Michael Oslin and historians dissect the Declaration of Independence's evolution from a state secret to a commoditized symbol, revealing how Jefferson's deleted anti-slavery clauses reflected political compromises rather than moral indifference. The discussion contrasts the document's role as a non-governing "circuit breaker" against the Constitution's checks and balances, while callers debate Donald Trump's potential authoritarianism, cybersecurity funding cuts, and redistricting abuses in states like Virginia. Ultimately, the episode argues that America's enduring unity relies on the Declaration's spirit of self-governance, which transcends current partisan cycles and economic threats from rivals like China. [Automatically generated summary]
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America's 250th Anniversary00:03:26
Democracy Unfiltered.
America celebrates 250 years and C-SPAN is there to mark every moment from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the voices shaping our nation's future.
From famous speeches, Give me liberty or give me death to battle reenactments and visits to key historic sites across the country.
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Join us for remarkable coast-to-coast coverage, featuring key events from our past that make possible the unlimited opportunities of our future.
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America 250, over a year of historic moments.
C-SPAN, official media partner of America 250.
C-SPAN is brought to you by the cable, satellite, and streaming companies to provide C-SPAN as a public service.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, today with our guest, best-selling author Heather Cox Richardson.
She's a professor of history at Boston College and whose books span subjects from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Gilded Age, the American West, and the history of the Republican Party.
Her most recent book is the best-selling Democracy Awakening.
Her newsletter, Letters from an American, reaches over 6 million readers.
She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader, David Rubenstein.
Some people who've written about the Revolutionary War say the indispensable person was George Washington.
Had he not been the general, we probably would have lost the war and so forth.
Do you agree with that?
In terms of the ideology, the person he was, and his willingness to walk away from power, that was extraordinary.
I always tell my students America has lucked out a number of times.
And the first time it lucked out was with George Washington in that position of extraordinary power.
Walking away from the Army first, and that's just why that's in the rotunda of the Capitol, but then walking away from the presidency is an extraordinary thing.
Watch America's Book Club with Heather Cox Richardson today at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
Tonight, on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A, Supreme Court of the United States Justice Neil Gorsuch will discuss his children's book, Heroes of 1776, which highlights the signers of the Declaration of Independence and other lesser-known revolutionaries who risked their lives, liberty, and property in the fight for independence from the British.
The Brits were coming in on Philadelphia, and so Congress retreated to Baltimore.
And it needed to get out word desperately that the Declaration had been made.
It was a rallying cry for independence.
And you have to remember, things were dicey then.
Only about 40% would identify themselves as patriots.
There were loyalists.
There were people who wanted to stay out of it.
They needed to get the news out, and so they went to the local printer who would always publish printed by M.K. Goddard at the bottom of the newspaper.
Beyond The Forever War00:15:13
Why MK, for probably pretty obvious reasons, didn't want to disclose that it was a woman.
But when it came to the Declaration, she printed her whole name.
Printed by Mary Kay Goddard in Baltimore, Maryland.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch tonight at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q ⁇ A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome back to Washington Journal.
We now have a great political roundtable to talk about a whole lot of news that's been surfacing.
We're joined by Chris Lehman, who's the DC Bureau Chief for The Nation magazine, and then Tyler O'Neill, the senior editor for Daily Signal.
Good morning, gentlemen.
Thanks for being here.
Let's start off for people maybe unfamiliar with your outlets.
Just tell me what your outlet is, what type of work it does, what political affiliations it has.
I'll start with you, Chris.
Thank you, Tyler.
See, I've already done it.
Oh, you're good.
We'll alternate throughout.
That's right.
The Nation is, I think, the oldest continuously publishing liberal left publication in the country.
It was founded in 1865 by abolitionists.
And we are sort of pro-democracy, pro-left reform.
We're not water carriers for either of the major parties.
I think we're pretty equal in our criticisms, and we are committed to realizing the promise of democracy in America.
Tyler, tell us about the Daily Signal, because folks, depending on how big of news nerds they are, there's Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Daily Signal.
So tell us about the Signal.
Yeah, so the Daily Signal started as the news outlet of the Heritage Foundation.
So we're very much on the other side, the conservative perspective.
But now we are independent news outlet.
We have White House correspondent Elizabeth Mitchell.
Rob Blewy, I believe, has been on, I don't know if he's been on your show, but he's been on many C-SPAN shows for a long time.
And just out there fighting the fight for conservative, traditional American values.
So great roundtable to have.
The first hour focused almost exclusively on the war against Iran.
It's now day 71 since the conflict was started.
Let's kind of zoom out for a second and take a bird's eye view.
I want each of your takes on how the war is going.
We were asking callers, has it been worth it?
Let's start with you, Chris.
What's your take?
Well, my take is that this was pretty much a completely unprovoked war.
You know, the refrain that Iran has been on the verge of developing nuclear weapons has been constant throughout 30 plus years.
You can see superclips of Israeli Prime Minister Ben Yemen Metanyahu saying, raising this threat over and over again.
Last year, when the president, again, illegally bombed Iran, he claimed to have completely obliterated its nuclear capacity.
Now we're being told that we acted precipitately in this case because they were yet once again on the verge of developing nuclear weapons.
So, you know, there's that, you know, the kind of unprovoked aggressive action against the sovereignty of another nation.
There's the utter failure to consult with Congress, which does have in the Constitution the power to declare war.
And then operationally, you know, the Washington Post had a story this week that Iranian forces had actually done far greater damage to American targets than anyone in the White House has indicated based on satellite imagery.
So you have this sort of, you know, and for people who remember the Iraq war, who remember Vietnam, this pattern of Americans intervention taking place in an empirically Shaky,
to put things generously, rationale, and then a constant stream of disinformation about what's actually happening on the ground when you're putting American troops in harm's way, when you're doing colossal damage to Iranians and civilians.
So, yeah, I think the war is not going as well as the Trump administration is claiming that it is, and it's also a constitutional catastrophe.
Tyler, I want your take, and I want to kind of in the context of there's been a bit of a divide amongst conservatives over this conflict.
You've seen a large amount saying we trust the president on this and his strategy, but there have been some folks saying, well, wait a second, you campaigned on kind of no more forever wars, so how could you square that?
So what's your view 71 days in?
So I think the first thing to note is that this is not a forever war.
What we have here is the United States carrying out precision attacks against Iranian leaders right after you have this long train of abuses.
So I mean, not only, and we don't want to relitigate everything, but this is an Iranian regime that states death to America, death to Israel, that attacked our embassy the day that they were instituted as a government in 1979 in the revolution.
So to say that this regime is not at war with us would be false.
The other aspect here is this is coming after the October 7th attacks, the pogrom against Israel, which there have been good sources saying that Iran and Iran had been protecting Hamas, funding Hamas, funding many of its proxies in the region that engaged in these attacks for a very long time.
So again, the idea that President Trump woke up on the wrong side of the bed and said, oh, let's immediately go to war and created a forever war and reversed his own standing, his own long-standing policy against forever wars is just a wrong way of viewing the situation.
Now, there are a lot of good criticisms of the war.
It does seem as though the administration didn't fully take into account the damage that this would cause, leading Iran to take actions to close the Strait of Hormuz.
That said, President Trump has come out with his own policy of closing the Strait of Hormuz and kind of flipped the narrative on it.
The final thing I'd like to say in terms of starting this war is it happened right after Iran carried out one of the worst attacks on their own civilian, their own protesters in history.
And I think what that did, it gave two signals to President Trump and to the White House.
One of them is this regime is absolutely horrific for its own people.
This was in the context of extremely horrible economic situation where they thought the regime was tottering and weak.
And if they took out a few people at the top, it would lead to the sort of regime change that many people have wanted in Iran for a very long time.
Obviously, that did not happen.
President Trump came in, knocked out all of the country's major leadership in really a shock and awe campaign.
But of course, the IRGC is still there.
Some of the people who replaced those leaders have been more hardline.
Of course, the real question now is who is in control in Iran?
I don't think we have an answer to that.
I think a lot of whether this war will be worth it or not will depend on how Iran looks later on down the road.
I think that point's interesting because the Trump administration says almost on a daily basis on camera, we don't know necessarily who we're dealing with.
We're trying to figure out their new leadership structure.
So that's definitely a factor.
I mentioned this Marist poll in the last hour.
I wanted to put it back up on screen just for folks who might be joining now.
Marist published this poll on May 6th talking about the president's handling of Iran and the war.
You can see right there, 60% say they disapprove of the president's handling, 33% say they approve, 7% are unsure.
We're now day 71 of this conflict.
We have a couple callers, so I want to bring them on and see what they have to say to you guys.
Well, two independents actually calling in, which is interesting.
We have Gar from Georgia calling in.
Good morning, Gar.
You're on with us.
What do you have to say for our guests?
Good morning, and happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there.
Amen.
And the thing I have to say, we've been at war two out of three years since World War II.
And President Dwight Eisenhower coined the phrase military-industrial complex.
He warned us not to become one.
So my question is: what we're going through right now, we've been going through that for the last, what, since World War II, and we're celebrating our 250-year anniversary.
We've been in over 75 wars.
How come journalists never talk about that?
Thank you.
Chris, let's go to you with that.
Thanks to the caller.
But let's put it in this bit broader context of the U.S.'s role in foreign conflicts, what the president had campaigned on, and kind of how the public might be reacting to another war in the Middle East.
Yeah, I think the caller makes a really good point.
When we talk about, you know, forever wars, it's a sort of catchphrase that came out of the Iraq fiasco and Afghanistan as well.
But in point of fact, the United States, especially since the rise of the Cold War, has a long and often very ugly and undemocratic history of propping up regimes as client regimes.
So one of the ironies, of course, about the Iran situation is that the United States deposed its democratically elected leader and put the Shah in power.
So when you talk about things like the heated death to America rhetoric, it's not, yes.
I mean, first of all, the Iranian regime is horrible.
And Tyler is right that they repress dissidents.
They're a fundamentalist democracy.
Rights of women are.
And that's something you hear a lot of Democrats on the Hill say.
They say, we're not advocating for Iran.
I don't think anyone is.
You know, in our political tradition, it is anathema.
But the question is, do you then take out the leadership of countries, you know, and it's part of the problem now is we don't know what the objectives of this war are.
You know, ostensibly, it's to take out the Iranian nuclear capability.
