reform. He's been increasingly flirtatious with the idea of court packing. He's trying to impose this new set of ethical standards from one branch to another.

My view and the view of most people, including Joe Biden until a few years ago, including.

the late Associate Justice, Ruth Bader, Ginsburg, just not too long before she died, acknowledged that it's a bad idea to change that number, even though constitutionally we're allowed to do it by statute. Because what you'd end up with, Tucker, is you'd end up politicizing the court. Whatever administration that decides to do this would only do it, most likely with a Congress and a Senate willing to put in... And a president willing to put in justices of that party's political ideology, such that people would stop seeing the court as an adjudicative body and much more as a political one, especially since, once we start this, it'll set off a nuclear chain reaction. Now, I've always been opposed to court packing.

I think all Republicans have, all Democrats have, until very recently. But if Democrats take this step, let's imagine, knock on wood, let's hope this doesn't happen. I don't think it'll happen. But if somehow in this year's election, Democrats were to win the White House, keep the majority in the Senate, and perhaps even expand their majority and win back the House, I have no doubt but that they would pack the court, meaning expand the court. They would increase it probably by four justices, taking it from nine to 13..

Now, just imagine the next time when political forces are such that Republicans take it back. You think Republicans could possibly decide, no, that's fine, we're not going to do this. There would be immense political pressure on us at that point, Republican lawmakers, to add an additional four, five, six, or seven. And the pendulum would swing back and forth, and as it swung, each time it swung, you would see additional appointments made to the Supreme Court. And before long, it would start to look like the Intergalactic Senate on the Star Wars movies.

They also want to essentially divest the power to draw legislative boundaries from the state legislatures and give them to nonpartisan, independent commissions, thus further taking away the power from elected lawmakers and putting it in the hands of unelected, unaccountable experts. These sorts of things, coupled with what I fear they would also do, they would enact another law, bring the District of Columbia into this family of states, making DC a state and perhaps Puerto Rico as a state, if they conclude that Puerto Rico and DC would be.

But there's no self-government. They're not capable of self-government.

Decades later, maybe a century or so later, sometime in the late 1800s, I believe, they decided that the Virginia portion of it wasn't necessary for the seat of national government. So that was given back to the state of Virginia.

And then what remains of it was the Maryland contribution. So the remedy here, if they want to be a state, if they want to have representation, voting representation in the House and two senators in the Senate, the way to do that is to give the Maryland portion of DC, or at least that portion of it, that's not deemed necessary to the independent functioning of the national seat of government, back to Maryland. This was part of a state from the beginning, and it should not be its own independent state, Of course.

It's interesting when you think about it, by the way, how can a party be at once revolutionary and institutional, but you know, progressives, that's what they do.

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Could Kamala Harris win?

If, by discounting her, they're assuming we don't have to work that hard to defeat her. Few things we know about Kamala Harris.

Kamala Harris, despite her gaffes that we've seen, when she's operating on script and she's got good, when she's got good staff preparing her material and she sticks to that material, she's actually pretty good. Now I disagree with almost everything she says.

I always think about this, the great mural,

I guess it's a fresco, technically, at the top of the Capitol Rotunda, the inside of the dome, you've got this beautiful painting by Constantino Brumidi, an Italian-born American immigrant, and it's called The Apotheosis of George Washington. It shows George Washington ascending into heaven, following his death, and he's surrounded by these 13 angels, each representing one of the original colonies. And he's surrounded, and then there are two other angels right next to him, one of which represents liberty and the other one represents the majesty of government or something like that. And he's being glorified and almost deified.

