Biden Shreds Constitution & Goes to War in Yemen—Why “Congressional Approval” Is Vital. Shapiro-GOP Again Celebrate Biden Foreign Policy—Why? Michael Tracey LIVE From Iowa Primaries. ADL’s Noble Crusade
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
The escalation in the Middle East that has been feared since the start of the U.S.-funded Israeli war in Gaza is now officially here.
On Thursday, the Biden administration, in partnership with the U.K., bombed 16 different sites in the country of Yemen.
The rationale for this bombing is that the Houthis, the Iran-backed militia that rules much of Yemen, has been attacking Israeli and American commercial ships in the Red Sea in retaliation for the U.S.-aided destruction of Gaza by Israel.
No matter your views on the justness and wisdom of this bombing campaign by Biden, two points are indisputably true.
Number one, the Middle East war in which Biden has involved the U.S.
in defense of Israel has now escalated to include the use of U.S.
combat forces, American troops, now, for now at least, in Yemen.
And two, Biden's bombing campaign, despite being telegraphed and planned weeks in advance, if not longer, It was carried out without any congressional debate, let alone congressional approval.
Numerous members of Congress in both political parties have objected to this new escalation on the ground that it is illegal and unconstitutional, because the American president does not have the constitutional authority to order the use of military force without congressional approval.
He can't just start new wars without Congress, except in the case of an emergency that is clearly not applicable here.
Now, this is a topic I have been reporting on and writing about for almost two decades.
Indeed, the expansive theories of executive power under which all of this is done, that basically argues that the president is free to do anything and everything he wants, as long as he can say that doing so is necessary to protect national security, was one of the most radical components of the Bush-Cheney administration's post-911 power grab in the name of the War on Terror.
Opposing those radical theories of executive power and warning of their dangers was one of the primary reasons I stopped practicing law and began writing about politics all the way back in 2005.
As a result of having been involved in these various debates for so long, I know full well that one of the challenges is inducing people to care about this.
Often when it comes time for the U.S.
military to start being deployed and start bombing and blowing up things and people, the excitement that comes from that, often the belief that it's warranted, renders debates over things like constitutionality and legality seem boring and legalistic, almost annoying.
But for reasons that I think it's vital to emphasize, these questions are anything but that.
We talk often, I'm sure you've heard before, about how Dwight Eisenhower, when leaving office in 1961, chose to devote a substantial portion of the 15 minutes that he was given for his televised farewell address to warn of the dangers of what he called, quote, the military-industrial complex, meaning the way in which the powers of the Pentagon and U.S.
security state had grown so large and unchecked that even this five-star general regarded it as a grave threat to democratic norms.
But Eisenhower was far from the first president to sound that alarm.
Indeed, it was the founders of the American Republic in the Federalist Papers and the very first American president, George Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address, who repeatedly and emphatically emphasized the dangers of allowing the presidency, the executive branch, to assert powers in an unchecked manner, especially the power to wage war or to maintain a standing army under his control.
Absolute executive power in the form of the British Crown was, after all, one of the primary grievances that motivated them to take up arms very dangerously against the world's then most powerful empire.
And they were absolutely determined when forming a new republic not to repeat its worst and most repressive attributes.
For years now, we've heard a supposed consensus that everyone agrees in Washington that the United States government needs to stop endless wars, especially in the Middle East.
It's time for us to no longer keep fighting in the Middle East.
And yet, here we are again.
Whether the U.S.
has made the right decision in bombing Yemen, and thus risking even broader regional conflict in that region, is a crucial question on the substance.
But it is also crucial to understand why Biden's unilateral decision to once again bomb a foreign country with no congressional approval is, on its own, independent of the merits, deeply disturbing, and quite dangerous.
Other than that lack of approval by Congress, Biden's bombing of Yemen provoked widespread applause on a bipartisan basis.
Among those cheering this decision and justifying it was Ben Shapiro, who was always happy to see American troops deployed in that region to fight against Israel's enemies, as long as it's not him and his family doing the fighting.
And thus do we see yet again that Biden's signature foreign policies in Yemen, In Ukraine, in Israel, with China commands enthusiastic support from the establishment wing of the Republican Party currently represented in the GOP presidential race by Nikki Haley.
One reason the DC establishment is so eager for Haley to be the nominee is precisely because it would mean that there's no debate or disagreement of any kind with regard to the three new wars in which Biden has now involved the United States in Ukraine, in Israel and Gaza, and now in Yemen.
And then after that, speaking of the GOP primary, we have spent the last week reading very alarming weather reports about the snowstorms and blizzards descending on Iowa as that state is poised to become the first state on Monday to cast real ballots for the 2024 presidential nominee of both parties.
Seeing that the state was being swarmed by a dangerous blizzard, we decided it would be a good idea to send Michael Tracy there to cover the election for us on the ground.
So that's what we did.
Michael will join us tonight from Des Moines to tell us about what he has been seeing and hearing, how he's been barely surviving this blizzard, and including a story about how he was almost arrested for the crime of trying to ask Nikki Haley a question.
And then finally, the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, is an organization we frequently criticize on this show for a variety of reasons, and yet we think it's very important, journalistically, that sometimes when a group that you generally dislike or are denouncing does something noble and positive, it's important to take note of that, to report it, and to give credit where it's due.
The ADL has launched a campaign to correct one of the worst, most systemic
Finally, the ADL is launching a campaign in conjunction with several prominent Jewish celebrities in Hollywood, as well as agents and producers and studio executives, to once and for all try and create at least some minimal space for American Jews to play some role in Hollywood.
And we'll tell you about that.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Earlier this week, as part of one of the many judicial cases brought against him, President Trump and his lawyers asserted a theory of presidential immunity that was extremely broad and President Trump and his lawyers asserted a theory of presidential immunity that was extremely
And as a result, a lot of hypothetical questions were asked by judges in order to test the outer boundaries of that immunity, such as, does the president have the power to order a SEAL team to go and assassinate And because they were asserting a very broad and virtually absolute theory of presidential immunity, they had to say yes.
And that created all kinds of angry headlines where a bunch of neocons and never Trump conservatives and media liberals were expressing this terror and this outrage.
Look, Trump has this extremely fascist and extremist view of presidential power that basically has no limits.
One of the reasons why I've been so disgusted and so indignant about how not just the liberal establishment but the Republican establishment has unified in response to President Trump is because so often they accuse him of doing things that they themselves pioneered.
They pretend that it's something that only Donald Trump would do, that it comes from Donald Trump, that he is the creator and the originator of it, when in fact it actually came from the very Bush-Cheney operatives that are now in alliance with the Democratic Party and who lead the way in corporate media in claiming that they're so noble, they're people of such good conscience, they're such American patriots, they believe so much in the rule of law.
That they're setting aside their ideological differences to stand behind Biden because Trump is just such a grave threat to the rule of law.
And the idea that presidents have no limitation on their power is one that came not from Donald Trump, but from the Bush-Cheney administration.
They exploited 9-11 in order to usher in these radical theories of executive power under Article 2, which I know about because they're the reason I started writing about politics.
I was practicing constitutional law at the time.
And felt that there was not nearly enough attention in media paid to these dangerous and radical theories that were consuming civil liberties in the United States and checks and balances.
And I began writing about those.
And that's one of the reasons why it sickens me so much to watch the very people, not just to cheerlead it from the sidelines, but who implemented it while in power, Now, posture and feign as though they're offended by the very theories that they themselves played such a key role in ushering into our political life.
Now, that is the context for what has just happened where on Thursday, the Biden administration decided that it was going to bomb 16 different sites in Yemen.
We haven't been bombing Yemen for over a year.
There's a ceasefire that has been somewhat informal but nonetheless been holding between the Saudis who were originally fighting with the Houthis in Yemen.
That was a war that began under President Obama.
President Obama extensively helped the Saudis in that war in bombing the Houthis.
We were bombing them for many years.
We created the worst humanitarian crisis before Gaza in Yemen.
Where millions of Yemenis were on the brink of starvation.
We decimated that country helping the Saudis bomb Yemen, but it hasn't been happening for quite some time.
And so the decision by the United States in partnership with the British to bomb Yemen is essentially a new escalation.
It's a new war in the Middle East that was not previously underway.
And it obviously emanates from the original conflict that the United States involved itself in, which is the war between Israel and Gaza.
Here is how the New York Times yesterday decided to describe what happened in its headline.
Quote, the regional war no one wanted is here.
How wide will it get?
Now, of course the Biden administration has been saying we don't want a regional war.
The Israelis have clearly wanted one.
They've been attempting to escalate the war with Hezbollah and Hezbollah has been playing its role but clearly been restrained thus far.
The Israelis clearly want to use the opportunity of what they're doing in Gaza to also go to war with their enemy in Hezbollah.
Early on in the conflict, back in October, mid-October, the Biden administration deployed to that region, two gigantic aircraft carriers and a whole bunch of other new military assets that they specifically said were there to, in the first place, try and deter other attacks on Israel, but in the event that that was unsuccessful, to then protect Israel with our Military hardware there with our combat troops.