But as I said, you know, that's been this kind of where's Waldo theme in American diplomacy for the last 35 years.
So, you know, I do think the, you know, and I obviously share the critique that some on the right have voiced against the specter of this as another forever war.
I Tyler says, no, it's not a forever war, but I think it's worth revisiting this alongside the Iraq experience where we instantly pronounced regime change.
We, you know, tried to set up a sort of proxy government there.
There was a decade-plus-long rebellion of heightened Islamic fundamentalist resistance.
Iran already has that, right?
So we are tampering with really volatile forces in a country where we've also dismissed a lot of the Iranian experts and the American government.
So one reason we don't know who's in charge is our people who had a grasp of these issues are gone.
And you're referring to various intelligence folks and all of that.
Right.
So we are in this situation which is very familiar again, not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but going back to Vietnam, going back to interventions in Central America where we're blindly sort of moving pieces on the global chessboard around without a clear identified agenda, without a clear sense.
We are in day 71.
When we started bombing, Trump said it would be wrapped up in a week or two.
So, and again, we don't know what is going to be the sort of inflection point because there hasn't been any effort to build a coalition behind us to marsha, as the mayor's poll shows.
American public opinion is very strongly against this war very early on, which you haven't seen in past recent conflicts.
And I think it's a function of all this chaos.
Tyler, let's build off of what Chris was mentioning.
But I think what's been striking, even some callers this morning have brought up Cuba because the President and Secretary of State Rubio have alluded to the fact that the U.S. might try to make some type of move in Cuba next.
We obviously started this year with Venezuela.
And the President has talked about the operation to remove Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela and how he loved that it was basically one day in and out and Maduro was brought to U.S. soil and was able to kind of face consequences there.
How do you square the differences with Iran that it's now day 71 and whether there's skepticism or do you think because it is a different conflict that people can't compare Venezuela to it and if they're worried about Cuba, they have to realize these are separate?
When Venezuela situation is very, you know, it has been striking to hear many people say that we're looking for a Venezuela model because we still don't really know what's happening in Venezuela.
Maduro is facing criminal charges here in the United States.
Del Codriguez has apparently really been engaging in changes in Venezuela to open things up.
You have protests there that would have been utterly silenced and quashed immediately under the previous government.
So we don't know to what degree Del Codriguez has achieved a regime change, but things are looking up in Venezuela.
Responsibility As A Superpower00:15:39
We don't know what Cuba would look like.
I mean, I think President Trump, and the reason why I say it's not a forever war, is because the way that Trump engaged it, we didn't come in with a military, with an army, and immediately take over.
We were trying to, from what I understand, and of course, nobody knows the mind of President Trump, and sometimes I'm not even sure he knows his mind, but it seems he thought if you take out the top leadership, you know, he might have been thinking a Del Codriguez model.
You take out the top leadership.
And for people in my vice president in Venezuela and then was viewed as a Maduro ally, but very quickly kind of flipped and was like, hey, U.S., I'll cooperate with you.
And that's why she's still in her position.
Thank you.
Yes.
So Del Codriguez has achieved to some degree a realignment of Venezuelan policies with alongside the United States in a view that, you know, I'm not sure I would have predicted that it would be this strong, but it definitely seems like a pretty strong win for the White House.
When we're looking at Iran, I think President Trump may, I'm not sure where things didn't match.
We have, I mean, horrible economic conditions, a huge protest that the Iranian regime represses brutally, and then he comes in and wipes out the top leadership.
You think this would be a situation ripe for regime change.
Now, President Trump has not said regime change was the goal.
The Israelis appear to very much have wanted regime change.
They were encouraging the Iranian people to rise up.
There's talk of bringing back Pahlavi, although I know he's not exactly a big fan of trying to take power again for understandable reasons.
Who's been here in the U.S. for a long time?
Yeah, so there's been some rising, waning hopes of a real change in Iran.
But I think the IRGC's iron grip on things, their somewhat decentralized structure, but also very much following the old path.
Even if the leaders that are, the other political leaders now really wanted to change the regime, I'm not entirely sure that they can.
And that's a really, I mean, you got to hand it to the Iranian regime when they put it together to make it almost indestructible is the wrong word, but to create these safeguards to preserve their radical ideology in governmental authority.
It's a little bit terrifying looking at it from that perspective.
And yeah, I'm not sure where things go.
I think there have been some positive signs recently, but President Trump does not want to be in Iran forever.
I think we all know that.
And the American people don't want us to be in Iran forever.
There are some things reopening the Strait of Hormuz is sort of the black box here.
And they are in a much stronger strategic position.
The sort of train of assumptions you just described don't include Iran's own agency.
And you see that with the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz.
There was clearly no anticipation on our part that Iran would act to close the Strait.
And it gives them this enormous leverage.
Which is something the White House has pushed back on.
They say, of course, they knew that the Strait of Hormuz would get involved in this and be kind of in the mix of everything.
But people have been critical because of the toll on gas prices.
Let's hear from another caller.
Brent is calling in from Charleston, West Virginia on the Republican line.
Good morning, Brent.
You're on with our guests.
Good morning, gentlemen.
Thank you for taking my call.
Thank you.
Go for it.
I am if the polls are correct, I'm very disappointed in the majority of the American people.
I think this nation had a right to institute regime change in Iran the day after they seized control of our embassy in 1979 and took hostages,
not to mention the long, almost 50-year record of violations and murder and kidnappings and torture and God knows what other kind of atrocities this regime has committed or sponsored around the world against all citizens of the world, but also primarily against American citizens.
I mean, my goodness, if we're going to claim the mantle of superpower, there are responsibilities that go along with that.
And a nation that tortures its own people, that imposes this cult-like version of a religion and seeks to convert or kill the entire world is a menace.
And the other Arab nations, by the way, in the region are on our side.
They want to go farther than the Americans because they're getting tired of having bombs lobbed into their territories.
And we need to listen to the people in the region, all of whom have turned their backs on the regime in Tehran.
And we need to be willing to fight for something larger than ourselves.
And being the world's superpower does not involve just sitting around waiting on someone to attack us before we take action.
We have a responsibility to bring stability and peace to regions where there are direct threats to our interest and look no further than the Strait of Hormuz.
We've got oil prices going nuts around the world because Iran has taken an international waterway and claimed ownership of it with absolutely no authority whatsoever.
Who is going to enforce that?
Certainly not any of the Arab countries.
That involves a major war that probably involves multinational.
It's probably a multinational alliance, and it probably goes on for years at the expense of millions of lives.
So the United States, we have a responsibility.
We can't have all the rights and privileges that come with being a superpower and say, well, we don't want any of the responsibility.
It doesn't work that way.
With rights, with status, with prestige, comes necessarily responsibility.
And we have that responsibility as the world's most powerful nation.
I don't understand what there is to oppose here.
Iran is a classic villain.
I mean, you couldn't have written in a movie script a better international villain than Iran.
These people look the part, they play the part, they act the part, they say the part.
And my goodness, where yet would we be struck?
Brent, thank you for weighing in.
He touched on a lot there.
And Tyler, I want to ask you about it.
I also want to put on screen, he mentioned the polling, this Marist poll that came out just a couple of days ago, asked about the President's job approval, especially when it comes in the context of the war and how he's handling things overall.
And it's striking.
59% disapprove, 37% approve.
But disapproval among Republicans is at 18%, and that's up about six points since a Marist poll in March.
So as Brent was outlining, he outlined a pretty compelling argument on behalf of the President's supporters about why this war was necessary and about the U.S.'s role on the stage.
Do you think the administration is messaging effectively in the way that he outlined?
Well, the way he outlined was extremely aggressive, I think in a way that the administration, at least the president, does not believe.
I mean, when you look at America's standing in the world, yes, to some degree we are the world's superpower.
We have the largest military.
We have the ability to engage in things.
I think one of the things that isn't appreciated enough is how much the United States has secured global waterways and freedom of navigation from an old system that relied a lot on piracy, that relied a lot on countries charging their own.
The idea of Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz echoes an ugly history that the United States has largely put behind us.
The thing is, we live in this weird in but not of sort of understanding.
The United States does not want to be a global, you know, we don't want to be the policeman of the world.
I think which the president said repeatedly, especially at his campaign rallies.
Well, and this is the other aspect.
We see this over and over again.
A president will campaign.
I mean, I think of Obama.
I think of Trump.
I think of many presidents.
And one of the biggest examples of this is Woodrow Wilson, who campaigned and said, we are going to keep America out of World War I.
And then, lo and behold, what happens a few years later, the United States joins the war.
And part of it is the crooked timber of humanity where it's hard for us not to engage when we have the opportunity.
And part of it also is noble.
I think President Trump realizes that he has immense power and he sees threats that we don't see.
So when you have a president, and I think this is probably true of Obama too, you have a president who sees an opportunity to engage in a small precision strike to take out a terrorist or to take out what he thinks is an entire regime.
And he thinks he can do it with minimal cost.
And what often unfortunately ends up happening is because of other things in the world, it isn't as easy as the president thinks it is.
The threat is real.
The threat is worse probably than those of us who are normal civilians understand.
And so I think there's an understandable gap, a very big knowledge gap between the president of the United States and the people who are deciding who the next president is.
And that's one of the reasons you get this mismatch.
I mean, it's funny to hear the first caller say, we've been at war every year except two since World War II.
And the second caller say, well, of course, we are the world's hegemon.
And I think the American people are stuck between these two things because most of those wars have not been, have not been authorized by Congress, have not been, and many of them are limited.
Many of them arguably don't fall under the scope of the War Powers Act.
And there's a question about whether that's constitutional.
But there is this both sides situation where we want, we have the ability and we want to make the world better, safe for democracy, in the words of Woodrow Wilson.
Or we want to help.
And I think we also don't want to.
And there is a tension there that we can't escape.
Chris, let's build on that because I played a short time ago as we were approaching 8 o'clock sound from former Vice President Kamala Harris speaking in Nevada about the conflict.
And she talked about it in the context of, you know, the world is seeing that the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner.
And in this idea of us being kind of the world's policemen, she said that's a bad thing.
As you look at this polling that we're talking about, and there are Republicans who are expressing a bit more frustration with the president's handling of this, where do you think that balance that Tyler was talking about stands for Democrats right now?
Should they, are they right to jump on the, yes, we are the world's superpower and we have to play a role, or is it look how the president got us into another conflict we didn't want?