There is a very familiar ring, connection between that painting and what the media is trying to portray of Kamala Harris. In the last few days, you've seen the complete erasure of any reference to Kamala Harris being the Borders are, which didn't go well. There's been an effort, a sustained and fairly successful effort by the media to erase the fact that she was widely regarded as one of the most, if not the very most, progressive liberal member of the United States Senate. There's been this rebirth of Kamala Harris as this great warrior who is ready, willing, and able, at a moment's notice, to take the reins as America's chief executive. And they're scrubbing things she has said in the past, crazy statements she's made from defunding the police to aggressive, radical climate change policies, Green New Deal stuff.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. They're papering over all that. So yes, Kamala Harris is a threat because she's got this media industrial complex that's completely behind her.

What's she like?

When she is on script, she can be very emotionally compelling in her speech, but she is very, very liberal. And especially when she went off script in the Senate Judiciary Committee, you could tell that. You could tell. And oftentimes-.

She was one who never hesitated to take really aggressive and sometimes cheap potshots at President Trump's judicial nominees and to at times badly mischaracterize them, Donald Trump, his positions, and his personnel.

Yeah.

It's now a sacrament. And you've got people being encouraged now to share their stories. Women who've had abortions being encouraged to share their stories of why it was such a good thing that they had one, which seems really awful.

Yes.

government before the Supreme Court. And I was asking him some questions about his job, and he mentioned Roe versus Wade. And he said, do you know what that is? And I had just finished the fourth grade. And I said, no, not really.

What's that? And he explained it to me. And he said, what do you think of that? And I said, well, I'm not sure that I see this, as, it seems like a legislative decision rather than a judicial one. So that's one problem.

The other problem is, I don't see anything in the Constitution that makes this a federal issue. It seems like one that maybe ought to be ironed out more by the states. I don't think I'd ever see my dad more happy to know that one of his children had listened to his discussions about federalism and separation of powers and that sort of thing. But if that was evident to me...

This is a fundamentally legislative decision, because it's a policy choice, and it's a policy choice that is nowhere directed, required, or commanded by the Constitution. And because there's nothing about it that makes it federal, it is the kind of policy decision that needs to be made, with some exceptions, like for where federal funding is involved, or federal territory, federal personnel, or whatever, by state policy makers rather than national ones. And yet, when they undid Roe two years ago, you had all these people. One of my favorites was Prince Harry, of all people. Prince Harry came out with this statement, oh, this is bad for democracy.

And my response to that was, number one, it's rich being lectured on democracy by an actual prince, a literal lineal descendant, both through his mother and his father, of King George III. But secondly, there was nothing democratic about Roe versus Wade. It was one of the most anti-democratic things we've seen.

She had a fairly coherent legislative strategy. She would always do the thing that progressive Democrats really like.

So you're Mormon, part of the LDS church. I heard, joking before we went on, that you're really part of me, you're related to everybody, you know everybody. And so you've been an... Which is a religious minority in this country. And so you've been an advocate, I think, for religious liberties.

since you got there. Do you notice hostility toward Christianity increasing in Washington?

And weekly prayer breakfast brings together Republicans and Democrats of every political stripe you can imagine, and every religious stripe you can imagine. Those contexts, there's very much an atmosphere of respect. But I've started seeing a couple of things that are disturbing that I never thought I would see. just in the last few years. I remember during the Trump administration, we started to see, for the first time ever, a couple of my Democratic colleagues, including some on the Judiciary Committee, who would say things like this.

I'm not comfortable with this nominee because I fear that the dogma lives loudly within her. This was, I believe, Senator Dianne Feinstein, speaking of then-Circuit Judge nominee Amy Coney Barrett. She was afraid that she was too Catholic, and that because the Catholic dogma, as she put it, lives too loudly.

I thought, I'm not sure she meant, not sure she realized exactly how far she went in saying that. That's a very collegial way of doing it. I chimed in and I said, I need to set the record straight here. We need to be very careful when we talk about this. There are at least two, maybe three, maybe more provisions of the Constitution that I think caution us against and more appropriately prohibit us from imposing this kind of filter, from imposing a religious test, from discriminating against someone based on their free exercise of religion.