This is a deliberate decision to involve the United States in the very high likelihood of a new war, not just the one in Gaza, but any escalation.
And there was no attempt to go to Congress and request from Congress any kind of authorization.
Over the last month, the United States has been threatening the Houthis that if they continue their attacks on ships in retaliation for the destruction of Gaza, Then the United States will begin bombing Yemen.
So this isn't an emergency.
This wasn't something that was a shock.
There wasn't an attack on the American military that Biden had to respond to in an emergency way without time to go to Congress.
This is something that the Constitution is specifically contemplating Congress needs to approve.
The United States, the Biden administration, the presidency wants to involve our country In the very high likelihood of a new war or an escalation of a current war, Congress needs to assent to it because that's the way the American people assent to being involved in a new war.
And yet, that did not happen here.
Here's what the New York Times said.
With the U.S.-led attacks in Yemen, there is no longer a question of whether the Israel-Hamas war will escalate into a wider conflict.
The question is whether it can be contained.
That is exactly right, that part.
We have been talking from the beginning of this war about all the different reasons why as an American you ought to be concerned about the full-scale support given by the United States government to Israel.
Not just because of the costs to American citizens, the financial cost, the security cost, the moral cost to helping the Israelis destroy Gaza, but also To the American standing in the world, but as well as the risk of escalation.
That's one of the things we've been emphasizing is that this war can very easily spiral to include many other countries in the region.
That's an extremely dangerous thing to do.
Remember, we've all been saying we're done with endless war in the Middle East.
And yet, we now have a clear escalation.
The question is, how far will this escalation go?
Quote, from the outbreak of the Israeli-Hamas war nearly 100 days ago, President Biden and his aides have struggled to keep the war contained, fearful that a regional escalation could quickly draw on American forces.
Now, with the American-led strike on 16 sites in Yemen on Thursday, there is no longer a question of whether there will be a regional conflict.
It has already begun.
The biggest question now are the conflict's intensity and whether it can be contained.
This is exactly the outcome no one wanted, presumably including Iran.
Quote, this is already a regional war, no longer limited to Gaza, but already spread to Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, said Hugh Levin, a media expert for the European Council on Foreign Relations.
And I think that's a crucial thing to note as well, as we've been covering this for almost two weeks now.
That before this bombing on Yemen, There is a bombing near Baghdad that infuriated the Iraqi government and blamed the United States for.
There has been repeated bombing campaigns by the Israelis in Syria, as well as attempts by the American military bases in Syria and Iraq to launch what they call retaliatory strikes against Iranian assets in the Middle East that they say are attacking our bases in Syria and Iraq.
Why do we have bases in Syria and Iraq?
And then obviously there has been a flare up involving Beirut and northern Israel between the Israelis and Hezbollah.
So there has already been escalation.
But this is now a direct engagement of American combat troops in this war.
Washington, he added, wanted to demonstrate that it was ready to deter Iranian provocations.
So it conspicuously placed its aircraft carriers and fighters in position to respond quickly.
But those same positions leave the United States more exposed.
The Houthis have been fighting a war now for many years.
They are very battle-tested.
It's a lot like the Russians, whose military has been fortified by two years of hardcore fighting.
They don't seem afraid of engaging the United States.
In fact, they continue to attack ships.
They haven't killed anybody, by the way, but they have attacked ships, they have seized the boats, they have taken the crews hostage, and they're obviously trying to make it difficult to pass through the Red Sea for any ships that are linked to either Israel or the United States, any country they blame for the destruction of Gaza.
They're doing it in the name of solidarity with the Palestinians.
Whether that's their actual cause or not, that's their stated cause.
And it is a powder keg in the Middle East.
It always is.
And we are now involved.
Primarily due to Israel and yet another Middle East war.
Now, as I said, we're going to debate the merits of this.
Republicans are overwhelmingly, yet again, cheering President Biden just like they cheered his policy in Ukraine to involve the U.S.
in a proxy war there, just like they cheered his policy of supporting Israel, just like they cheered his antagonisms toward Beijing.
Republicans are largely on the merits, cheering President Biden yet again.
But there are some members of Congress objecting on what seems, again, to be this legalistic, annoying ground that President Biden didn't go to Congress and get congressional approval, but which in fact goes to the heart of how our constitutional republic and our structure of government actually functions.
Here is Congressman Ro Khanna, the Democrat from California quote the president needs to come to Congress before launching a strike against the Houthis in Yemen and Involving us in another Middle East conflict this that is article 1 of the Constitution I will stand up for that regardless of whether there is a Democrat or Republican in the White House Senator Mike Lee, the Republican of Utah, said, quote, I totally agree with Ro Khanna.
The Constitution matters regardless of party affiliation.
Senator Rand Paul, the Republican Senator from Kentucky, said, quote, once again, President Biden is acting without congressional authority.
Only Congress can authorize military action like this.
Now, I'm going to get to what I know a lot of people believe allows President Biden to do this, which is a law called the War Powers Act.
Which, the War Powers Resolution, which cannot override the Constitution.
Obviously, acts of Congress and laws cannot override the Constitution.
But if you actually look at what the War Powers Resolution said, there is almost no doubt that even if you want to give it all the credit in the world as valid law, it does not authorize President Biden to, out of the blue, bomb Yemen with no congressional approval.
One of the ways that you can know that is to look at what Democrats, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, said about this very question.
When it came to the question of whether President Trump in 2020 was permitted to engage in similar bombing campaigns, including in Iran.
Here is Joe Biden on February 7, 2020.
Quote, as president, I will use military power responsibly and as a last resort.
We will not go back to forever wars in the Middle East.
That's what he said as part of the Democratic debate.
We will not go back to forever wars in the Middle East.
Here's what he said when it came to the question of whether Trump could bomb Iran in January.
Quote, "Let's be clear, Donald Trump does not have the authority to take us into war with Iran without congressional approval.
A president should never take the nation to war without the informed consent of the American people." Here's Kamala Harris in February of 2020.
Quote, "For too long, Congress has abdicated its responsibility to authorize the use of military force.
We can't afford to let that continue and allow Trump to further escalate tensions with Iran.
I voted early yes earlier today to restrain Trump's authority on military conflict with Iran.
So when Democrats were seeking power, Biden and Kamala Harris, they were essentially saying, That the War Powers Resolution does not permit the kind of bombing that they just ended up doing without congressional approval.
One of the most principled members of Congress when it came to constitutional authority was the former Republican Congressman Justin Amash, who served as a Republican from Michigan for a decade in Congress.
And here's what he wrote earlier today.
Quote, one of the most frequently misrepresented federal statutes often falsely used to justify unconstitutional presidential war powers is the War Powers Resolution or Act.
If only more people would read it.
Contrary to what you may have heard about the War Powers Resolution, it does not allow the President to take military action for any reason for 60 to 90 days without Congressional approval, so long as the President notifies Congress within 48 hours.
That is the claim that you constantly hear, that the War Powers Resolution allows Congress, allows the President rather, to just a 60 to 90 day free shot of using the military however he wants.
Remember, it was Article 1 of the Constitution, which defines the power of the legislative branch of the Congress, that says only Congress has the power to declare war.
It then makes the President Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, in Article 2, that defines executive power, but only when There's an actual war when there's a military that's convened.
We weren't supposed to have a standing army in the United States.
They were petrified, the founders were, of a permanent standing army.
And I'm about to show you that this is one of the things the founders most eagerly wanted to avoid.
And so the idea of presidents as commanders-in-chief simply meant that when Congress authorized a war, it was the president who then executed it.
You need one commander-in-chief of the military once there's a war, but only Congress can authorize the use of military force.
The president can't both start a war and then execute it, as has now become the norm in the United States for reasons that are very dangerous.
Amash goes on, the War Powers Resolution states clearly, quote, The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances are exercised pursuant to, one, a declaration of war, two, specific statutory authorization,
Or three, a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its own forces.
Of the three cited authorities, not one indicates a presidential power to take unilateral offensive military action.
The first two authorities allow the president to take military action, but only with Congress's expressed approval.
And then the third authority, the emergency, allows the President to take defensive military action without Congress' approval in the event of a specific type of national emergency, such as a sudden unforeseen attack on the United States that happens too quickly for Congress to meet, necessitating immediate action to protect Americans.
It is that last situation that the War Powers Resolution provides for the aforementioned 48-hour report.
Think about what that means.
It's very commonsensical.
If a foreign military attacks United States homeland or just suddenly starts attacking military bases or ships overseas, the President can't just allow those attacks to continue because he doesn't have time to convene Congress.
Imagine if Congress were on vacation.
If Congress couldn't be convened, of course the President in an emergency situation for a limited amount of time has to be able to order the armed forces to defend the United States until Congress can convene.
But that is only supposed to be in an emergency situation where there's no time to convene Congress.
That is not what happened here.