Well, as Tyler was saying, you know, these dichotomies are often kind of unsatisfactory.
A lesser two of two eases.
Right, and I would, you know, I'm sort of increasingly as we live through this time of executive power on steroids.
I am, you know, much more than I ever thought because I'm as cynical as the next person about how Congress operates.
But I think Congress is losing incredible standing and leverage in the separation of powers.
And you're seeing this right now.
Yes, Tyler is right that a lot of these conflicts are opportunistically defined by the executive branch as conflicts or police actions.
And that's to avoid having to have Congress weigh in.
But I think we are aspirationally a democracy and a republic.
And we, I think, you know, the decision to go to war is one of the most fraught that can face our government.
It involves the sacrifice of American blood and treasure on a massive scale.
And it's always a bigger scale than everyone anticipates.
I think the big lesson to learn from our tour as self-described global policemen is the lesson of blowback.
We've seen it again and again from, I mentioned the original regime chain, which we engineered in Iran in 1953.
We saw it in Guatemala, El Salvador, all of these theaters of action, Greece, I could go on and on.
Vietnam, obviously, in Cambodia and Laos.
These are all places where we decided, okay, we're going to take charge.
And we see a threat to the world order on the schema of the Cold War.
We see a threat to a terrorist threat in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, which then suddenly became democracy promotion under George W. Bush, which is good luck with that pal.
So again, part of the problem is we have this executive, and I think it's acute now, where, yes, they're saying we have knowledge that no one else has, but in a democratic government, it's the obligation of the executive to go to the public and say, we have this knowledge, here are the costs.
Here is what we anticipate will happen.
And then the public either goes along or it doesn't.
Covering Gaza And Iran00:04:50
We're now seeing that it doesn't because no element of that case has been made.
Let's go back to the public.
We have John calling in on the independent line from Westchester, Pennsylvania.
Good morning, John.
You're on with our guests.
Hey, Taylor, thanks for letting me on.
I appreciate your show.
You do a great job.
You let people speak.
Go for it.
Yeah, sure, of course.
Yeah, so I mean, I just have kind of two rhetorical questions, sort of, or comments, and I guess and then actual questions for the guests.
But I guess when does a non-forever war become a forever war?
I mean, you call our Tyler, you call our strikes precise, but what about the Tomahawk missile that Iran stole from us and then dropped them to their all-girls school?
Yeah, that's just something for folks to think about.
But I just kind of wanted to ask you about, Tyler, how much the Daily Signal has covered the amount of wounded troops in Epic Fury.
I mean, the DOD seems to have a policy of obfuscation.
We haven't heard about these, that jet fuel leak for three months.
It seems that Heg Seth and Donald Trump like to withhold negative information from the media.
And what do you guys do to try to report on scoops that kind of portray this administration negatively or find out information that might be being hidden?
I mean, do you guys have standards for ratios on negative or adverse articles versus positive articles for your publication slant?
And then for both guests, I really just kind of wondered both your thoughts on the Israeli slaughter of journalists in Gaza and the Middle East in general.
I mean, do you guys care about journalists and journalism or do you just care about your jobs?
All right.
Thanks, John.
There's two questions there.
So Tyler, I'll let you answer first about his question about the Daily Signal and the reporting.
Yeah.
So I, my particular beat, there have been times when I've wanted to cover Iran, but I'm more focused on domestic issues.
So as for, unfortunately, we just lost our national security correspondent.
So we're in a transition on that coverage.
We do generally give the administration positive coverage because they do things that align with what we believe.
But when it comes to issues like this, and I think our White House correspondent, Elizabeth Mitchell, has been doing a fantastic job of showing the divisions inside the White House and talking about the negative repercussions of some things regarding AI policy.
She's been developing really unique sources on that issue and navigating that issue is extremely complicated.
The administration is about to do an AI executive order and doesn't seem to know exactly which direction they're going to take it.
Which is notable because AI has a big impact on everything.
It's huge.
They're being warm naked, right?
Yeah.
Before I go to you, Chris, just to pull up, for folks who might not know, because John referenced just the number of casualties and what the military has been reporting, the Pentagon does have a formal website where you could track, it's called the Defense Casualty Analysis System for Operation Epic Fury.
And right now, this is the wounded in action section, 403 total.
And then there's a deaths tab, and we're still at 13 U.S. service members who have been killed in this conflict, sadly.
Chris, I guess, do you want to respond to what he was saying about journalists at large and how they factor into this conflict?
Yes.
Actually, the nation has been really good on chronicling the slaughter of journalists in Gaza.
It is, I agree with the caller.
It's a grievously undercovered story within American media generally.
And we have been very good.
I'm just going to blow our horn here.
We've been a great source of critical coverage of the Gaza war, which is now under the cover of the Iran conflict.
Israel is now attacking Lebanon.
It's all part of the Netanyahu Netanyahu.
It's basically waging war so he can stay out of jail.
So yeah, we are, I am very proud of our Gaza coverage, including our coverage of the war on journalists, what has happened to journalists in the Gaza theater of conflict is unconscionable.
Tyler, to build off of what Chris was just saying about the Israeli prime minister, I'm curious from your perspective, from the Daily Signal's perspective, what have you been observing as it relates to Americans' feelings about Israel in this conflict?
Gerrymandering And Reform00:15:08
Because we get calls all the time of people saying, both Democrat and Republican, Israel led us into this war.
The President Trump is doing the prime minister's bidding in this.
There appears to be frustration with that.
Yeah, I think there is growing frustration with that.
I think I don't think it's justified.
President Trump made his own decisions with this war, and Iran is America's implacable foe as well as Israel's.
But yes, there is a sense that, and I like to compare Israel right now, unfortunately in my mind, but to the position that Prussia had in the late 1800s, early 1900s, before World War I.
And it's easy for us on this side of history, you know, we saw the Nazis, we saw, you know, and then of course it's also underappreciated how much America demonized the Germans in World War I, where,
you know, you had war socialism and Woodrow Wilson comparing German people to Huns and like when Germans were a sizable minority of the United States population at the time.
I mean, it's but in any case, in Prussia, Prussia united the German Empire, and they had this series of wars where, and this was a situation where the German states were all disparate.
They were not united, and a lot of them wanted to unite.
This was the century of nationalism and industrialism and revolution.
And so there were these big, and Prussia came in, and Prussia was a small kingdom at the time, but they had been growing over the course of a few hundred years.
And they took up the mantle and united Germany and achieved something that people did not think was very possible.
But they were extremely militaristic, they were very powerful, they were very ideological, and they alienated a lot of other countries by uniting Germany in the way that they did.
And so they had this very big achievement that later led to hostility from the other countries around them.
And I think one of the dangers that Israel faces right now is that Israel has been achieving great successes and in general in a position that I think is responding to longstanding attacks from the other side.
But they've gone to a degree that I think is alienating people.
And this is not wise for them.
Let's hear from Chris, another Chris, calling in from Boston, Massachusetts on the Democratic line.
Good morning, Chris.
You're on with a fellow Chris.
And Tyler, what do you have to say?
Oh, thanks.
Good morning.
Yeah, once upon a time, not so long ago, attacking another country without a United Nations Security Council Chapter 7 resolution was a war crime.
As George Bush Jr. found out in 2011 when he was advised not to travel to Switzerland lest he wind up in the International Criminal Court at The Hague for crimes committed in Iraq.
Maybe Trump and his bunch of sycophants might find it problematic for future overseas travel.
Do you have any comment?
Thanks a lot.
Thanks, Chris.
Chris, do you want to take that?
Well, I won't weigh in on the international tribunal piece.
I think that's above my pay grade generally.
But as I said earlier, yeah, this war is illegal just in American terms.
There was no effort.
And it is striking.
I've been making a lot of disparaging analogies with the Iraq war, but one thing that George W. Bush did prior to the escalation of the conflict was to assemble a UN vote.
It was based on false evidence.
It was a largely farcical coalition of the willing.
But we're now in a, you know, and again, I go back to the consolidation of executive power.
We're now at a moment in our political history where the presidency feels no compunction to do any of that.
And again, I think the blowback you're seeing in the polling is a reflection of that.
There isn't any effort to articulate a coherent war aim, let alone a case for, you know, saying to other countries, here's why it's in your interest to join up.
Here's what we'll do for you.
We're seeing quite the opposite, obviously, with our alliance partners in NATO are trying to get as far away from this conflict as possible.
I'm going to use this as an opportunity to pivot to another topic I wanted to talk to you both about, which is we talk about Congress's role in this or their inaction in all of this.
There's a lot of redistricting news happening kind of every day, and it's a bit dizzying.
And I wanted to put up, we have one piece from the Daily Signal and one piece from the nation.
The Daily Signal has this headline from a couple of days ago.
Trump sends warning to rhinos, Republican in name only, via the Indiana State Senate.
And that has to do with primary campaigns where the president endorsed multiple candidates to run against Republican incumbent state legislators because they did not agree to redistrict.
And then I want to put up this piece from The Nation that talks about the headline is, the GOP's Jim Crow gerrymander rips up Memphis and America's civil rights legacy.
Because in Tennessee, we saw over the last couple of days, the legislature there move to redraw their congressional map and basically do away with one Democratic-leaning district.
So, Tyler, I'll start with you.
Let's talk about Indiana because it was notable the president was, in essence, going to political war against his own party because these legislators did not agree on redistricting there.
What stood out to you about that?
Yeah, I thought President Trump was perhaps being a little overly aggressive at the time.
And then I see what happens in Virginia.
And I almost think, well, maybe he wasn't aggressive enough.
You see, and I think the main aspect we need to get to with redistricting, this has been a political decision in state legislatures for a very long time.
I mean, gerrymander dates back to near the beginning of the beginning of our country.
And, you know, there are those of us who would like in an ideal world to see our congressional districts based merely on simple populations, cities, like, you know, let's make it simple.
Let's have our maps not be convoluted.
And at the same time, we have this established precedent where state legislatures use gerrymandering for political partisan advantage.
And so one of the things that, you know, when President Trump started this push, this came after news that the Census Bureau had undercounted Republican states and overcounted Democratic states.
And it also came in the context of another court-mandated redistricting in Texas.
And this is, you know, when these court rulings came down, there was a cockamame reading of the civil rights or of the Voting Rights Act that essentially said we should engage in discrimination on the basis of race by saying,
all right, let's find particularly majority-minority districts and give voting power based on people's, based on your racial identity.