We need to not do that. You can find their religious beliefs unusual or you might find them to be candidates that you don't want to support for some other reason. But I don't think their religious beliefs should be on trial here. In fact, constitutionally, they can't. I thought at that point she would back down or at least clarify or narrow her statement.

Instead, she said, no, I meant what I said. I said what I meant. A lot of these nominees are just too extreme in their religious beliefs and I'm going to call them out. I'm going to oppose every one of them if I think their religious beliefs are too extreme.

Sometimes, those in our government don't necessarily reflect the religious beliefs and the religious sensitivities of the people as a whole. And that's one of the many reasons why I often distinguish, differentiate between America,

the country, and the United States government. They're two different things. It's one of the reasons why I bristle every time when anyone of either party refers to the President of the United States or to Congress as quote unquote. running the country. We don't run the country.

The President of the United States certainly doesn't run the country. The President of the United States happens to be the chief executive officer of the United States government and the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces. Runs a large organization with immense power, to be sure. I don't want to denigrate the office, but he doesn't run the country.

The country itself consists of the American people. He's not running the economy. That's why presidents shouldn't go too far in over-promising what they're going to do for the country. I'm going to create this many jobs or to claim credit for jobs that have been created. Presidents can't do that.

We've got to get back to a proper understanding of what government is and, more importantly, what it isn't. Government's not there to be your rich uncle, your best friend, your fun aunt. It's not there to make everything fair. No, government exists for the purpose of protecting life, liberty, and property. Making sure that we don't fall victim to those who would take that which belongs to us, or do us harm, either from the inside or the outside.

And within the federal government, it's even narrower. Federal government's job is to protect life, liberty, and property in specified, enumerated, limited ways. Immigration, bankruptcy laws, weights and measures, trademarks, copyrights, and patents, interstate and foreign trade or commerce, and so forth. We've gotten so far afield to that that we've tried to make government the all-powerful, omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent decider of all things. That is wrong.

That's always going to set that government up for failure, and it's always going to sow civil discord among the people. Because we've assigned to government attributes that are incompatible with the mortal human condition. Right.

Yes. Yes. And one of the hallmarks of a dysfunctional government and an illegitimate democracy, in my opinion, is a leadership class that doesn't represent the people who elected them. So I want to ask you about two specific cases, one in where you work and the other where you live. So first, where you work, the United States Senate.

It doesn't seem like the leadership of the Senate,

in some cases, Mitch McConnell specifically, doesn't seem like he shares the views of Republican voters, which is a huge legitimacy problem at sea. How did that happen?

really resonates with the words of Ronald Reagan and the objective of limited government and lower taxes and softer regulations. He'd say all of those things. But Mitch McConnell, who's been the Republican leader in the Senate now for a record period of time, going on- A couple centuries. 18 years. A couple centuries, at least, since the William Howard-.

So it does these along two axes, one vertical, which is federalism, the other horizontal, which is about separation of powers. But we've messed with both of those since the late 1930s. Then there's been a corresponding accumulation of power within Congress, within each house of Congress, and within each caucus, Republican and Democratic, of each house of Congress, where there's been an accumulation of power. Now, this is especially poignant and impactful in the United States Senate, where the whole thing was designed around the principle of equal representation among the states. It's the one constitutional amendment that is preemptively itself unconstitutional and therefore, impossible to bring about.

You cannot amend that part of the Constitution that allows and requires equal representation among the states. In theory, you could adopt a constitutional amendment giving every state a different number of representatives, but every state would have to be equally represented. And our Senate rules reflect that understanding. And our traditions, our precedents, reflect that.

There isn't a vast distinction under the Senate rules, as they're written and as they've historically been applied, between any other member and the current minority or majority leader. Under our precedents, even, the only technical distinction is what's called the right of first recognition. If multiple members are seeking recognition at the same time and one of them is the majority leader, then the majority leader gets recognized. But we've built this up just over the last couple or three decades, started maybe when LBJ was in the Senate. Prior to LBJ, the floor leader, as it was once called, I believe, but the majority minority leader of each party, wasn't that significant.