The United States has been threatening Yemen for weeks with this kind of an attack if these attacks didn't stop.
They've been planning it.
They've been gathering an international coalition.
There was more than enough time to go to Congress and get congressional approval, and yet they specifically chose not to do that.
It is illegal and unconstitutional.
Now, you can write that off as being unimportant, and I'm going to show you why that is not a rational or cogent response.
What I will concede Is that in general the solution to this when the president starts a war without the authorization from Congress required by the Constitution is the branch of government whose prerogatives are being violated is the one that's supposed to defend those powers.
So Congress does have a solution.
Instead of just going on CNN and whining and complaining or posting grievances on Twitter They could, for example, cut off funding for any further operations in Yemen to prevent Biden from proceeding with this military action.
The reality is that the reason Congress is happy for the president to fight wars without authorization from Congress is that Congress doesn't actually want this responsibility.
They don't want to have to run for re-election having cast hard votes about whether or not we should go to war.
They're more than happy to let the President make that decision on his own while they sit back and complain and chirp, oh, they should have come to Congress to do it.
And that in itself is a major problem in our government, that Congress has basically abdicated its responsibilities and its powers to the President.
But basically what we have now is exactly what the Founders were desperate to avoid.
A standing military, so we have a permanent military, not one that is convened and assembled through conscript and voluntary fighting in the event of a war that Congress authorizes and funds and then the President executes.
That was the vision.
We have a permanent army.
Obviously, it's not going anywhere.
There's an army automatically and every year, not just funded, but funded to almost a trillion dollars a year, infinitely more than any other country on the planet spends.
And then not only do we have this permanent military under the president's command, but then he gets to decide which wars are fought and how those wars are fought, almost with no input or checks from any other branch.
The exact kind of concentration of power in the executive branch that began in earnest after the War on Terror and has really Now become the normal way of doing business in Washington because Congress doesn't want this responsibility.
Now, I want to show you a few of the reasons why this matters so much and why the design of our country depended upon avoiding exactly this situation.
So here back in 2005, on the blog that I started called Unclaimed Territory, I write about these issues.
I started it in late October of 2005.
This article was December 17, 2005, so less than two months after I first began writing about politics.
The title was Bush's Unchecked Executive Power versus the Founding Principles of the U.S.
And the article was designed essentially to say that the unlimited presidential powers that Bush and Cheney were claiming in the name of the war on terror was a core violation of everything the founders warned about.
Quote, underlying all the excesses and abuses of executive power claimed by the Bush administration is a theory of absolute unchecked power vested in the presidency, which literally could not be more at odds with the central founding principles of this country.
Quote, the notion that one of the three branches of our government can claim power unchecked by the other two branches is precisely what the founders sought first and foremost to preclude.
And the fear that a US president would attempt to seize power unchecked by the law or by the other branches, i.e.
that the executive would seize the powers of the British king, Was the driving force behind the clear and numerous constitutional limitations placed on executive power.
It is these very limitations which the Bush administration is claiming that it has the power to disregard because the need for enhanced national security in time of war vests the president with unchecked power.
But that theory of the executive unconstrained by law is completely repulsive to the founding principles of the country, as well as to the promises made by the founders in order to extract consent from a monarchy-fearing public to the creation of executive power vested in a single individual.
The notion that all of that can be just whimsically tossed aside whenever the nation experiences external threats is as contrary to the country's foreign founding principles as it is dangerous.
Madison, James Madison, emphasized in Federalist 51 that liberty could be preserved only if the laws enacted by the people through the Congress were supreme and universally binding, quote, but it is not possible to give each department an equal power of self-defense.
In Republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.
An extremely potent demonstration that the Bush administration's claim to unchecked executive power is fundamentally inconsistent with the most basic constitutional safeguards comes from one of the unlikeliest corners, Antonin Scalia's dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld in 2004.
Now, this was the dissent in this case, but he wasn't dissenting on the grounds of these principles, which he laid out.
I want you really to listen, because this is Antonin Scalia, a defender of broad, robust executive power.
Talking about how crucial it is that we avoid a situation where the president commands a standing army and then can exercise the powers of the military without congressional approval.
This is what Scalia wrote, quote, and he wrote it in 2004.
The proposition that the executive lacks indefinite wartime detention authority over citizens is consistent with the founder's general mistrust of military power permanently at the executive's disposal.
In the founder's view, quote, the blessings of liberty were threatened by, quote, those military establishments which much gradually poison its very fountain.
Quoting The Federalist, number 45, written by James Madison.
Then Scalia said this, quote, no fewer than ten issues of the Federalist were devoted, in whole or part, to allaying fears of oppression from the proposed Constitution's authorization of standing armies in peacetime.
Many safeguards in the Constitution reflect these concerns.
Congress's authority, quote, to raise and support armies was hedged with the proviso that, quote, no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years.
Except for the actual command of military forces, all authorization for their maintenance and all explicit authorization for their use is placed in the control of Congress under Article 1, rather than the President under Article 2.
As Hamilton explained, the President's military authority would be, quote, much inferior to that of the British King.
Quote, it would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces As First General and Admiral of the Confederacy, while that of the British King extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies, all of which, by the Constitution, would pertain to the legislator, the Federalist No.
69.
A view of the Constitution that gives the executive authority to use military force rather than the force of law against citizens on American soil flies in the face of the mistrust that engendered these provisions.
The whole point was that there's no more consequential decision that can be made by a government than whether to go to war.
Typically it means that the citizens of the country may be called upon to fight that war and they certainly are going to be called upon to pay for it.
And the only way that decision could be just, said the founders, as recognized by Scalia, as through pervades all the Federalist Papers, Was if the citizens give their consent to that war through their elected representatives in Congress.
That was the whole design of the Constitution and how the separation of powers was to function.
Now just to underscore how it was the Bush and Cheney administration where all of this became really called into question for the first time in a long time.
Which is why it sickens me to watch Bush Cheney operatives and their supporters, or their liberal allies, pretend that they're the ones defending these principles when they were the ones who waged war on them.
Here's a New York Times article, news article, December of 2005.
"Behind power, one principle as Bush pushes prerogatives.
A single fiercely debated legal principle lies behind nearly every major initiative in the Bush administration's war on terror," scholars say.
"The sweeping assertion of the powers of the presidency." From the government's detention of Americans as enemy combatants to the just-disclosed eavesdropping in the United States without court warrants, the administration has relied on the unusually expansive interpretation of the president's authority.
That stance has given the administration leeway for decisive action, but it has come under severe criticism from some scholars and the courts.
With the strong support of Vice President Dick Cheney, legal theorists in the White House and the Justice Department have argued that previous presidents unjustifiably gave up some of their legitimate power of their office.
The attacks of September 20, 2001 made it especially critical that the full power of the executive be restored and exercised, they said.
That's where this all comes from.
From the very neocons and bushing the operatives that we are now told are the defenders and guardians of the rule of law.
Here is James Madison in the Federalist Papers number 47, quote, the particular structure of the new government and the distribution of power among the different parts.
That's what he was writing about.
Quote, the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands Whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justifiably be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
That, more than anything, is what they were seeking to avoid.
That one part of government made all the decisions, such as when to assemble the military, how to assemble it, whether to start new wars, and then how to fight it.
Here's an article I wrote from early 2007 where I said our Supreme General has spoken, and this is so fundamental to the debate that people were having at the time that has now been forgotten.
Quote, the idea that Americans should refrain from debating the propriety of using military force I was responding there to a interview that Dick Cheney had given about the unpopularity of the Iraq War, where he said, look, we don't care if the American public turned against the war.
It's our decision whether to continue to fight it.
It's not for the American public to decide.
And so that's what I was talking about.
when I said the idea that Americans should refrain from debating the propriety of using military force is about as foreign to our political traditions as anything can be.
The Constitution, while making the president the top general in directing how citizen-approved wars are fought, ties the use of military force to the approval of the American citizenry in multiple ways, not only by prohibiting wars in the absence of a congressional declaration, but also by requiring congressional not only by prohibiting wars in the absence of a congressional declaration, but also by requiring congressional approval every Public opposition is the key check.
on the ill-advised use of military force.
In Federalist 24, Hamilton explained that the requirement of constant democratic deliberation over the American military is, quote, a great and real security against military establishments without evident necessity.
Finding a way to impose checks on the president's form-making abilities was a key objective of the founders.
In Federalist 4, John Jay identified as a principal threat to the republic.
A principal threat to the Republic, the fact that insufficiently restrained leaders, quote, will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for purposes and objects merely personal, such as a thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambitions, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans.
These and a variety of other motives which affect only the mind of the sovereign often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.
I know when you talk about the Federalist Papers and old court rulings it seems crusty, it seems archaic, it seems like it doesn't matter in the face of what people might think is an important and legitimate bombing of Yemen.
But it matters a lot in terms of the kind of country we have.
And John Jay is explaining why.
There are all kinds of corrupt motives that presidents have to start wars without the consent of the American people.