And you're referring to Section 2, the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court just ruled in, which goes into the conversation in Memphis and in Tennessee.
The Democratic incumbent there, Steve Cohen, who is not black but represents a majority black district, he's been very critical saying this basically takes away representation for this primarily black community, and this is Republicans just carving it up and doing what they want.
What stands out to you both in the context of what we saw in Indiana, but also what we saw in Tennessee and what we're seeing elsewhere.
Virginia, their state Supreme Court just ruled?
Yeah, there's a whole I can go on for quite a while.
I think it's important first to start with the fact that we are seeing this sort of doom loop of redistricting in the middle of a census cycle, what has historically happened.
And all of these are traditions that, as we're seeing now, can readily be overthrown, including the history that state legislatures get to draw up congressional districts for political reasons.
So right now, and I would take, not surprisingly, a more jaundiced view of what's been happening out of Tyler, that I don't think President Trump is motivated by sort of high-minded concerns about the misapplication of the Voting Rights Act.
I think he is desperate about the standing of the Republican Party coming into the midterm cycle.
Right now, the majority they have in Congress is functionally, I think, a four-seat majority.
The way that national polling is breaking strongly against Republicans for the midterm cycle.
So what we see is an object lesson in what happens in flavian democracies, that power accrues not to the people who win the votes, but to the people who count the votes.
So in all of these districts or all of these states, we've seen Republican legislatures draw up heavily lopsided districts to their advantage.
We've seen in California, that that started off this sort of recursive war.
Yeah, the back and forth.
Governor Newsome in California has said Democrats need to fight fire with fire.
Yeah, I mean, they're in this, I mean, and I want to sort of pan back and say this is terrible for our democracy, you know, just across the board when we're in this position of everyone is opportunistically drawing up new maps.
You know, I think we have to start thinking differently about how we draw up congressional districts, what representation really means.
We need reforms like proportional representation where you don't have, where you can have multiple members from a district of a certain population and not this first pass-the-post winner-take-all model of representation, because this is where it leads under conditions of democratic decline.
And we really need aggressively, and this is one of the things I beat up the Democrats for, is they don't have a plan.
You know, right now they're doing this rear guard battle.
What happens with the 2030 census, which everyone foresees will produce big population gains in, quote, red states.
And, you know, and that will set off a new wave of redistricting.
This all goes back to 2010, by the way, when very smart Republican operatives decided to use 2010 census to do this massive nationwide campaign to gerrymander in Republican favors, and it bore instant fruit.
But again, when you are talking about, and we saw in the wake of the Supreme Court's College decision, it's not just Memphis, it's Louisiana has called off an election in process to start to redraw districts.
Whatever you call that, that's not democracy.
And I just want to quickly reference the racial representation thing, which Tyler mentioned.
What often happens when the right invokes this model of, you know, we have to judge everyone by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
There's an 80-year history under which African Americans had no ballot access whatsoever.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly acted and included in the language of the Khaled decision as though we have somehow magically evolved beyond that point.
It is simply not true.
And I'm not, again, I'm not a fan of gerrymandering in general, and I do think racial gerrymandering can be risky.
But I think there has to be some baseline acknowledgement that the Voting Rights Act was enacted for a reason.
Yes.
And the reason is to secure real conditions in one man, one vote, when we just paid rhetorical lip service to it and denied the franchise to a vast segment of our population.
That's true.
And that's why the Voting Rights Act got rid of things like poll taxes.
It got rid of...
And it is an ignominious history.
The thing that the Voting Rights Act did not do in the plain text of the Voting Rights Act is say that districts must be drawn to maximize power of racial minorities.
That's not what it did.
And that's why the Supreme Court rightly ruled.
And by the way, the Supreme Court was not the first to rule against majority-minority districts.
It was Virginia that pushed the two, you know this, like the two rate, the two majority-minority districts that they got rid of in pursuit of Democratic partisan advantage.
So I would even partially agree with you here that racial gerrymandering is short-sighted in conditions of the South, particularly because you do have, you see it in the existing Tennessee map, you see it in Georgia, you see it in lots of states.
You have a couple of majority-minority districts, and then they're surrounded by a sea of deeply red white suburban districts.
So again, I'm not a fan of gerrymandering across the board.
Memes Distraction Politics00:16:03
I think we have to think of other fundamental reforms to get to a point.
But I also recognize, like, you know, you sort of go to war with the armies you have.
And when we had the Voting Rights Act, that was a huge struggle and a huge fight.
And I think we need to honor, yes, what is not necessarily in the language of the Act, but the actual objectives of the Act, which is to secure some, you know, redress of a shameful history.
Sadly, I have to cut this off, but I open a can of worms with this topic.
I do want to close with both the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post today talk about this.
There's headlines right on screen.
New York Times, two rulings give GOP some hope about midterms, 10 days, 10 more seats.
And then the Washington Post midterm house math is upended.
Democrats now face a steeper climb.
There's so much more we could talk about, so you guys will have to come back.
But this roundtable has been the Nation Magazine's Washington Bureau Chief Chris Lehman and the Daily Signal senior editor Tyler O'Neill.
Gentlemen, thanks so much.
Thank you for having us, Taylor.
And for those who have been waiting on the line, stick around because after the break, we're going to return to Open Forum.
We would love to hear from you.
As a reminder, there are lines for Democrats, Republicans, Independents.
You can see the phone numbers up on your screen.
A lot to talk about.
Redistricting, the war, so much more.
So call in and we'll hear from you when we come back.
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Welcome back to Washington Journal.
We've been cramming a lot into these few hours, and we're back to Open Forum.
As a reminder, we'd love to hear from you.
Here are the numbers to call in.
Democrats 202-748-8000.
Republicans 202-748-8001.
And Independents 202-748-8002.
Could also text in at 202-748-8003.
We've talked a lot about the war against Iran and the impacts here at home.
We just had an interesting discussion with our roundtable about redistricting and how it's impacting the balance of power in Congress.
We have a few callers who have been patiently waiting.
So let's go to Mariah now from Houston, Texas on the Democratic line.
Good morning.
You're on with us.
Hi.
Good morning.
Hey there, Mariah.
You're on.
What would you like to say?
Yes.
I probably called in Happy Mother's Day first, all of the mothers.
But I have called in, I think, two times previously over the last four months.
And I'm calling today just to remind the United States of the name, United States.
Not everyone is a Republican.
Not everyone is a Democrat.
Not everyone is an Independent.
But we are all part of the United States.
And I have lived 72 years, and I have never, in those years, I have not seen this country as divided as it is now.
We take our sides, whether right or wrong, and we will go down with the ship.
And I'm curious, Mariah, if you don't mind me interjecting, I'm curious.
And you let into my next question saying how long you've been around.
What do you think has been one of the changes for that, the causations for more division from your perspective?
To be perfectly honest, Donald Trump becoming president, as I stated, I've lived 70 years.
There's always been prejudice.
There's always been people that think that there's always been the millionaires, the billionaires.
There's always been the lower class or poor people.
But it used to be a middle class.
Now, if you're a billionaire, there are certain rights that you have.
If you're poor or middle class, those rights are being taken away.
All right, Mariah.
Thank you for winning in and thanks for calling in the last few months.
Let's go now to Joan calling in from New Jersey on the independent line.
Good morning, Joan.
You're on and it's open forum.
What's on your mind?
Good morning, and thank you for having this forum for us because it's so needed now.
There's just so much going on.
I feel that we're so distracted and overwhelmed and it's just a lot.
And we really need the press to stay on top of a lot of the things and not go away and take the bait for the distraction.
So what I want to talk about more now is the gutting of the voting rights for black people in America.
If black people are expected to pay taxes, then we should have representation.
No taxation without representation.
And if we're not going to be represented in the halls of Congress and in the halls of the Senate, then we should boycott paying taxes in this country because that's what this country is about.
Also, the Republican Party is no longer the Republican Party.
I wish you guys would stop calling it the Republican Party because I'm an independent and I would vote Republican if it made sense.
There's no more Republican Party.
There's a party that is fueling hate and using that hate to divide this country.
And they have given racism, they've given people permission to be racist.
When you have Laura Luna, a white Jewish woman, call a black woman a not-beheaded whatever in plain sight, and that is okay and acceptable, and there is no outrage about that.
Then, where are we going then that we can openly call black people derogatory names and consistently chip away of our rights?
Basically, what I'm seeing is white America does not want us to be part of this society.
And so, then where do we go?
Because we came here with, we didn't come here because we wanted to come here, but we're here now, and we've helped build this country, and we're a part of this country.
So, the Stephen Millers and the Trumps and all those people who think this country belongs to them, this country does not belong to you, belongs to everybody who has paid their taxes.
And we have to figure out and have helped contribute to this country.
So, where do we go?
Because we have to exist here because we don't have no place else to go.
So, what's the plan?
Joan, thanks for weighing in.
I wanted to pull up, building off of the conversation about the Voting Rights Act and the Supreme Court's decision.
This is a New York Times headline.
It says, Alabama asks the Supreme Court to allow it to use a new voting map.
State officials urged the justices to allow them to jettison Alabama's congressional district map, citing the Supreme Court's recent decision that dealt a blow to the Voting Rights Act.
And I think this is part of the broader conversation about racial representation that we were having with our roundtable and that you just raised.
It said officials in Alabama asked the Supreme Court on Friday to clear the way for the state to use a new voting map for the midterm elections, hoping for permission to use districts that would boost Republican chances of flipping at least one Democratic-held seat.
Later on, it says Alabama's current map, which was drawn to conform to the Voting Rights Act as it had been interpreted before the court's recent ruling, currently has two districts with a majority of black voters.
Both are held by Democrats.
So, that's part of that broader debate.
Let's hear from Mike now, calling in from Wisconsin on the Republican line.
Good morning, Mike.
You're on with us.
It's open forum.
Man, I have to follow that.
To all the black callers, look, your district doesn't dictate anything at all about the race should have nothing to do with it.
You guys are slandering a black Republican who's going to run for that district for an old white Democrat.
And nobody cares, apparently, that Senator Whitehouse, who's, I think, from the Northeast is a member of an all-white country club.
He pays top dollar to stay away from people of color.
But that's not why I'm calling, Taylor, because you seem like a nice guy, but your show is very the people that run it, there's an agenda, and I have a few things written down.