LBJ started building up the position, but it's really blossomed over the last 20 years or so, where they've now got all this power in each caucus built up behind the law firm of Schumer and McConnell, respectively. And so once that happens, I call it the firm, the law firm of Schumer, McConnell, Johnson and Jeffries. Once they get into that position, if they share this mindset, that accumulation of power within their conference, within Congress, is a good idea, they start to operate as their own constituency, as with the hive mind, particularly on spending bills. So the law firm of Schumer, McConnell, Johnson and Jeffries will get together and they'll figure out what's going to be in the next spending bill. They'll release it predictably, foreseeably, with only days, sometimes hours, before the expiration of a spending period.

It'll be a couple thousand pages long, contain hundreds of earmarks, often a lot of things.

that bear a faint but distinct resemblance to the home states of members of the firm. Special benefits for this or that state and industries that are popular there.

The firm then becomes the proxy, the leader of what I call the uniparty. They bring that to the floor. And what happens? These spending bills brought forward with too little time to amend them. They tell members, look, you got to take or leave this.

We don't have time to amend it because we've made sure of it. You can vote against it, but if you vote against it and it doesn't pass, the government's going to shut down. We will blame you for a shutdown. So, we recommend you just vote against it. Now, I've done this.

I've voted against it. I've voted against them basically every time they do this, and on occasion, it's resulted in a shutdown. I've been blamed for shutdowns. It's not pleasant. But this is what happens.

They become much more about the accumulated power and about maintaining the prerogatives of accumulated leadership.

What I found is it's not terribly unusual. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens far more often than you should.

I don't... You know, you're supposed to have 12 different spending bills, each according to a different function of government, so that not everything can be tied together, and we haven't done it that way in a long time. I said, that'd be ideal, but even if you can't do that, if you want to do it in one bill, then you've got to give us at least a few weeks, maybe a month or so, to debate it, discuss it, and, most importantly, in the Senate, the opportunity to amend it. Unlimited debate and amendments are supposed to be the norm, and historically were the norm in the Senate. That's collegial, and it's how our rules operate, and those rules reflect back what the Constitution contemplates.

And we were told, yeah, you'll have adequate opportunity to do this. You'll have... We operated with continuing resolutions, more or less for the first year of the Trump administration, just punting the ball forward every couple of months. Finally, it wasn't until, I think it was March 23rd, 2018, when we were finally at about that point where I knew we would have to pass something, but we had a few weeks left. But it was a Wednesday night, maybe 8.35, 8.36 p.m.

on a Wednesday night. We got this email from our majority leader, colleagues, Natasha's spending bill may come up sometime, and you ought to become familiar with it. Every alarm bell in me went off right then. I opened the thing up instantly, and my heart was pounding, thinking, okay, this is our big opportunity. We got to make sure that we're ready for this.

To my surprise, this was 2,232 pages long. So I immediately scrambled the jets within my office. I got every available legislative staffer on my team, pulling essentially all-nighters, because we wanted to make sure we were ready. We had no idea what the schedule would be. I really hoped that, as we had been promised, we'd have the opportunity to debate them, discuss them, offer amendments, pull out this or that earmark or special benefits for thoroughbred racehorses or distillers of Kentucky, bourbon or whatever it was.

Tucker, the House of Representatives passed that bill without a single amendment before lunch. the next day. The Senate, despite my protestations, passed it at about 3 in the morning later that night. It was too late right then to call President Trump. I didn't want to wake him up.

So I called him first thing in the morning to advise him to veto it, because this was quite contrary to what he thinks is good government. His staff, the White House staff at the time, screened out the call. They didn't give him the message until after he had already signed the bill. By that time, it was a Friday night. I got on the plane, Friday evening, was flying back to Utah, maybe half an hour into the flight.