That's the reason why it's so much more than just some sort of legalistic obligation or ceremonial requirement that Congress openly debate whether this war is actually worth having, whether the risk of escalations are worth it, whether it's worth putting American lives in harm's way.
What the likely retaliatory effects of the war will be, how long we're going to stay in this war, what the purpose of it is, what the outcome is, what the mission is, how to define success, when it's going to be over.
Those are all things that get examined when you actually debate the war in Congress that you don't have when the president just gets to decide on his own to deploy the military and start bombing and then justify it afterwards.
And this is what we have lost completely to the point that now Biden can start a new war, which is what he just did in Yemen yesterday.
And very few people, you have a handful of members of Congress, are willing to stand up and object because it's treated as though it is just a bureaucratic and annoying requirement when it's actually fundamental to everything that the Republic is.
All right, we're going to be back in just a second.
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When it comes to a president's foreign policy, obviously any wars that the president chooses to fight become the defining prongs of what that foreign policy is.
And for the Biden administration, the first three years of it, we now have three wars, depending on how you count, three major wars.
One, obviously, is a decision to have the United States be the primary sponsor and proxy of the War in Ukraine, the war against Russia in Ukraine.
The second is the decision to fully fund and arm the Israelis in their destruction of Gaza, even though it has often meant skirting Congress, not just in the way I just talked about with Yemen, but even sending arms to Israel without involving Congress in any way, something that members of Congress have objected.
And then the third is this new decision to Use U.S.
combat troops to bomb Yemen in retaliation for the attacks on U.S.
and Israeli ships in the Red Sea, which in turn is retaliation for the Israeli bombing and destruction of Gaza.
Now, One of the notable aspects of this foreign policy, and if you really wanted to, you could throw in there, Biden's policy toward China, since it is generally agreed that China has become the number one competitor of the United States, so obviously any foreign policy toward China is crucial.
If you look at those, let's say, four key prongs of Biden's foreign policy, Ukraine, Israel, Yemen, and China, The establishment wing of the Republican Party, the dominant wing of the Republican Party represented in the presidential race by Nikki Haley and in the Congress and the Senate by people like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton, are fully on board with all of those policies.
The policy toward China has been to militarily encircle it, to put bases in places like South Korea and Japan and the Philippines and off various islands to essentially militarily encircle the Chinese.
Biden was the first president in decades to explicitly state the U.S.
would go to war with China in order to defend Taiwan.
And almost all of these foreign policy prongs, the core ones that define the Biden approach to the world, have received applause from the vast majority of the Republican Party, which supported the war in Ukraine, which obviously supports the U.S.
paying for and arming of Israel, which supports the bombing of Yemen, and which supports an antagonistic and aggressive posture toward China.
Here is Ben Shapiro, Yesterday, just as one example, who spent 15 minutes or so on his program justifying and cheerleading the decision of the Biden administration to bomb Yemen.
Not just the act of bombing Yemen, but the rationale for it.
Now obviously Ben Shapiro is somewhat of a special case because he is somebody who has long wanted the American Armed Forces to be used to fight against Israel's enemies.
It's something that is a very consistent part of his worldview, but it's not like he's aberrational in that regard.
There are a lot of people who believe that the United States should devote everything it can, its resources, its bombs, its military, to seeing the world through the eyes of Israel, to see Israel's enemies as the United States' enemies.
And so obviously with the Houthis saying, we're against the destruction of Gaza, we're taking retaliation against Israeli ships and American ships, Ben Shapiro's thrilled that there are now combat troops of the United States Armed Forces now actively fighting in the Middle East against one of Israel's enemies.
Not just the Houthis, but in Ben Shapiro's eyes, an arm of Iran, the ultimate enemy of Israel that neocons and warmongers have long wanted the United States to fight.
Remember, at the start of the war in Israel, people like Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley were saying, "Let's bomb Iran." Lindsey Graham recently said, let's bomb Iran off the map.
And so this obsession with going to war with Iran has long been a centerpiece of traditional Republican, Bush-Cheney, kind of Mitt Romney foreign policy that would fit perfectly comfortably into the GOP establishment prior to Trump.
Which they're eager to bring back.
So here's Ben Shapiro.
I think it's worth going through a few excerpts of what he said.
Again, in defense of the Biden administration's decision to launch a new war against one of Israel's enemies.
So last night, CENTCOM, as well as a bunch of other foreign countries, part of an American alliance, struck at targets.
So last night, CENTCOM, as well as a bunch of other foreign countries, part of an American alliance, struck at targets in Yemen.
They struck the Houthis.
The Houthis are a ragtag group of terrorists who have taken over a large swath of Yemen after a massive civil war between the Houthis And we'll get into the history of what exactly happened with the Houthis.
Suffice it to say, the reason that all of this is happening right now is because the Houthis decided that they were going to try to act as an Iranian proxy arm and generate support for Iran by attacking Israel and then by, more largely, attacking shipping in the Red Sea.
Okay, he's exactly right.
He's seeing the world through the Israeli perspective.
He's saying the motive of the Yemenis is to strike back at Israel as punishment for what they're doing in Gaza.
have much of an impact on world opinion or on the world at large, but attacking ships in the Red Sea absolutely does.
Okay, he's exactly right.
He's seeing the world through the Israeli perspective.
He's saying the motive of the Yemenis is to strike back at Israel as punishment for what they're doing in Gaza.
So the question yet again becomes, how is that an American war?
The Yemenis haven't killed anybody.
They haven't sunk any American ships.
They have been trying to impede the flow of commercial travel through the Red Sea by some countries that they perceive as being responsible for the Israeli war in Gaza.
But why does this mean that the United States now has to go to war because the Houthis are angry about what the Israelis are doing?
This is something we talked about from the start.
That the cost that the United States was incurring in order to defend this foreign country yet again is not just measured in the billions of dollars that we're going to spend to transfer to the Israelis, nor in the already depleted stockpiles we're going to use to transfer the weapons to them that they're using, as everyone knows, to destroy Yemen.
Whenever there's a video of babies that are killed or children being operated on without anesthesia.
Broadcast to the entire world.
Everybody knows that it was American weapons that did that and that bears a real cost.
But the biggest cost is the danger that we're going to now have the Ben Shapiro's of the world demanding and now getting and now celebrating The deployment of American troops in an actual fighting war, in a shooting war, against other Israeli enemies in the Middle East.
That's what we have and that explanation of his makes clear that that is actually the dynamic that he is happy about.
Let's watch a couple other excerpts.
the prior year.
Well, all of this drove last night an allied attack on certain resources in Yemen controlled by the Houthis.
It was a telegraphed punch, meaning this entire exercise was designed to deter the Houthis, not designed to actually kill or destabilize the Houthis, who in fact, as we say, are a terrorist group that governs a large swath of part of Yemen.
The reason to telegraph the attack is to allow Iranians to get their military forces out of the way so as not to provoke and provoke some sort of escalation with Iran more directly, because of course, Iran has lots of forces on the ground helping out the Houthis in Yemen.
Now obviously needless to say, anybody who dislikes Israel or who fights against Israel is a terrorist.
That's pretty much the definition at this point.
Any group that defies the orders of the United States or Israel is a terrorist organization.
And even though the Houthis are now running and governing Yemen.
Ben Shapiro wants to call them a terrorist organization.
But as he just said, it was a campaign that we had telegraphed for many weeks.
It was something that was very well planned.
Everybody knew it was coming.
And that begs the question that we raised in the first segment of why the Biden administration could not simply have gone to Congress to debate whether or not It was time to go start a new war, a risk a new war, in order to fight against one of Israel's enemies in the Middle East.
It should have been openly debated and then voted on in Congress for exactly the reason Ben Shapiro just said.
There was no emergency there.
It didn't pop out out of nowhere.
The opposite was true.
It was very deliberate.
And we had weeks to plan it and threaten it, which means we had ample time to have gone to Congress to debate it and to seek its authorization.
A blow.
The Houthis, of course, say they're not going to be deterred because the way this works in the Middle East is that you have basically terrorist groups that provoke a response from an overwhelming power, they get their asses absolutely kicked, and then they claim that just because they survived they won.
That's what's currently going on in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas provokes a gigantic Israeli military response, the largest Israeli military response to any attack since 1973.
And they get their asses absolutely handed to them.
It's cowardly stuff.
He's sitting in the studio making millions of dollars a year.
And then if they are breathing at the end of it, they claim victory.
The Houthis are playing the same game.
It's really, honestly, cowardly sort of stuff.
Nasser al-Din Amir, Houthis.
It's cowardly stuff.
He's sitting in the studio making millions of dollars a year, maybe millions of dollars a month, to cheer the deployment of American troops in that region to defend this foreign country that he acknowledges he has a great deal of loyalty to and love for. to cheer the deployment of American troops in that region before.
The Houthis are confronting the most powerful military in the world and are saying they're going to continue to do it because of the cause that they believe in, which is trying to impose some cost on Israel and the United States.