Go for it.
That's why we have open forums.
So lay it on.
I've heard you for days mention Trump's memes.
The memes mean nothing.
That's a distraction.
Stop talking about memes that he shares.
Ron Johnson in Congress held a congressional hearing with Tony Fauci's top doctor about gain of function research.
Now, you never talked about it, and it ended up being a big lie.
CNN refuses to have him on.
Savannah Hernandez, you guys talked about political violence.
Savannah Hernandez was beat up by a bunch of protesters in Minnesota.
Never heard it on your show.
Angel Moms had a hearing talking about sanctuary policies.
Senator Hank Johnson wanted to berate them about why they shouldn't be there and other topics should be there.
And luckily, Brandon Gill allowed the angel moms to spend five minutes reiterating their story because the Democrats don't want to hear from angel moms.
You want to hear from people that come into our country lately.
I mean, it's just crazy.
You guys, these are topics that matter.
The LA mayor debate, the California debate, the governor's debate.
I mean, where are you guys?
The Democrats that ran those cities aren't doing their jobs.
And you'd rather play, Taylor, a clip of Kamala Harris.
Who cares what Kamala Harris thinks about the war?
Let's talk about what these mayors and governors are doing to these cities.
I hear you.
It's valid to want to hear, especially these big mayoral and governors' races.
C-SPAN is always looping into all of them and trying to play as many forums as possible.
It's part of the broader theme of open forum.
But thanks for weighing in.
You called him from Wisconsin.
Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from there, has made a lot of headlines over the years relating to coronavirus and his interest in figuring out kind of what happened.
Let's go to Roger now from Milford, Pennsylvania, calling in on the Democratic line.
Good morning, Roger.
You're on.
It's Open Forum.
Yeah, hi.
I was calling in in response to your last guest, Tyler, I guess.
And if he can't tell what's on Trump's brain by now, he needs a new job.
Trump is just a reactionary, just a child reactionary, reacting to his failures.
And that's all Venezuela and Iran is about.
In Venezuela, over a year ago, he had a deal with Maduro to buy their oil through Chevron, which would have brought in, which would have given us, which would have been sold in U.S. dollars.
So people are saying that it was because of the Yuan and China situation.
So that's not true.
And inflation in Venezuela is up 45% since he took out Maduro.
Crime is up in Venezuela also.
And if you go to the website that the oil industry accountability website called Transparency Sovereignty, which Ms. Rodriguez promised, it displays only one entry.
It's not transparent at all.
$300 million.
Where did it come from?
Where is it going?
I guarantee you it's going to Trump.
And this should be, you guys didn't talk about that at all.
And if you think this is over in Venezuela, you're insane.
And Iran is just, again, to divert from the e-files and the China rare earth situation, because Trump was trumped by China on the rare earth last July.
And these, so he's just pissed off and he's doing, and he's sacrificing all these people for his own problems.
And I just want to point out that in 2014, there was a bill for us to fund our rare earth companies in the United States, and 145 Republicans killed it.
This was all caused, this is all caused by the Republican Party not wanting to fund certain things and being irrational.
But it was a bipartisan bill, but enough Republicans.
So, this whole thing is on them.
The debt is on them.
This is all on them.
Roger, thanks for weighing in.
Young Adults And EPA00:09:43
You actually, you brought up something I wanted to touch on because there's been so many topics we've dove into this morning.
President Trump is scheduled to go visit China this week.
He's scheduled to leave, I think, in the middle of the week.
It's going to be a high-stakes visit.
It was initially postponed because of the war against Iran, but as of now, it is still on.
China is, of course, the biggest buyer of oil from Iran, so there's just a lot of competing interests here.
The New York Times has this headline: the world's two most powerful men are set to meet again.
Here's what to know: the war in Iran, trade, artificial intelligence, and Taiwan are expected to be on the agenda, but expectations are modest.
So, that's going to draw a lot of news in the coming days.
And as of right now, the Trump administration says that trip is on.
Let's go to Mary calling in from Plainview, New York, on the independent line.
Good morning, Mary.
Yes, hi, good morning, and happy Mother's Day to everyone.
I have been watching this morning and found much of what was said, especially by your guests, very, very interesting.
You know, I think when we talk about the security of the United States and what's in our best interest, we can break it down to threats from without, other countries, and threats from within.
And one of the issues I think about Iran and countries who do not like us is whether or not we are capable, really, given what the risks are to society, in protecting this country, especially when this main focus is about war, is about will they bomb us, will they, and so on and so forth.
When the Trump administration has done so much cutting of funding to their cybersecurity forces, to the programs and research in cybersecurity.
And I think that the likelihood of the destruction here in this country from these outside threats will be cybersecurity related, whether it's the electrical grid or water or banking system or hospital systems.
So that's one thing I wanted to point out.
Then we talk about threats from within.
What we have seen in these last couple of years is a bashing and a destruction of so much infrastructure in this country by this administration, whether it's the EPA or various agencies that we rely on to protect us.
And not just the EPA, but HHS and so on and so forth.
And I think what we should be incredibly worried about in this country is how it's being destroyed from within.
And if all of us who are going to be voting in the midterms and in the next election do not really understand what is in our best interest, everyone is flawed.
Is this president unbelievably flawed?
Well, I guess it depends who you speak to.
But the impact of these decisions that are being made that are stripping us of so much of what we have been so proud of and gives us a feeling of safety and the possibility for a future.
Well, that's being slashed over and over and over.
And that's the point I wanted to bring up.
And I am a mother and a grandmother, and I am so concerned, not about my future, but the future of our children, grandchildren, and so on.
Thanks for taking my call.
Thank you, Mary, and happy Mother's Day to you.
I think it's an interesting point you raise about the Trump administration's efforts to slim down government.
This time last year, Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency at the time, was being led by Elon Musk, and it triggered so many protests.
It got so many headlines.
A year later, you don't really hear about that much.
And it was interesting because this time last year, a lot of people thought that that would be a big motivator come the midterm elections this fall.
So always something to always interesting to balance the competing news cycles.
Let's go to Dominic calling in from Manassas, Virginia on the Republican line.
Good morning, Dominic.
Hey, good morning.
Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there.
Well, you know, when I originally called in, I was going to talk about the Iran nuclear threat.
And I think if people studied history more, they'd understand that the Pope in the late 1000s started the crusades because the radical Islamic folks were slaughtering Christians in Europe.
That's, you know, we had three great crusades with what was called the Holy Roman Empire.
So I personally, and I can't imagine any human on the face of the earth, wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
That'd be the end of us over here on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Then I listened to some of the callers.
This sounds like a feeding frenzy for Trump derangement syndrome.
We have had a few callers call in and discuss like getting rid of the EPA.
The EPA has been slimmed down.
It was a monumental, hugely incorrect mistake to give it so much power with an entrenched bureaucracy to write rules that make not a lick of sense.
I think Lee Zelda's doing a great job there.
Thank God we put an adult in charge of that instead of mandating things like electric cars under saying that carbon was bad for the human race.
You know, we don't have carbon dioxide in this country.
We're basically screwed.
You know, you don't get plants.
You don't get photosynthesis.
I can't really have an intelligent discussion with some of what I consider the leftist radical.
And the young lady that called in, the mother that just called in, talked about not prosecuting people.
The BLMs ripped down Minnesota.
And what happened?
Nothing.
Not one thing.
And I think that's despicable.
Talk about unequal enforcement of things when they're putting grandmothers in prison for praying outside of abortion clinics.
Hell, that's free speech.
And that was an administration.
I don't have Biden derangement syndrome, but I got to tell you, anybody that picks Kamala Harris as the vice president of the United States, they're already suffering from dementia.
That's it.
Have a nice day.
Thanks, Dominic.
Thanks for weighing in.
Let's go to Nicole now calling in from Brooksville, Florida on the Democratic line.
Good morning, Nicole.
It's open forum, and you're on.
Hi, good morning.
And as always, Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers.
So I'm a mother, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother.
Wow.
So that tells you I've been here a long time.
And, you know, it's weird because all the time I hear about how all the suffering and everything going on in Ukraine and Iraq.
But there are two things about that that really come to mind.
In both scenarios, even though they're different, you've been trying to get them for 40.
Russia's been trying to do that for almost 50 years.
The same in this scenario.
It's like a bad criminal.
You keep going to jail for the same thing and you don't never learn.
So why is it that you've been trying to do this for almost 50 years and you still haven't accomplished it?
So that's number one.
Number two, like I indicated, we talk about the bad things that go on in different countries.
Do you realize how many bad things go on in the United States?
How the terrorism, the ICE, the disrespect.
We still talking about racism and setting boundaries and restructuring things because we want to know how many minorities.
Can you imagine if the minorities finally thought about everything that the white people did and decided to retaliate against them as we are trying to retaliate against other countries for what they do in their own backyard?
All right.
That would be crazy.
So, and then to add, to put the cherry on top, let's put the cherry on top.
You're going to send our young adults to war.
What they going to do?
TikTok them to death?
They scared of dirt.
You got them.
70% of the young adults have asthma or bronchitis.
What are they going to do?
That's all I got to say.
Thanks for winding in, Nicole.
Appreciate that.
And thanks for everyone calling in on Open Forum.
We have a really exciting guest joining us next after the break as the America 250 celebrations continue this spring and summer.
We're going to talk with historian Michael Oslin about his new book, National Treasure, How the Declaration of Independence Made America.
Stick with us and we'll be right back.
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The focus of the book is on famous names, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau.
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Washington Journal continues.
Welcome back.
We're joined now by our next guest, Michael Oslin.
He is here to discuss his new book on the Declaration of Independence.
It's called National Treasure.
You can see the cover right there.
He has quite the background.
He is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Great to have you here, Michael.
Thank you for having me, Taylor.
Congratulations on the book.
Thank you.
Obviously, a lot of people have been hearing about America 250 celebrations that are going to be taking place.
This book is a very helpful kind of touch point for that.
Give us kind of the bird's eye view of what led you to write this and what the goal is, because it's not the first time the Declaration has been written about.
It's not.
You're right.
But this is the first complete history of the Declaration.
Most of the books that have been written, which are wonderful books, focus on 1776.
They focus sometimes on Abraham Lincoln and, of course, you know, the Gettysburg Address and shifting our understanding of the Declaration.