43 Foxtrot, very back of the bus, flying back to Utah. It was the one part of the flight where everybody was quiet.

My secretary texted me saying, the President's trying to reach you. And I said, well, I wish he'd called me earlier, but I'm on a plane now, I obviously won't be able to talk to him. I'll be on the ground in maybe four hours. And next thing I knew, I saw these Delta flight attendants looking sort of disheveled, walking down the center aisle with a bright sort of neon orange headset with an equally bright neon cord that stretched the entire length of the fuselage of the plane. They walked all the way back to row 43,.

back of the plane where I was, and said, excuse me, we have the White House Situation Room on the phone. The President of the United States would like to speak with you. And he was looking at me like, who are you?

Listen, I had to sign it. Congress had left town. There was no other way around it. There would have been a shutdown. It would have caused all kinds of problems, and Congress wasn't there, Mike.

And I said, Mr. President, with all due respect, your staff is not shooting straight with you. They're lying to you. if they told you that. We were still in town.

We still could have done something. We still could have passed a short-term stopgap measure to keep us funded for another, I don't know, 72, 96 hours, or perhaps a week or two, as we debated and discussed it.

The connection wasn't stable and cut out. a short time later. They sent back a message, okay, he'll call you when you get on the ground. That'll never happen. He's busy.

Sure enough, as soon as I landed in Salt Lake City, I hadn't even gotten to the curb yet or to my car before I got a call from him and he wanted to talk. We talked for like an hour and I explained to him what had just happened to him and that it couldn't happen again. I said, if it does happen again, if your staff tricks you into this again and if what I now refer to as the firm does this to you again, I fear what it could do to our base. that expects something different out of us. I fear what could happen in the November 2018 midterm elections.

We could lose the majority. If we lose the majority, as sure as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, they're going to impeach you. I don't know what for, but they'll make something up. If that happens, it could really cause problems for you. Let's just not do this again.

Many of us do talk about it in private, and there's usually some type of general agreement, but it's followed up by sort of a cognitive dissonance.

A dog to its vomit. It refers to what happens when people return to that which is familiar, even though it's not necessarily a good thing and maybe a bad thing or a disgusting thing. You do it because it's there. It's the decision before you. And unless you decide in advance,

I don't always quote Rush lyrics in media interviews, but to quote Free Will by Rush, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

I will vote no every time. In fact, that was a campaign promise that I made from the first time I ran for the Senate, which is the first office I ever ran, the first public office I ever sought in 2010.. And I've stuck with that. If they don't give me the ability-.

Yes.

You have to remember, these do not read like a fast-paced novel. They're full of cross-references. And it takes an army of very well-trained people who know what they're doing to recognize where they're going in order to understand it. If you don't have the opportunity to at least meet with your staff and scrutinize this thing, and then have the opportunity to amend it, and then have the opportunity to improve it and get feedback from your constituents, you have no business voting for it. But here's what's happening.

Here's what is frustrating to me most about the firm and the uniparty that it generally manages. I've explained what the firm is. The uniparty, as I conceive of it, is that apparatus which manifests itself most obviously and frequently in the form of these massive omnibus spending bills. that blurs the distinction between the two parties in those areas, which is, again, most acutely observed in the spending bill context. The firm puts the bill together.

The four of them are the only ones who have really seen the whole thing, maybe a couple of appropriators from both houses and their staffs, but most of the members have seen nothing about it. But then, when it comes forward, something quite consistent usually happens.

Most or all Democrats will tend to vote for it. And then enough Republicans in both houses will join most or all Democrats in order to get it over the line, to make it look bipartisan, and in the Senate to make sure that it passes the 60-vote cloture standard. Remember, it takes a simple majority to pass legislation typically, but most legislation. in order to get to final passage on a simple majority, you first have to satisfy cloture. You have to bring debate to a close, which takes three-fifths or 60 votes to get there.

And so Republicans end up supplying the difference. So over and over and over again, even sometimes we're in the majority, you have spending bills that unite most or all Democrats, and then anywhere from 10 or 12 to maybe 19,, 20, as many as 25 or so Republicans will join with the Democrats.