For killing an enormous number of civilians in Gaza and destroying civilian Palestinian life.
Now, whatever else you want to say about the Houthis, what they are doing is not cowardly.
Cowardly is sitting in a studio sending other people to war for your pleasure or for your agenda.
That's cowardly.
Spending your whole life demanding more and more wars that you and your family never go fight.
That's cowardly.
Cowardly is not what the Houthis are doing.
whatever else you might want to think about them.
The official told the Wall Street Journal, this is a brutal aggression.
I love this.
It's a brutal aggression.
Amir, a Houthi official told the Wall Street Journal, this is a brutal aggression.
I love this.
It's a brutal aggression.
Honest to God.
If America and its allies wanted to commit quote-unquote brutal aggression against the Houthis, this guy would not be alive to talk about it.
He said we will undoubtedly pay its price.
We will not waver in our stance to support the Palestinian people regardless of the cost.
After the coalition strikes, the U.S.
had not seen any direct retaliatory action directed toward U.S.
or other coalition members in the Red Sea.
And again, the strikes came with a lot of warning.
One week ago, the U.S.-Britain key allies issued an ultimatum saying, stop it.
And then they didn't stop it.
And then on New Year's Day, Biden convened his national security team to discuss the options.
And then despite the coalition warning, the Houthis fired an anti-ship ballistic missile that fell into the water within sight of a commercial vessel.
Now the Houthis knew that the United States and its allies were going to strike all these targets and so they had relocated some of their weapons and equipment and fortified others.
The question is whether this is going to deter further action from the Houthis.
The answer is probably not.
When you telegraph punches like this, it is very unlikely that that is going to convince the Houthis to stop what they are doing.
No, I agree with him there too.
This is very unlikely to be the end of this escalation.
The This war is likely to go on, which means we have a new Middle East war.
The question is, for how long it will go on?
For how many more exchanges of violence will it entail?
How many people will be killed?
How much retaliation will there be?
Ben Shapiro seems extremely unbothered by those questions.
Ones that should have been debated in Congress, that we should still be debating now.
Because what he wants is what he has.
That's why he's so happy.
Mainly the exploitation of the most powerful military in the world in defense of this foreign country and its deployment against its enemies.
But if you're somebody looking at it from an American perspective, those are to be of great concern to you.
He's saying this is almost certainly not the end of it, just the beginning.
Which means we've now bought ourselves another Middle East war of exactly the kind that Joe Biden, when running, said he would not give the United States because nobody else wants these Middle East wars.
Let's look at the last excerpt before we go to freezing cold, devastatingly cold Iowa and speak to Michael Tracy, who we sent there.
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And so it's very important that the West did something about this, just on a practical level.
Now, on the moral level, the Houthis are some of the worst people on planet Earth.
In a legitimately evil, awful group.
So the Houthis are an Iranian proxy group.
Iran, as we've explained, is a terror sponsor.
It has its tentacles all over the Middle East.
It has its tentacles in Iraq, obviously, where they've had significant... I have to laugh so much.
I mean, I really laugh.
Like, I find it darkly funny when people like Ben Shapiro complain in general that Iran has all of its tentacles in the Middle East.
Nobody has more tentacles in the Middle East than the United States.
At least Iran actually is in that region.
The United States is on the opposite side of the world.
The United States has not just tentacles but military bases and control over multiple Arab states.
We fund these Arab dictators like the Saudis and the Emiratis and the Egyptians and the Jordanians and the Qataris in order to do our bidding.
And we're actually there fighting as usual.
You have to go back to the 1970s to find a decade in which the United States did not bomb Iraq, just Iraq.
And you notice there that Ben Shapiro is complaining that the Iranians have their tentacles in Iraq, a country that he cheered on as the United States went and packed up its military over across the world to invade and then occupy it for the next 15 years.
But those kinds of hypocrisies, those kinds of discrepancies don't enter his mind because he's looking at the world from a very self-centered, self-interested perspective.
Secondarily, the American perspective, primarily the Israeli perspective.
And so, if you look at it from those interests, in that order, Then you're going to see the American involvement and control of the Middle East as something that we need more of.
whereas somehow it makes the Iranians the most evil people in the world, that they're trying to exert influence, counter-influence in their region.
...big impact on the government of Iraq.
They have their tentacles in Syria, where they're allied with Bashar Assad.
They have their tentacles in Lebanon, where they effectively control the government via Hezbollah.
They have their tentacles in Hamas.
They have their tentacles in Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
And they have their tentacles with the Houthis.
Those tentacles are all over the Middle East.
Now, one of the big problems that Iran historically has had is that Iran is Shia, and a huge percentage of the Middle East is Sunni.
And because of that, there is not a lot of solidarity between the Shia and the Sunni.
I mean, the reality is that whatever the hatred is for the Jewish state in the Middle East, the hatred for Israel, that's mostly a sideshow between the ongoing wars that have been happening between Shia and Sunni over the course of the past several decades.
A multiple more Arabs and Persians have been killed in a variety of wars since the 1980s than anything that's happened with regard to the Jews.
And all the hatred of the Jews does is it allows for the possibility of some sort of cross-cultural communication between Shia and Sunni in the Middle East.
And that's what the Houthis are trying to do right now.
They're trying to rally support to the Iranian side in any sort of Shia-Sunni conflict by siding with the Palestinians.
Because one of the things that's happened is that the Palestinians, being an incredibly radicalized population that literally no Arab state will take in, not only will no Arab state take in the Palestinians, Arab states have expelled the Palestinians before.
In the aftermath of the Gulf War, 200,000 to 300,000 Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait because they sided with Saddam Hussein in his war against Kuwait in the first Gulf War.
So, none of the Arab states are interested in taking in the Palestinian population, and so the Hamasniks went over to Iran, and they worked a deal where Iran became one of their chief suppliers.
So let me just say two things here before we listen to this last part, which is, first of all, I hear this claim now all the time.
radicalized population, destabilized virtually every regime they've come into contact with.
By the way, this is why you're seeing Jordan right now issuing these very loud statements because they are deeply afraid of their own population.
70% of Jordan is Palestinian and they are afraid.
So let me just say two things here before we listen to this last part, which is, first of all, I hear this claim now all the time.
It's supposed to make you think that the Palestinians are subhuman and undesirable, that even Arab states don't want to take in the Palestinians.
hands.
Now, first of all, one of the reasons why states like Egypt don't want to take in the Palestinians is because they don't want to help Israel in what is their stated goal in this war, which is to ethnically cleanse Gaza by transferring all of the Arabs and Palestinians out of there by putting them into other countries and then taking control of Gaza.
But the other part of it is that when he says Arab countries don't want this, what he means are Arab dictators, U.S.-supported, U.S.-implemented Arab dictators, who are there precisely to suppress the actual sentiments of the population.
Like he just said, 70% or 80% of Jordanians want their government not to be an American puppet, but want them to be on the side of of Palestine because there's a huge Palestinian portion of Jordan, of the Jordanian population who is Palestinian.
That's why we have a king, a ruling family that we protect and pay for to keep that population's sentiments from being expressed.
Same as in Egypt, same as in Saudi Arabia.
So when they say, oh, even Arab states, what they mean are even the dictators that we control.
But the most offensive part of this, this idea that, oh, well, obviously the Palestinians are bad people because no one wants to take them as refugees, is that after World War Two, there were millions of Jewish refugees who survived the Holocaust in Europe.
And no country wanted to take them.
There were ships that came to the United States that FDR turned away during the war.
And a lot of them ended up having to go back to Europe and dying as a result.
The US wouldn't take any Jewish refugees and then after the war, The European Jews stayed for at least two years in horrific refugee camps that a lot of them said were as bad as the concentration camps from which they were liberated, except for the fact that they just didn't get killed.
But other than that, it was the same kind of treatment.
They were fenced in conditions that were horrible in nature because no state would take European Jews as refugees.
So, if the fact that no Arab state wants to take in Palestinians as refugees tells us something about the character of the Palestinians, which is the point of this argument, to make you think that, what did it say about the character of Jews and European Jews that no one wanted to take them, if you apply that same reasoning?
The reason people don't want to take refugees is the same reason we're having such a Fervent debate in this country about trying to close our borders and why so many people in Europe are so angry about taking refugees, including in Ireland, for example, where they're furious about the number of Ukrainian refugees they had to take in.
Because it becomes a burden on the population.
People don't want refugees in their country.
But let's listen to this last part because this really gives away the game of how Ben Shapiro and his comrades are actually looking at this conflict and the reason they want The American military is so involved.
Listen to this. Listen to this.
Because what you say is, look at all these Arab states.
They want to make peace with Israel so they can side against us.
But the real enemy is the Juden!
The real enemy is the Jews!
And if we all remember that, then maybe we won't have any Abraham Accords.
And Iran, of course, hates the Abraham Accords because it makes them a more minor player in the Middle East.
It creates an overwhelming coalition of force that exists around its borders.
That's the whole purpose of the Hamas attack.