But nobody really wrote the thing that I wanted to read, quite frankly, which was 1776 to Today, really the story of America through the Declaration and how we have all engaged with it and encountered it.
So we were about two years out when I stumbled across the realization that there wasn't anything I could read, and that got me going.
Wow, quite the undertaking.
As a reminder for folks listening, you could call in to ask Michael some questions about this topic, the numbers, Democrats 202-748-8000, Republicans 202-748-8001, and Independents 202-748-8002.
You're a historian.
You specialize in both the 19th century but also Asia.
How did that background influence you writing this book?
So I was always, when I taught at Yale or I was at the Hoover Institution or other places, I was looking at America and Asia and trying to understand what we were doing, our history, our interests, our values.
And at a certain point, after a long time of doing that, it just felt natural to come home and ask the same types of questions and understand it in terms of our long history.
What I really was doing was starting to write a book on the history of Washington, D.C. in the 20th century, how we became an imperial capital.
It doesn't just happen, right?
You have to build it.
And I was looking at that.
I went down to the archives to understand the architectural history of the archives.
And before I knew it, I was hearing all these stories about the Declaration.
Realized I didn't know anything about the Declaration, despite being a professional historian, and that sort of got me going.
I want to read an excerpt from the book just to give people a taste.
It says, A constitutional republic is a fragile creation for only the people's adherence to its principles and rules preserves it.
It is easy to undermine belief in democracy.
And since the founding of the republic, claims that either mob rule or shadowy cabals are destroying the people's sovereignty have been prevalent.
Against such views, our founding document remains a powerful statement of unity as much today as 250 years ago.
A theme in the book that I think is interesting because you talk about the document's journey and how when it was first written, it's not like it immediately became known to everybody that was here.
It took years.
Can you talk a bit about that and then how it kind of took on a life of its own from that point?
Sure.
Well, to begin with, Americans did know that the Declaration had been adopted.
It was printed up on the night of July 4th by John Dunlap, who was a printer in Philadelphia.
And then it was sent from the Continental Congress throughout the colonies.
So General Washington, George Washington, reads it to his troops in New York on July 9th, and it makes its way up and down the coast.
So people did know that there was this Declaration.
They're printed on what's called broadsides, and you can go see them, some of these original broadsides right now.
For example, at the National Archives in their new exhibit called Free and Independent, or at the Library of Congress or other places.
There's only, by the way, Taylor, there's only 26 of these original broadsides that exist today.
Just 26.
Just 26.
We don't know how many were printed originally, probably about 200, but it's one of the rarest artifacts we have.
But when you go to the National Archives and you look at what we call the engrossed parchment, the one that was signed, on the top line, it says in Congress, July 4th, 1776.
But that parchment wasn't even written until at least a month later.
And then it started getting signed in August of 1776 and onward.
That parchment, what we might call the official Declaration of Independence, that was a secret.
It was a state secret.
It was kept rolled up, kept with the papers of Congress.
probably until after the War of 1812, when the story of its survival, you know, when the British burned Washington, until that story gets out, probably most Americans didn't know that that even existed.
They'd never seen it.
They'd never seen the signatures.
What they had seen was just this sort of block printing like you'd get in a newspaper.
And actually for the first six months of independence, no one knew who signed the Declaration because it wasn't made public.
It was also a state secret.
And you have to remember, first of all, Congress, everything that Congress did was under a cloak of secrecy.
Secondly, what they were doing was treason at the time.
And thirdly, we were losing the war against the British, which was one of the reasons to actually have the Declaration.
And so for all these reasons, that there was a Declaration was known.
As I said, these broadsides were going out.
But that there was something official that basically stated, this is our founding document with everyone signing it.
That wasn't known for quite some time.
I think it's really interesting.
People could look up this op-ed you put in the Washington Post, an excerpt from the book, and it's headlined, This Fragile Document Observed a Celebration at 100.
It got one, how the Declaration of Independence became the hit of the 1876 Centennial in Philadelphia.
And it's a really interesting read because in the sense of making this document accessible to everyday Americans, both in a way that people could hang it up, they could read it, they could pass it on to their children as a history lesson, it really took that long to kind of become something that was materialized and ended up being sold.
Could you talk a bit about that?
Sure.
You know, for the first 30-plus years, the Declaration was really sort of forgotten.
It did its job in the summer of 1776.
Americans learned that they were now citizens of a new nation.
Nobody really knew what that was going to mean.
And in fact, the idea was you'd have 13 sovereign states.
There was no concept of a federal government.
There was going to be a confederated government under the Articles of Confederation, but not obviously the system we have today.
Everything that happened after July 4th of 1776 really had little to do with the Declaration, right?
Number one, you have to win the war.
Number two, you have to set up some type of government.
The states have to figure out how to govern themselves and interact with each other.
So there's all of these things that are going on, which the Declaration doesn't talk about.
It was never meant as a governing document.
And when Americans, for example, started celebrating July 4th, even though, of course, the vote for independence was July 2nd, that was the day John Adams wrote Abigail Adams, his wife, that this was to be the great day in American history, you know, very quickly because the document said in Congress July 4th, everyone starts celebrating July 4th.
But after that, when we celebrated independence, we would talk about independence, but very rarely talk about the document itself.
There were some, but for the most part, people didn't talk about it.
And the things that we care about today the most, right, the statements, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and other parts of that preamble.
And then at the end, that was, it wasn't quite window dressing, but that was not what the Americans of the day thought was the most important part.
The most important part was the part we don't read today.
Those are the 27 charges because those were the justifications for declaring independence and leaving Britain.
So it took a very long time.
What happened is the story got out, first with the idea that Dolly Madison saved it, then the real story got out, which I tell in the book.
By the skin of its teeth, the Declaration is rescued from the British coming into Washington, burning the Capitol, burning the White House.
And next to the White House is the State Department where it's kept.
It's a... record of state.
That's burned to the ground.
The document is taken secretly up into Leesburg, Virginia, and thrown into a cellar, unguarded, where it sits there for weeks.
When that story gets out, suddenly people say, that's fantastic, but what was saved?
Because again, they didn't know that this parchment was there.
Soon, some people realize that you could now show Americans this birthright certificate, so to speak, but at the same time make money off of it.
So there's this beautiful and perfect marriage of civics and commerce where these reproductions of the Declaration, which aren't exactly faithful in the beginning, start getting sold.
And John Trumbull, of course, you can see his famous portrait in the rotunda of the Declaration of Independence being given to Congress.
All of those come out at the same time in the late 18 teens.
And through those decades, it becomes what today I guess we would call merch merchandise.
It becomes a commoditized object that you can buy.
You can put on your wall.
They print it on silk scarves.
They have different reproductions of the Trumbull painting that you can buy cheaply or buy expensively.
By the time of the centennial in 1876, it's stamped on medallions.
It's given away by companies as a promotion.
It becomes a cultural object.
But in doing so, it's always in front of the minds and the hearts of Americans.
You could say it's, well, it's crass commercialism.
But what it really does is it makes it the fundamental document that Americans think about when they think about their history.
Yeah, it truly becomes a symbol.
And you write about in 1876, Alonzo Bell walking into the train station.
He's the chief clerk of the Department of Interior, and he had this rectangular-shaped package.
And he literally took a train to Philadelphia, unguarded, no big escort, holding the document and kind of brought it.
I think it's just striking to think about because we've now familiarized it so much with being this official symbol of the country and everything.
Well, not only that, I mean, think how it's guarded today.
Yes.
You know, for the past 70 years, it's gone down into a vault in the National Archives every single evening.
It is surrounded by all sorts of security.
And here is the clerk of the State Department wrapping it up in brown paper and just by himself walking onto the train, the Baltimore and Ohio, to go up to Philadelphia.
Same thing in 1814.
The clerk who saves it, Stephen Pleasanton, the city is in chaos.
The British are literally, the Battle of Bladensburg has just happened.
The American forces are wiped out.
The British are coming in.
The city's in chaos.
He somehow finds material to make bags, linen bags.
He somehow finds carts.
He throws it with the Constitution and the journals of Congress in the back of a cart and just rides it up through Georgetown across the Potomac, goes across the Chainbridge, and then up into Virginia, completely unguarded.
We think of it now, especially if you've seen the movie National Treasure, and the security around it.
Obviously, it can't be stolen, and there's no treasure map on the back.
But in different points of our history, the document was treated so, I don't want to say cavalierly, but it's just how they treated things.
And so it gives it, I think, a very human scale to this document.
Sometimes you look at it and it's, you know, it's this, it is a great statement of principles and it sort of sits there statically, but it's had this incredible life of adventure and an incredible life of danger.
Yeah, I love how you, that's a theme throughout the book, just that it is this human document and it's taken a human journey.
There's some callers who want to ask you some questions about it, so let's start to dive in with them.
We have Byron calling in from Wilson, North Carolina on the independent line.
Good morning, Byron.
You're on with Michael.
Good morning.
Yes, I want to ask him: do he think the Constitution will survive Donald Trump?
And secondly, I want him to explain the Constitution is a living document.
Founders Arguments King00:15:54
And over the years, we have not updated it.
You know, like the Lectaria College, a lot of things should have been adjusted so we don't come into the problem that we have today.
And they make it so easy for someone like Donald Trump to get in to do what he's doing.
And I always thought of this.
I served in the military.
When I first went in, I heard a Russian president.
It was Khrushchev.
And we had a briefing.
And he said, we will bury you, America, and we won't shoot a shot.
And we will kill you within.
And I laughed at him.
I said, what a stupid old man.
We are a super powerful country.
That never happened.
And it hurts me so bad to see this happening today.
And it seemed like this right here that's happening to America is something that has been set up a long time ago and just moving slowly.
And I think that American leaders have been asleep at the switch because without updating the Constitution and looking at the things that could happen, especially through the media and stuff like that, we just opened ourselves up for what is happening today.
And, you know, I want him to elaborate on that because a lot of people act like they're scared to really come out and tell the truth.
Thank you, Byron.
Do you want to weigh in?
Well, you know, I'm not, the book is a history.
It's not talking about today's issues, though it brings us up to pretty close to today.
I would say a couple of things.
One's just a very personal one that, you know, when I didn't anticipate, I didn't really think initially I was going to write a book about 200 and roughly 250 years of American history.
In doing so, though, it actually gave me a great deal of confidence that we've made it through a lot of difficult times, however, those were defined on either side of the political spectrum.