Right. And no one notices that?

Does anyone think the military is stronger? now? It's got more funding than ever. Is it stronger? Of course, it's much weaker.

But under the British system, as Hamilton points out, in Federalist 69, the king, the chief executive, had the ability to take the country to war independently, unilaterally. The Constitution, by contrast, requires a declaration of war by Congress. Now, we never passed an AUMF or a declaration of war with regard to Yemen. They regard all kinds of other existing authorities, from the 01 and 02 AUMFs to inherent Article II power in the presidency. It's all unpersuasive, in my mind.

But to authorize all this. So I've been opposing this ever since 2015, because I believed that this was first and foremost about benefiting the military-industrial complex and that it would tend to be one of these entangling affairs that gradually escalated. And it's been exactly that. It's interesting. I've found some unlikely allies on that.

Here's a picture from a couple of years ago of me and Bernie Sanders arm in arm just after passing one of the first successful efforts at using the War Powers Resolution to get us uninvolved in the conflict in Yemen. It was vetoed and we weren't able to override the veto at the end of the day. But that's how we get involved. And we get involved by degrees. And they've redefined what war is to the point now where, in effect, the executive branch has the ability to get away with fighting war without anyone ever authorizing it or declaring it in Congress, because we've redefined what war is.

The military issues are to us kind of, it's our own microcosm of what progressives experience everywhere else. So for Republicans, we regard, Republicans, far too many have concluded that this is conservative, like making sure that we have a military strong enough and foreign policy dedicated enough to ensure that the world is safe for democracy generally.

I used to live in a country that had one. But the rules-based order advocates supported the theft of billions of dollars in personal property of the so-called Russian oligarchs, many of whom opposed Putin, had nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine, zero. And we sat back and allowed the Biden administration to steal all their stuff because they had Russian last names. That's not the rules-based order. That's theft.

That's starting to not be the case anymore. And that's very chilling, because we've all benefited from that to a very significant degree.

How did a state like Utah wind up with a governor and lieutenant governor who were just like open out of the closet, liberals? Like, what is that?

On the most basic level, they're conservative.

They are pro-religion, pro-God, pro-family, and that sort of thing. And so in that respect, they're able to portray themselves and, I think, genuinely view themselves as Utah's more conservative paper. But they ignore the fact that, outside of those areas where consistent with the Deseret News ownership, and also the ownership of the broadcast media entity that is also owned by the church, KSL, even though they are themselves defenders of religion, of families, and of some conservative values, they're run by the journalistic profession, the guild, so to speak. And the guild, as you know, journalists, by and large, are liberal. Now, there are a lot of professions that are like that.

My profession, I'm a lawyer, lawyers lean left also. But I'm not aware of any profession that leans more consistently to the left than journalists. And so these journalists maybe still see themselves as the more conservative paper, but in their heart, and in their writing, and in their broadcast messaging, they lean left, at least far to the left of where most of Utah's population goes.

radio personalities. But the print media statewide and the statewide broadcast entities, radio and television, lean pretty consistently to the left. And that has an impact. So too, we've got a lot of universities in Utah, about 10 of them, and they, like most academic institutions, have tended to lean left. Now, not as far left as what you see at Harvard and Princeton and, frankly, most universities in America, but definitely much farther left than they used to be and much farther left than most Utahns are.

Those things are having an effect and it's causing problems. It does cause me concern.

And it can be destroyed very, very quickly, very quickly. California, obviously the greatest state this country ever produced. And now it's in some ways the worst. And it happened in a generation of my lifetime. And I just don't think the people of Utah understand how quickly their state could become a slum.

California's become a slum. And that could happen because you're comfortable, you're prosperous, you're like, we've been too mean, like putting people in prison for rape, like maybe we shouldn't do that. And you don't understand that the second you allow disorder, slovenliness, debt, the whole thing can disappear in 10 years.