It's why the Yemeni Houthis are now involved in a fight that really has nothing to do with them.
Because again, this is all being directed from above by Iran.
Now, in all of that, do you hear anything about the interests of the American people?
The lives of the American people?
The irony is that the U.S.
is actually helping Iran, if that's really their goal, uniting the Middle East in defense of the Palestinians and against Israel.
But if you listen to Ben Shapiro talk about why this conflict is so important to him, why he's obsessed with the Middle East, He's not very subtle about what his priorities are, and they really do not have anything to do with the interests of the United States or the lives of the American people.
And one of the reasons why I wanted to play you so much of that is so that you could hear that laid out, that vision laid out, that worldview laid out, because I think it just so vividly speaks for itself.
All right, Michael Tracy is on the line.
We're going to get to him in just a second.
He's very patient, as always.
He's a very tranquil, calm person.
He understands that sometimes we're a little bit late when we're doing the show.
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And we'll be right back with Michael Tracy reporting from extremely freezing cold Iowa.
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The first votes for the 2024 presidential race will finally be cast this Monday at the Iowa caucus.
And speaking to us from Des Moines is Michael Tracy, who is on the ground reporting where he's been the last couple days and will be there at least through Monday.
Michael, tell us what is going on there.
I hope you're staying warm.
It's so cold and so hazardously cold that I just saw a TV reporter doing a stand-up shot on the scene to make it seem as though they're right in the midst of things ahead of the caucus, and they're doing it just from the hotel lobby.
Well, you were saying, just to get people, I mean, it's usually like a boring thing to talk about the weather, but you were making the point that you actually think the weather, given how extreme it is, might actually affect voter participation and the outcome.
I mean, how cold is it, and what do you, I mean, are people in Iowa accustomed to this sort of cold?
Obviously, it can get cold in Iowa in January, but this is anomalously cold, at least in terms of the recent precedence for the Iowa caucus.
So on Monday, the latest forecast I saw is that in Des Moines, it is going to get to negative 17 degrees toward the evening, and the Iowa caucus is held at 7 o'clock at night.
So the temperature even dips further potentially.
And then in other parts of Iowa, it might get even colder to that, as low as negative 20.
Now, I don't know.
Common sense seems to tell me that there are – Portions of the potential electorate, like older people or people who just might not want to, people who might be more casual voters or less diehard voters, who might be dissuaded by such extreme temperatures.
Now, if I ever, every time I mention that, I always get scolded by people who tell me I don't understand how how strong of a constitution the people in the Midwest have to endure even such harshly cold temperatures.
But it seems like this is on the upper edge of the spectrum in terms of what is potentially tolerable.
So on Monday, it will already have been below zero temperatures in Iowa for several days.
So stuff's going to be frozen.
I don't know how operable the roads will be.
And yeah, it is usually boring and tedious to talk about the weather.
It's just small talk, but I think it actually could have a...
Fairly significant effect.
Actually, Ron DeSantis suggested as much himself, and he thinks that it could be to his benefit, because he's saying that that will put a premium on what he claims is his campaign's superior organization and superior enthusiasm among a contingent of activist-minded supporters and volunteers, whereas at least, as he put it, Mahalia, and I guess even Trump, maybe have less
Well, if nothing else, you're not from Iowa, and so you're not accustomed to it, and so the fact that it is so bitterly cold makes it at least very entertaining, at least for me knowing that you're there.
Let me ask you, I've seen you talking about Both the Haley and the DeSantis campaigns.
I actually want to get to some of the things that you saw when you were covering each of them.
Is Trump also kind of running around the state holding rallies the way the DeSantis and Haley campaigns are?
Trump has not been here yet since I arrived, which was on What was it, Tuesday, Wednesday?
He has had some surrogates who've been here.
I believe Don Jr.
was here two days ago or so.
But Trump physically is not anywhere near as present here as Haley and DeSantis.
Trump has instead opted to attend optional court hearings for his myriad court cases, including his civil trial in New York City.
Where he had his lawyers put in a special request for him to make a statement in his own defense in open court during the closing arguments.
So apparently Trump calculates that that's more politically advantageous to him than actually coming to Iowa, which might not be entirely inaccurate.
I've seen some media speculation that the media outlets have basically stopped covering Trump's rallies, but they do cover all of his court hearings.
So if he goes to those court hearings and then gives a press conference, as he's been doing, that is a way that he can force the media outlets to cover all the things that he can say I guess the assumption of everybody that I've been seeing and reading and hearing is that on Monday it's a contest for second place, that Trump's obviously going to win Iowa and win it by a significant margin.
Have you seen or heard anything there at all from anybody that leads you to question that?
Well, I question it because caucuses are inherently more volatile.
than primaries.
Because remember, to attend a caucus or to participate in a caucus, you don't just show up to a polling place, cast your vote after five or ten minutes, and then leave.
You have to dedicate basically a full evening's worth of activity to taking part in, what is it, it's a in-person event where the idea is you're supposed to attempt to persuade your fellow citizens to come and
Join your candidates team and you're supposed to debate and it's actually somewhat interesting of a democratic exercise, but it inherently incentivizes participation from a more activist-oriented or energized core of voters than just your standard primary.
And caucuses are controversial because there are people who can't attend for several hours on a Monday night because they have other stuff that they have to do.
I just talked to somebody, I actually was chatting with the woman who manages the restaurant where DeSantis had his campaign event last night that I attended, just kind of just asking about her political views, whether she follows politics at all.
And she seemed roughly apolitical to me.
But she said that even if she did have a strong enough preference to go caucus, she couldn't go anyway, because she has to work.
I mean, she can't get off from from 7 to 9pm or whatever on a on a Monday night.
So given the given the volatility inherent caucuses, and the weather, and so forth, I don't know that I would be hyper confident in the result being exactly as you know, the pundit consensus seems to predict. the pundit consensus seems to predict.
But at the same time, Trump has always seemed to me to be a statistically insurmountable lead.
So even taking into account some of that volatility or unpredictability around the nature of caucuses, it seems like Trump almost certainly has enough of a buffer that it would be shocking beyond belief if he were not to at least win by a relatively sizable margin – But who knows?
You gotta be a little bit humble here.
Yeah, you know, before I got to the class tonight, our plan was we were going to cover Yemen last night and the bombing there last night.
And then tonight we wanted to do a show reminding people of what actually happened in 2020 in the Iowa caucus on the Democratic side.
As you probably recall, they implemented these new systems that had been designed by some Obama party hack.
And it basically made the outcome of the election completely unknown for many days.
Did Pete Buttigieg win?
Did Bernie Sanders win?
They really never ended up getting a very clear read on what the actual outcome of the caucus was.
I think they kind of declared both Buttigieg and Bernie the winner.
Bernie went on to win both New Hampshire and Nevada, so it probably didn't make a big difference.
But there was that incredibly embarrassing, and I think just utterly inexcusable, inability to just count the votes and determine Because remember, Glenn, the caucuses are party-run.
after 2016 when there was all of that, basically that cheating by the DNC in order to make Hillary Clinton win and Bernie Sanders lose.
All right, let me ask you about the- Because remember, Glenn, the caucuses are party-run.
They're not state-run.
And so you could have a situation where, in the case of the 2020 Democratic caucuses, is the state party will just decide to introduce a new stupid app that is supposed to be its tabulation counter for votes cast, and then it creates a whole catastrophe.
Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
And so forth.
And with the Republicans, I mean, Trump has such a dominant position within the party apparatus that to defy him is really taking a risk, especially for party officials in a state like Iowa, which is inordinately Trump supportive especially for party officials in a state like Iowa, which is inordinately Trump supportive and gravitated strongly toward Trump overall in terms of its overall electorate
Remember in 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama won the state of Iowa both times in the general election and then it flipped dramatically to Trump in 2016 and 2020.
I think it was one of the most extreme flips anywhere in the country in terms of Obama versus Trump.
So there's a, it's not just a matter of, you know, a state official neutrally holding a primary.
It's all kinds of So one of the things we were taking joy with and hoping for when we asked you to go to Iowa for us was that you would be subject to these extremely cold conditions, almost inhumanely cold.
But what we did not hope for or anticipate was that you would end up getting arrested, and yet exactly that almost happened.
When you were covering the Nikki Haley campaign event and tried to ask a question, explain to us, because I think it's so actually illustrative of how this kind of circle of control and security is being increasingly constructed around political leaders in the West where nobody can even get close to these people to ask an unscripted question, at least for some of them.
It really illustrates that to me, which is why I want to hear about that.
Tell us what happened and what you did and what the outcome was.
Yeah, well thankfully I don't think I exactly came close to being arrested.
Well they did say if you came back you would be arrested.
That is true.
Yeah, yeah, I'll get it.
People think that I'm like on the run or a fugitive and there's going to be like Iowa State Police barging down my hotel room door or something.
Yes, so today actually most of the campaign events were canceled because not only is it Oppressively cold.