There was a member of Congress who got up and said that there is a despotism in Washington.
The president is a despot, basically a dictator acting like a king, and this was the gravest threat to American survival.
That was in 1829.
And that was Henry Clay talking about Andrew Jackson because he had just fired the librarian of Congress.
So these cycles that we go through of concern and fear over the future of the Republic, what I came to from writing the book is that there's an enormous, deep strength in this country.
And again, that encompasses both sides.
I want Democrats and Republicans and Independents and Libertarians and socialists and everyone to read this book because we are all here together.
And that's why I think the Declaration, even though the caller was asking about the Constitution, the Declaration, first of all, is the spirit behind the Constitution.
And the Constitution does change.
We've amended it, what, 27 times now, and we may amend it into the future.
It's changed a lot in terms of adding on.
What hasn't changed is the spirit behind the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which is contained in the Declaration, the idea that all men are created equal.
crucially and importantly to me, why the very first line of our Declaration states, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to separate themselves.
One people, not 13 colonies.
Or actually, as Thomas Jefferson originally wrote, a people.
Ben Franklin changed that to one people.
The Declaration is our great statement of unity.
It's why the founders pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
They didn't pledge it to the new country.
They didn't pledge it to their states.
They pledged it to each other.
I think that the signers and the founding fathers were giving us a lesson from the beginning that you don't have to like your neighborsness.
I mean, think of the men in the Continental Congress.
Think of the egos and the vanity and the brilliance and the difficulty of men like John Adams and others and John Hancock.
Certainly they didn't think that Americans had to love their neighbors.
Hopefully you like your neighbors, but you don't have to love your neighbors.
But you can't hate your neighbors and survive as a nation.
And I think the Declaration in the beginning is telling us you are, we are, one people now.
And again, going through this history, and if you read the book and you go through the book, from the very beginning, and you read that quote, from the very beginning, there were concerns that the experiment, which we still are, would fail.
It wasn't going to last.
In 1812, New England did not want to get into the war with England because that was going to cripple its importing and exporting economy.
And in the Civil War, obviously, the South is, the Confederacy is appealing to the Declaration because of the issue of consent of the governed and saying we no longer consent to this government.
We've gone through all of these cycles and we have come out and we have come together.
And so if anyone's asking me as a historian or as an individual, you know, do you fear for the future of the country?
My answer is no.
I don't fear for the future of the country, but I also recognize that each of us must do our part in maintaining these freedoms and maintaining what we understand critically is our connection to each other.
I think that caller's point was striking.
Thinking just over the last year and a half, some of the biggest protests have been the no-kings protests, you know, criticizing President Trump and trying to claim he's a king.
You alluded to some of this, but I want to read another excerpt from the book where you say, but in drawing up its list of 27 charges against King Charles, Congress made clear how a just government should not act and thus by implication, how a government justly representing the consent of the governed should act.
Only when a new, more centralized government was required would the echoes of Jefferson's charges inform the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights.
I think it's a good reminder of how this was all crafted in response to separating from a monarch and kind of the present day discussion.
King George, by the way, not King Charles.
Oh, sorry.
King Charles, because I looked at Congress right now.
King George, exactly.
You know, we might draw up new charges against Charles, but I don't think so.
The royal visit that just happened.
Yeah, I think, you know, again, the Declaration was not meant to be a governing document.
That was going to come initially with the Articles of Confederation and then later with the Constitution.
But it does, as I write, implicitly show how a government, a just government, should not act.
And people on both sides refer to it even today.
And those who have arguments about what the president is doing on the other side, one of the charges, I'm paraphrasing it, but it's a charge against the king that he has sent hither swarms of officials to eat out our sustence, substance, and the like, meaning there are too many unnecessary bureaucrats who are living off the fat of the people.
Certainly that's an argument that you hear today.
I mean, a lot of these things continue to resonate.
And that's part, I think, of the colonies already were democratic in the sense that they had been governing themselves with elected assemblies for, you know, by the time of the Constitution, for almost 170 years.
The idea of democracy itself in America was not new.
How we would do it as a unified nation or a set of 13 sovereign colonies, states acting together, that was a new question.
But the question of self-governance was not new.
And so this idea that we have these inherent rights that are from God, these are natural rights given from God, and that government's role is simply to protect those rights and not go beyond those rights.
That's what animated the founders, right?
I mean, Jefferson's argument in the Declaration is very simple.
He starts with what they sometimes call a major premise.
His major premise is, all men are created equal with rights from God.
The minor premise is that King George is trying to take away those rights.
And so the conclusion is very simple.
We are therefore justified in rebellion.
But everyone understood it was a balance.
So some of the charges that Jefferson wrote in the document were softened or removed by Congress because they understood he was making polemical points and often very emotionally.
And the document, as it finally came out of Congress, was much tighter.
It was actually a much better final version than what his draft was.
His draft is fast.
It gone through editing.
It had gone through a lot of editing.
I mean, one of the controversial edits, of course, was the deletion of Jefferson's condemnation of the slave trade.
He had a very long, very passionate condemnation of the slave trade, saying those who are being taken as slaves from Africa have rights as human beings.
Those rights are being denied by the king by being taken from their land and being brought here.
The next step, however, of would they have political rights in this system was not one that he or any of the other founding fathers could get to.
But almost all of them, including almost all of the slaveholders, understood that slavery was evil.
They thought it would die out.
They thought it was economically inefficient.
That's why Jefferson wanted to end the trade.
He thought if you end the trade, you will end slavery.
And that didn't happen.
But my point is that these debates over monarchical power, no kings, an overweening government of bureaucrats, those have been with us from the beginning.
And so when you hear arguments on the right and you hear arguments on the left, they actually reflect back to the very start of our country.
But what I think we can take comfort from is that it was an attempt by one people, often very bitterly and ultimately leading to our greatest catastrophe, the Civil War.
But it was always an attempt by one people to figure out what is the balance by which we are going to live, meaning a balance between our private, individual, social lives and this political communal life.
And that's one that, quite frankly, will never end.
It's not going to end with Donald Trump.
It's not going to end with the next president.
It will be there forever because it's been with us for 250 years.
Yeah, it's a key peg of the overall experiment.
Let's hear from another caller.
Kathy is calling in from Albuquerque, New Mexico on the Democratic line.
Good morning, Kathy.
You're on with our guest.
Hello.
I just wanted to say I'm a little bit disappointed with this historian.
I'm open to new ideas, especially, I love John Adams.
I love his greatest quote.
Great would be the guilt of an unnecessary war.
But you just seem to dismiss like the first caller you had.
I think Donald Trump, it's kind of unfortunate that he'll be our president during the celebration of our country.
We have so many things to be grateful for, but I think it's a deal solution of our country.
What he's doing, he does want to be a king.
And I don't think there's anybody that's been like, I mean, he doesn't believe in the Constitution.
He goes against it.
And I just think it's just unfortunate.
I just wish we had a better leader during this because he wants to make it all about him and not the country or the Constitution.
And I think that's unfortunate.
Thank you so much.
Goodbye.
Thanks, Kathy.
Let's talk kind of broadly speaking based off the point she was raising over the last 250 years.
Because you're describing how the Declaration is in many ways kind of this foundation that was laid and then everything else was built upon it.
How, in your observations and in your research for the book, has it held together during unusual times, you know, times of war, times of crisis here at home?
And how do you think it's kind of being represented, how it's holding together now compared to other parts of history?
You mean the Declaration?
Yeah.
Well, I think the reason I think the Declaration remains so powerful is that, again, it's not a governing document, right?
So every caller has said the Constitution is being shredded, which, you know, we all will have different opinions on that.
Some think the Constitution is being upheld.
But, and again, I'm a historian.
I'm not going to get into that argument.
That doesn't interest me right now.
Interests me as an American citizen.
It doesn't interest me in terms of my book or why I'm here talking about it today.
So people can rail against President Trump and what he's doing to the Constitution.
That's fine.
And I'll have obviously my own opinions.
But in terms of speaking about the Declaration and its role in our history, the reason I think it's so powerful and it survived and why I want everyone to reread it and quite frankly to fall back in love with it is because it's not a governing document.
It is above our politics.
That's why it's survived and has been so powerful.
The Constitution, again, we talked about it, it's been amended and there are still arguments, get rid of the Electoral College, do this, do that.
You know, some on the right say get rid of the district and circuit courts.
Those aren't in the Constitution.
Others say, you know, curb the president before he becomes a king.
The Declaration remains this statement of how we should want to live together.
And again, in the negative, it does tell us how a just government should not act, right?
There are limits to what government should do and of course can do as we've set up the system, but limits to what it should do, right?
So for example, the charge, which one of the most famous charges against quartering troops in houses, very clearly draws a line between what a government may legitimately do in private property and what it may not do, making it difficult for assemblies to meet.
Gets right to the core question of how are we represented, meaning our representatives should be available to us.
They should be able to meet and to discuss and debate and legislate without any hindrances.
So for example, during COVID, there were arguments that, well, our election should be postponed, right?
Because it's a crisis, right?
Well, again, though you can look back, and it's not a direct, it's not a direct one-to-one, of course, right?
But you can look back and get insight from how the founders thought about many of these issues in terms of what was legitimate and what was illegitimate.
And I think those still stand us in good stead.
Again, I think that because this document, it wasn't like they said, okay, you know, we're going to repeal it or get rid of it, we can't do that.
Because the Declaration still serves as the spirit behind the Constitution, in a way it's, I hope, and what it should be in some ways, is a circuit breaker between those passions and those emotions.
And of course, in some ways, that was the way the founders set up the government, right?
With a balance of powers and with originally a Senate that was elected by the state houses because that would once again give a separation from the passions of the people.
Appealing To The Constitution00:04:03
It was something John Madison warns about in Federalist 10, the passions of the people and faction.
And they understood we were going to be like everyone else.
There was no republic that had survived up until that point.
And they feared greatly that this republic would not survive.
They looked back all the way to ancient Israel and the Hebrew Commonwealth, the Hebrew Republic, and said even that, which was divinely inspired by God, failed.
So how in the world can we, you know, fallible humans without, you know, we had, they believed that God was looking down on the United States or America, right?
And that comes from the pilgrims.
That's deeply embedded in their worldview, that this was divinely, there was a, and they talk about the supreme judge and divine, you know, nature's God.
They believed that there was a connection between this country and God.