I mean, anytime you put it in the hands of unelected, unaccountable experts, the way the thing works, particularly in conservative state, it's going to move you further to the left. So it passed. It's one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of voter initiatives. We've got a Republican form of government. We shouldn't dilute it with these.

You've got legislatures for a reason. I think it's better to have them do it. But regardless, it's allowed under our state constitution. It passed. Well, our legislature, as well.

it needed to, modified what they did so as to keep the legislature more or less still in charge of the ultimate product. Our Utah Supreme Court, five members on it. All five of those members have been appointed by Republican governors and confirmed by our Utah State Senate, Republican dominant for many decades. All five of them recently agreed that the legislature's modification of the original.

redistricting reform was unconstitutional under our state constitution. This is how we get brought into a progressive system, bit by bit by bit, by the appeal of the allure of the scientific expertise and the use of the left's, Dutch words, like the partisan gerrymandering and the rigged legislative districts. That's the whole point. Since the founding, it's been understood that this is how it works. The legislative body alone can make this law.

There were some people who said, when California began to collapse, you guys need to build a wall on your Western border to keep the Californians out. You didn't do that. I think it was a mistake. But now that you've been flooded with Californians, is there any discussion of instituting a probationary period before you let them vote? You know, you come to our state from your failed state.

It's almost like we import criminals from Venezuela. You can't vote right away. Why do you allow Californians to vote right away when they come to Utah? Why not a cooling off period of a couple of decades?

And those who choose to go there, obviously there are exceptions, but by and large, those who have chosen to move to Utah from California recently, I believe, lean more conservative, even more conservative than the Utahans.

Moved to Bozeman.

I didn't even know until our wedding day that they were-.

I've read a bunch of his other books. But I read The Naked Communist, a book that he wrote, I think, first back in the 50s and then continued to update it periodically until around the time of his death. But he outlines the plan by which those who wanted a more progressive form of government were influenced by Marxist philosophy, generally, and wanted to inculcate a lot of that into the United States. I think we underestimate, as Americans, the extent to which we have been marinating in progressive messaging, which has elements of Marxist philosophy built into it, from the time we could crawl, from the time we entered kindergarten, whether you went to public school, private school, even many religious schools, and regardless of where you attended university, unless you went to Hillsdale or a couple of other places. More likely than not, you received a lot of conditioning with progressive ideology, so much so that we almost don't have adequate language as part of our lexicon to communicate the true purpose and function of government.

And I think that's how we end up with this mess, where we're $35 trillion in debt, adding to it at a rate of $2 trillion a year, with no plan to get out of it, because we've bought lock, stock, and barrel, this idea that the federal government's job is open-ended, it's there to right all the wrongs, to make everything fair, and that's all a big lie. And that's how we get stuck in it. But if we can reinvigorate this idea that the Constitution and the limited government it guarantees us is our birthright, and that liberty is good, that government expense, only at the expense of individual liberty, we'll be better off. We've got a real opportunity with this election. People love to say, every time this year's election is critically important.

I think this one is an especially important inflection point. In addition to the presidential election, where we've got one of the most liberal, progressive, and, frankly, lawless presidential administrations in US history, the Senate's on the line. I think Republicans have a real shot at recapturing the majority. That's happening at the same time when our current Senate Republican leader, who is in his 18th year, a world record in the Senate for either party, is going to be stepping down as leader. We'll have the chance to elect somebody else.

And I hope, I expect, I'm pushing, I'm messaging to my colleagues constantly, let's focus, before we get to the who, let's focus on the what. Let's talk about, what it is that we envision for this position. We want somebody who will foster and promote the kind of atmosphere in which individual members and the states they represent, their respective voters, can have a voice. Because that voice has been narrowed. It's been narrowed to a very small choke point.

And it has not inured to the benefit of the American people. And it's frankly, one of the reasons why we're $35 trillion in debt.