There was actually a giant blizzard today, which is apparently a once in a 12 year snow event for Iowa.
So there haven't been many campaign events to attend today in person, but there were yesterday.
And so I did go to a Nikki Haley event in Ankeny, Iowa, which is a suburb of Des Moines.
And when you enter, you had her little operatives or handlers or You know, minions wandering around the premises trying to identify who might be media and who would therefore need to abide by their tyrannical dictates in terms of how they can comport themselves in relation to this event.
So I just avoided those people and tried to not make eye contact with them.
And I wanted to go get a decent position because my ultimate objective was to see if I could ask Nikki Haley an unscripted question, which is essentially to Nikki Haley like, I don't know, like trying to give her hemlock or, you know, trying to throw dynamite at her.
It's so terrifying that it must be avoided at all costs.
And one way they tried to avoid this terrible scenario unfolding is that her campaign people put a strip of masking tape on the floor, and they wrote on it, no unescorted media beyond this point.
Now, I'm not really all that familiar with what it means to be escorted versus unescorted media.
I would think that most people in the media who are self-respecting would probably not want to subject themselves to being, quote, escorted by some campaign operative as though they're like, you know, in kindergarten and they need to be holding teacher's hand to like you know, in kindergarten and they need to be holding teacher's hand to like go from one classroom to And also, under what authority are they even trying to claim that unescorted media are not permitted?
Are these people, like, some kind of a royal court where they can issue these these decrees?
I mean, there's no binding authority behind this.
I just ignored it and got myself a decent position.
And then what happened was Nikki Haley did not take any questions during the event itself, so she just gave a canned version of her stump speech, essentially, and she rattled off her promotion of DeSantisLies.com, which I don't know if you saw her debate with DeSantis the night before, but she must have said DeSantisLies.com like 25 times.
So she repeated that.
She had a couple of minutes to spare, gracefully, to have members of the public come up and take a photo with her.
Oftentimes, when a candidate holds an event, whether it's in Iowa or New Hampshire or one of these early states, there will be a time afterwards where the public can just co-mingle with the event, and sometimes reporters will try to approach them, or maybe they'll hold a press gaggle.
Not so with Nikki Haley, as I found out, because I waited on the public line to approach her, which I guess was forbidden of me, but who cares?
And I quickly introduced myself and tried to ask her a question about Ukraine policy and her minions sprung into action.
They were saying the woman who was, I guess, her body woman said, you know, where's your phone?
Give me your phone.
Her point being that if I didn't want to just take a selfie with her or have my phone, give her my phone so we could take a quick photo with her, then I wasn't permitted to be there.
And so they started shouting.
I got the impression that Nikki Haley actually would have been willing to maybe take the question, but the campaign have been given such strict instructions, apparently.
To expel anybody who attempted to ask a question that she could barely even hear my full question over the shouting of her operatives who were, you know, going crazy.
And I did get the question out, but she only murmured, you know, half an answer.
What I asked her was, you know, given her strident position on the Ukraine war and wanting to send weapons to Ukraine in perpetuity and defeat Russia, would she Remove the ostensible limitation that the Biden administration has imposed on Ukraine against using U.S.
weaponry to strike targets inside Russia.
Now, that ostensible limitation that the Biden administration has imposed on Ukraine has in practice not been upheld because there have been a great number of documented instances in which U.S.
armaments have actually been used for striking targets inside Ukraine, and we don't have full documentation of what Ukraine uses anyway.
We know that the U.S.
is basically subsidizing their entire war efforts, so the distinction of whether or not they're using U.S.
armaments for strikes inside Russia is kind of immaterial.
But I did want to know if she would formally, if she had her way, get rid of that restriction.
And over the shouting, I'm not sure if she fully heard me, but she did say that she wasn't aware of that issue of The Biden administration imposing that nominal restriction and that she would have to look into it.
So it was a non-answer.
But at that point, her campaign personnel had summoned a police officer to come and say, OK, that's it.
We're out of here.
And led me away.
You know, I wasn't handcuffed.
I wasn't grabbed or anything.
I was just told that I must leave and I must, you know, accede to his escorting me out of the venue.
And as we were leaving, he said to me that, you know, he was basically on his headpiece or his headset talking to God knows who.
And he says, you know, they want you out and they're going to, you know, set you for trespassing.
And if you return, you'll be arrested.
I said, who wants me out?
He said, the building owners.
So I'm to believe that whoever owned this commercial complex where there was this restaurant type place where Nikki Haley happened to hold her event, they were on direct, you know, real time speed dial communication with the police determining what members of the public they wanted in there or not.
And it wasn't anything to do with the campaign or whoever, whatever security team, the campaign Yeah, maybe they recognized you from Twitter and just happened to be the owner of the premises, one of the people who dislikes you on Twitter, or maybe it was the Haley campaign who was actually the people not wanting you near her candidate.
It seems like the second option seems to be the more Pause one.
Now, you also went to a DeSantis campaign event where your experience was pretty different and you were actually able to ask him a question that he seemed to like in terms of wanting to answer and he gave an answer that I think was very illuminating and actually pertained to the topic we spent most of our show on.
So talk about what happened when you went there and the question you were able to ask him.
Yeah, so even before yesterday, DeSantis was actively setting up a contrast between himself and Haley by pointing out that he, DeSantis, was on principle going around and making a point to take unscripted questions and even engaging with the media, engaging with members of the public, not having this tightly controlled atmosphere where any deviation from the standard script is like some kind of nightmarish
Eventuality.
And so at an event that he held yesterday in Ames, Iowa, at a barbecue place, he did go around and take questions from the public and from whoever else.
And I was able to ask him, you know... We have the video.
Let me show the video of your asking him this question and getting the answer.
There are reports tonight that the Biden administration is now bombing those Houthi targets in Yemen.
Is that something that would require congressional authorization, in your view, having served in Congress yourself?
Or what is the role of Congress there in declaring war or not?
So it's interesting.
I think it's a great question.
So if you have military action on the seas, what does that look like in terms of congressional authorization?
We actually know what the founders thought, because some of the main military skirmishes They were happening at the dawn of the Republic were against the Barbary pirates.
And so Congress did authorize that through funding and other stuff.
They did not formally declare war against the Barbary pirates.
And I think the founders didn't view that as rising to the diplomatic level where you would need it.
Obviously, Congress would have to agree to fund those operations.
But I think that if shipping is stopped and you're taking defensive actions, To me, I don't think that that rises to the level where you're going doing an all out war on another country.
But at a minimum, Congress would need to be able to be willing to apply funding to ratify that.
And I think that they would do that.
But that's really I mean, if you go back, that's the thing with terrorism.
You know, these Barbary pirates, they were the original terrorists that our country had to deal with.
And this was a huge, huge issue for years and years and years.
And I think all of our early presidents took action to fight the Barbary Pirates.
And so I view it as similar to that.
I think these are stateless actors.
I think they're operating outside the traditional laws of armed conflict.
And I think you have a right to ensure that commerce continues and that they're not allowed to just bomb ships and do other things.
I don't know.
And no confidence that Biden will actually do that in a way that's effective and appropriate.
And so, you know, I am concerned just any time he's blundering into anything, like, what's the result going to be on that?
Because I don't think there's been very many things you can point to that he has touched that has ended up turning out well.
I mean, I think it's been a comedy of errors since he's been president.
I mean, so I have to say, you know, credit to him.
That's not only an answer, but like a thoughtful answer.
Obviously, DeSantis is a lawyer.
He studied constitutional law.
He was in Congress, as you said.
And it was interesting because the distinction he was really drawing, which has become the main distinction.
I mean, we were talking before about this need for Congress to authorize military force The Constitution talks about declaring war, but the way in which Congress has, when they do vote, which isn't often, but for example when it was time for them to vote on the invasion of Iraq or time to vote for the regime change war in Libya, it was framed not as declaration of war but an authorization to use military force.
But as we saw in the debate in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, it entails the same kinds of deliberation, the same kinds of debate, the same kinds of questioning of executive branch officials.
So you end up getting this deliberation, this involvement of Congress.
And even though he was saying these early examples didn't involve declaration of war, they did involve Congress authorizing military force.
Because so much of these early presidents were very worried about the ability of a president to maintain a standing army that would then be under his command even to start wars without the approval Congress.
I thought that was a very interesting answer.
He seemed to have appreciated the question, which is not always the case with Governor DeSantis when he's taking questions.
And I don't know, the contrast was extremely stark between how he handled that and how Nikki Haley did.
Yeah, I mean, I think part of the reason why he hasn't always been so friendly to journalist questioning is because oftentimes journalists don't have much of an interest in delving into substance like this.
I'm not saying I'm the most substantive person on earth or anything, but you know, you'll usually try to kind of get him, goad him into attacking Trump.
or they'll try to basically provoke him to making some kind of incendiary comment about some other issue.
And I actually wanted to hear him elucidate his views on this because I hadn't heard him do so before.
And just as his event was underway, the news had broken that the Biden administration had authorized this round of strikes in Yemen.