But they understood that we were fallible humans.
And they looked back in history, and their great fear was that the Roman Republic had fallen, and all of these other republics had fallen.
So how could we maintain our power?
Now, this is something that's happening in 1776.
Those fears are there.
It really becomes animated later over the debates over the Constitution in the 1780s.
But the Declaration has been this thread that Abraham Lincoln could appeal to.
Before him, John Quincy Adams could appeal to.
Abraham Lincoln could appeal to.
Presidents throughout our wars in World War I and World War II and the Cold War, all of which I go through in the book, always appealed to the Declaration.
They would appeal to the Constitution, but they appealed to the Declaration and the spirit in the Declaration.
Why are we out fighting for freedom in the world?
Because we believe that all men are created equal.
And for us, it is harder to live in a world in which no one is free.
So that thread, you asked, how has it lasted through our history?
I think that because itself is not political, because it is above politics, it therefore can be referred to by all, and all presidents of whatever party have referred to it, even as most of those presidents have been charged with seeking to aggrandize power to themselves.
Harry Truman, they thought he was, and Woodrow Wilson, fundamentally changing the nature of our federal balance by creating such a massive government.
And of course, Franklin Roosevelt.
But each of them also appealed to the philosophy and the spirit of the Declaration.
And again, that's why I think we're still here.
I like the framing of it as a circuit breaker, too.
It's interesting to think of it that way.
Let's hear from Dave calling in from New York on the independent line.
Good morning, Dave.
You're on with our guest.
Hey, good morning.
I decided to make a quick statement and then my question.
But I would like I think it's a great discussion on the Constitution.
And I just think like the first quote said, he says it's like a living document.
I guess, you know, just because it's not rigid, it's fluid.
You can, you know, through legislation, we can adjust to whatever, you know, comes up down the line.
And so I think it's a unique situation with that.
And also, I think the writers of the Constitution, I think they were cynics.
I think they looked at politicians, or they knew in their heart, like through history, the historic politicians were like the most greedy, power-hungry, like, corrupt, worst kind of people society can produce.
And those are the ones that rise to become politicians.
And so they did the checks and balances.
So they knew each group would try to destroy the other in their quest for greed and power.
So you have the House, you have the Senate, then you have the executive, the judiciary, and that power.
Deindustrialization And China00:07:29
So the more one group tries to take control, the others will kind of negate it.
And so it's almost like Chinese handcuffs.
So I would like to say the poor people who are horrified by President Trump, don't panic because the midterm elections are coming up, and you'll see how the Constitution works.
But now my question is more broader, is more like the future of the Constitution.
In terms of like East versus West, like class of civilizations and the end of history type stuff, when you look at Russia and China, they're like dictatorships, but they have indoctrinated market forces into their government.
But their advantage, I guess, is they have like 25-year plans, like in China.
So as China becomes like the industrial power in the world, in the United States, we're on our back legs.
We got $40 trillion of debt.
We print money.
Same with Europe.
And these Western democracies seem to be completely deindustrialized and almost in a complete panic to where we're trying to take over and reintroduce like the Here, Dave, if you don't mind, Dave, I'm going to interrupt to hopefully build off your question.
I think it is timely given that President Trump is about to go to China to meet with Xi Jinping, the leader there.
I'm curious, as you research just the Declaration's journey, and I think your framing of it being kind of above the day-to-day politics is really striking.
When you look at, to that caller's point, another superpower like China, how do you think the Declaration has helped differentiate the United States as it has remained kind of a dominant force on the world stage?
And is it in any way a buffer?
Is it a tool that other countries like China or Russia haven't been able to figure out to kind of apply in their own way?
I think it's been deeply inspirational.
And it's been inspirational for almost 250 years.
Our Declaration inspired the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
It inspired the declarations that accompanied the wave of revolutions in Latin America in the early 1800s.
It inspired declarations after World War II during decolonization.
There are dozens and dozens and dozens of declarations of independence, many of which even quote directly from ours.
I mean, in 1945, Ho Chi Minh, as he was setting up the Democratic Socialist Republic of Vietnam, quoted directly from our Declaration.
Obviously, he didn't imbibe the spirit of it, but he quoted the words.
And I think that's really the difference, is very few of those other declarations have the same amount of philosophy in it that, you know, again, we still debate what does this mean, all men are created equal, they are endowed by their creator with certain natural rights, that these are, you know, these are self-evident to us.
Our declaration, the one written by Jefferson and edited by the Congress, is one that has occasioned libraries of books to try to understand the meaning of the role of the individual, the role of the state, the balance between the two, the role of God.
All of these things were coming in through this statement.
Now, the statement reflected things that Americans have been saying for years, decades, which is why Jefferson said, I wasn't going to write anything new.
It was meant to be an expression of the American mind.
And that's why I think it has inspired the rest of the world, but the rest of the world hasn't quite adopted the spirit of it the way that we have, because as Jefferson said, this was the American mind.
Already 170 years of self-governance in different ways, not at a national level, but at local levels.
And the local is really important.
So when the caller's referring to the problems, many of which, by the way, I worked on this for 30 years in a different life.
And in fact, the last time I was in this studio, I was talking about Asia.
I was talking about America.
I was talking about the competition with China.
Those are things I spent decades of my life working on.
And I agree with much of very much of what he said.
To me, when you look at this document, the Declaration, its first and foremost concern is with the people.
And so you can talk about deindustrialization and you can talk about all these things, but it gets abstract.
I'm from the Midwest.
What does deindustrialization really mean?
It means people have lost their livelihoods over generations now, two generations going on.
It means that they haven't been retrained despite everything that Washington says, well, we're going to retrain people as if you can do that with a wave of a wand or snap of fingers.
It means people are not able to provide for their families and in a very un-American way, and yet a way that we haven't figured out how do we get out of it, they become dependent on public support in a way that from the beginning of the country, the whole idea of why people came here was to be self-supporting.
They left the old world, wherever that old world was, Ireland, Scotland, England, or later Greece, Italy, Poland, didn't matter where you were coming from, because you wanted to be self-supporting.
You wanted to have that chance to determine your own future for yourself and your children.
It was the declaration that drew them, that brought them here because of its claim that in the old world, you were a peasant, you were part of a caste system, you were stuck in a particular class.
Here, the world started anew.
All men were created equal.
Now, obviously, the reality of governing, the reality of bureaucracy, the reality of becoming a superpower, dramatically changed America over those decades, all of which I go through.
But that spirit is what still draws tens of millions to our borders over the years.
And still, people go to China to make money.
They don't go to China to live a Chinese way of life, unless you might have a Chinese heritage background.
But very few leave Western Europe and say, I'm going to China because I want to live under the Communist Party in China.
It doesn't mean they might not be good managers.
In some ways, they're very good managers, and they're very good planners.
But there's something much deeper about what the human spirit wants at the end of life, which is to have lived in accordance with your own beliefs, to worship the God that you want.
China has been tearing down mosques and churches for decades now.
People are not allowed to worship the way that they want there.
So again, why are people coming here?
They're coming here, yes, because we do have a vibrant economy, but they're coming here because there is a way of life that to themselves, they feel this is what they want.
It's such a fascinating conversation.
I wish we had more time because it's so complex, but it's been really interesting to get your take on this.
For those who might have just seen or didn't see the cover earlier, Michael Oslin's new book is National Treasure.
Fascinating Democracy Conversation00:02:23
It's about the Declaration of Independence.
Of course, with America 250 coming up, it's a fascinating conversation, and you're going to be promoting it in the weeks to come.
Thanks for coming in.
Thank you for weighing in.
There's going to be so many America 250 events moving forward here in Philadelphia, New York City.
President Trump has talked a lot about it, and I think it's going to provoke a lot more conversation about this.
So thanks again, and congratulations on the rollout.
It's been a packed show.
We talked a lot about the war in Iran.
We talked a lot about congressional redistricting.
And now we talked a lot about America 250 and kind of the founding of this country.
Thanks as always for tuning in to Washington Journal.
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Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, today with our guest, best-selling author Heather Cox Richardson.
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Monday Morning Independence00:03:15
Some people who've written about the Revolutionary War say the indispensable person was George Washington.
Had he not been the general, we probably would have lost the war and so forth.
Do you agree with that?
In terms of the ideology, the person he was, and his willingness to walk away from power, that was extraordinary.
I always tell my students America has lucked out a number of times.
And the first time it lucked out was with George Washington in that position of extraordinary power.
Walking away from the army first, and that's just why that's in the rotunda of the Capitol, but then walking away from the presidency is an extraordinary thing.
Watch America's Book Club with Heather Cox Richardson today at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
Tonight, on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A, Supreme Court of the United States Justice Neil Gorsuch will discuss his children's book, Heroes of 1776, which highlights the signers of the Declaration of Independence and other lesser-known revolutionaries who risked their lives, liberty, and property in the fight for independence from the British.
The Brits were coming in on Philadelphia, and so Congress retreated to Baltimore.
And it needed to get out word desperately that the Declaration had been made.
It was a rallying cry for independence.
And you have to remember, things were dicey then.
Only about 40% would identify themselves as patriots.
There were loyalists.
There were people who wanted to stay out of it.
They needed to get the news out, and so they went to the local printer who would always publish printed by M.K. Goddard at the bottom of the newspaper.
Why MK, for probably pretty obvious reasons, didn't want to disclose that it was a woman.
But when it came to the Declaration, she printed her whole name, printed by Mary Kay Goddard in Baltimore, Maryland.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, tonight at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q ⁇ A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Coming up Monday morning, Reed Wilson, founder and editor-in-chief of Plurivus News, talks about redistricting efforts across the United States and their potential impact on the midterm elections and beyond.
And then Christian Science Monitor Washington Bureau Chief Linda Feldman on White House News of the Day and a preview of the week ahead.
Also, Cato Institute policy analyst Tad DeHaven on the Trump administration taking equity stakes in private companies and concerns about federal stockholdings.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal joined the conversation live at 7 Eastern Monday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett spoke about the nation's top court, including public perception of the Supreme Court and the emergency docket process.
Dallas Presidential Center00:00:20
This happened during a conversation hosted by the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas.
It's about 50 minutes.
All right.
Justice Barrett, thank you so much for being here with us.
Thank you for having me.
It means the world.
Let's start.
Let's go back in time.
Let's start at the beginning, not the total beginning, when you were born.