So I do credit him for, number one, taking the unscripted questions.
And number two, having an unusually robust answer to the question, even if I would...
Probably contest some aspects of it on the substance, and I'm curious what you would contest about that answer, Glenn, because one of the assertions that he makes is that this precedent of the Barbary Wars from 1801 to 1815 serves as the reason why Biden or any other president would not have to first go to Congress to obtain authorization before taking of this kind, and
DeSantis says that that precedent is up because, like the Barbary Pirates, the Houthis are stateless actors and akin to just terrorists.
So they're not state actors in a way that might actually compel that requirement to go to Congress first.
I think that seems to me a very questionable distinction.
I mean, the Houthis do control, they're the governing authority of Yemen, effectively.
Exactly.
They're the governing authority of Yemen.
We, exactly.
And we've been at war with them for a long time.
And he did say, even in his answer, that Congress didn't declare war, but they did authorize the spending and authorize the use of the military force, which, like I was saying before, did entail at least some deliberation and some signal of approval on the part of the Congress, just like we had did entail at least some deliberation and some signal of approval on the part
It wasn't a perfect procedure because I would have preferred that the United States Congress declared war in Iraq in order to invade it and have a war against it, but they did at least authorize the use of military force.
And even DeSantis in that answer was saying that was how, at least on several occasions early on, the situation with these pirates was handled.
But I don't even like the analogy for the reason that you said.
I think the Houthis are far more akin to...
to a state actor, it seems like a much more conventional war.
You have the governing body of a country that controls the military that we're now attacking.
These are not just Romeless pirates at sea who are just randomly attacking ships.
There are geostrategic implications that ought to be debated.
The Houthis are firing ballistic missiles.
Right.
And so they have some fairly formidable military capacities that would seem to put them on a level beyond just aimless pirates roaming the high seas.
And secondarily, it's not as though the Biden administration just sent in some naval assets to strike at Houthi vessels in international waters or to take strictly limited preventative action on the high seas or something.
The strikes that were launched yesterday, it was about 60 or up to 100, I'm not sure the exact number, missile strikes that hit military installations in Yemen.
So it's not just maritime warfare.
This is physical land warfare.
At least the installations that were targeted were on the lands.
So I just don't think that the Barbary Pirates thing serves as a particularly apt precedent.
But it is interesting that that is what is invoked.
And DeSantis must have some knowledge that is beyond the norm for a presidential candidate even to be able to invoke that precedent.
He went to Yale Law School.
He was in Congress.
He talked about those issues a lot.
And he wrote a book, actually, in 2011, which was a critique of Obama, but it was framed around how Obama is not abiding by the will of the founding fathers.
And so it got into questions of constitutional law and so forth.
Yeah, I don't know if you heard, but in our segment, I focused a lot on what the founders said about exactly these issues, and they were very adamant that The thing they feared most was the ability of the president to start wars without the approval of Congress.
All right, Michael.
It was great to see you.
We hope, I guess, that you stay warm until Monday, at least, when I hope you are extremely cold.
You'll go to the caucus and we will talk to you then about the things you're seeing and hearing.
We'll hope to have some results.
I think we probably will by the time we're on the air.
So we hope to speak with you on Monday.
We will speak with you on Monday.
And in the meantime, Glenn, you enjoy lounging on the beach and sipping your fruity drink.
I will be thinking about the blizzard in Des Moines coming down on your head, hoping for even more cold.
All right, Michael, have a nice evening.
All right, bye-bye.
Alright so we have one last segment to do as I noted at the top of the show the Anti-Defamation League is an organization that when mentioned on the show is typically the target of our criticism and tonight we are actually able to heap praise on it and credit because they are launching a campaign to combat a very longstanding systemic and quite notorious problem in the United States, which is the inability of American Jews going all the way back to the founding of Hollywood to be able to have any role whatsoever in the entertainment industry.
As you probably know, when Hollywood was first founded, it was run by a system of studios, run by people like Louis B. Mayer and Warner Brothers, and there was simply no way for any Jews to ever have any role in any of these studios.
Once the studio system started declining in the 60s and 70s, the power shifted to agents and then to mega agent firms where American Jews have been notoriously excluded.
And as well, even on the level of acting, there are virtually no American actors who are Jewish who have ever been able to get any prominent roles.
And so fortunately, the Anti-Defamation League is using the momentum of October 7th and all of the concerned about the crisis of anti-Semitism to finally stand up, finally, and demand that something be done about the refusal of Hollywood and demand that something be done about the refusal of Hollywood to allow American Jews to play any role in the entertainment
Here is Jonathan Greenblatt, who is the head of the ADL, and he tweeted on Wednesday, quote, it's critical for any push for diversity in any industry to be inclusive of Jews.
If your project of inclusion perpetuates the exclusion of Jews, you are failing.
So we applaud the many celebrities for their courage in standing up, speaking out, and writing to the Academy to demand change.
Now, one of the things we've been trying to get conservatives to understand is that the efforts by people like Bill Ackman to get people fired from American universities for having supported too broad of a theory of free speech is that they're not trying to eliminate the DEI system, they're trying to expand it in order to include American Jews, to give American Jews even more privileges within academia than they already have.
Now, like Hollywood, the Ivy League schools are notorious for not allowing American Jews there, for not allowing any American Jews to succeed within academic institutions.
The ADL has been fighting against that too.
They have this new ally in Bill Ackman, And that's what the ADL is saying is, we like DEI, we like all these diversity programs, we want them expanded though to include the need to include more American Jews, especially now in the entertainment industry where they're notoriously underrepresented.
And here from The Hollywood Reporter, which is the article the ADL promoted, describes what the campaign is.
From January 9th, you see at the top there's several Jewish celebrities, Juliana Margolis, Greg Berlanti, Miriam Billick, among the 260 signatories of the letter to Film Academy critiquing Jewish exclusion from diversity standards.
And you see the subheadline there, quote, an inclusion effort that excludes Jews is both seeped in and misunderstands anti-Semitism, reads the letter.
letter organized by the Jew in the City Hollywood Bureau for Jewish Representation.
That's what it says there.
I'm not sure if that's actually the correct formulation, the Jew in the City of Hollywood Bureau for Jewish Representation.
But in any event, the article then says the following, quote, amid Israel's ongoing war with Hamas, Jewish entertainment figures have come together to issue an open letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, criticizing their exclusion from being specified as an underrepresented group.
Quote, an inclusion effort that excludes Jews is both steeped in and misunderstands anti-Semitism, reads the letter, organized by the group Jew in the City's Hollywood Bureau for Jewish Representation.
Quote, Jewish people being excluded from the Motion Picture Academy's representation and inclusion standards is discriminating.
is discriminating against a protected class by invalidating their historic and genetic identity.
The Academy Standards unveiled in 2020 as part of its Aperture 2025 Diversity Initiative describes a number of identities that it considers, quote, under-representative groups, women, LGBTQ+, having cognitive or physical difficulties, or being deaf or hard of hearing, as well as under-represented racial or ethnic or being deaf or hard of hearing, as well as under-represented The standards which ask productions to submit self-identifying demographic information about its cast and crews in order to qualify for best picture consideration do not ask for religious status.
The JITC letter explains that being Jewish is not always a matter of faith.
Quote, while many mistakenly believe that Judaism is only a religion, Jews are actually an ethnic group with a varied spiritual practice that not all observe.
Jews are an indigenous people to the Middle East with a contentious presence there for over 3,000 years, said the letter.
And then went on to complain about things like sometimes there are Jewish characters in films and yet not always Jewish actors are cast to play those roles.
Sometimes they go to non-Jewish actors and they want to put an end to that.
So this has been one of the great taboos in American life.
Everybody knows that Hollywood has spent a hundred years now just Basically, operating as a Jewish free zone, Americans have no role whatsoever in the entertainment industry.
They have been aggressively and severely underrepresented.
It is one of the grave injustices in American political life, just like at Ivy League schools, where finally the plight of Jewish students at Harvard and Penn and Yale and the like are being Attended to for the first time in many decades and finally there's something being done about the under-representation of American Jews in the entertainment industry.
It is a hundred years too late, but thankfully the ADL is taking the lead in that.
They are always at the forefront of the most just causes and we want to recognize the important and noble crusade that they have undertaken because we often criticize them and we think sometimes credit is due where it's due and it's certainly due in this case.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form, where you can listen to every episode 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow the show, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
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Those aftershows are available exclusively for members of our Locals community, and if you want to become a member, Which gives you access not only to those twinkly aftershows but also to the daily transcripts of every show that we produce here to the original journalism that we publish there.
There's a weekly thread that I try and interact with as much as I can to respond to questions and critiques and the like that also are part of the Locals community and it's really the place that we rely on to support the independent journalism that we're trying to do here.
You can simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page, and it will take you directly to the Locals community.
For now, those of you who've been watching, we are, as always, very, very appreciative, and we hope to see you back on Monday night and every night at 7 p.m.
