Andrew Clavin and guests dissect Trump’s 2018 Kavanaugh nomination—a calculated move to lock in a conservative judge (300+ rulings) before midterms, sidestepping GOP defections. Jenna Ellis defends his originalist record, dismissing critics’ claims of ideological drift, while Clavin argues his "restrained" approach could still dismantle Roe by pushing abortion battles to states. Matthew Peterson of the Claremont Institute exposes the administrative state’s unchecked power—unelected agencies like the EPA and IRS, shielded by precedents like Chevron, rewriting laws without accountability, a legacy of Wilsonian progressivism. The episode ties Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy to broader resistance against bureaucratic tyranny, framing it as a fight for constitutional limits over progressive consolidation. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump has literally picked Adolf Hitler to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court.
According to the New York Times, a former newspaper, Trump literally brought the 20th century German dictator literally back to life by harnessing the lightning in the laboratory in the penthouse of Trump Tower.
It's a liar.
It's a liar.
New York Times editor-in-chief blithering prevarication III issued one of his more restrained statements on the Trump Supreme Court pick.
I can't stop it.
And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also chimed in with these carefully planned remarks.
Schumer promised to stage a Senate fight against the candidate that would divide the country, destroy the Democratic Party, threaten the future of free governments throughout the West, and put an end to life on Earth because he said, quote, it's the right thing to do, unquote.
Angry leftists, meanwhile, gathered outside the Supreme Court to protest the selection of literally Hitler to the court.
Women's March organizer Sharia Moore told reporters, quote, this Supreme Court pick is literally Hitler, literally a short German man with a small mustache who literally caused World War II.
He will literally murder Jews, enslave women, and set the entire world on fire.
And as a radical Muslim, I feel that's literally my job, unquote.
After the hysteria at the New York Times, the rhetoric from Chuck Schumer, and the protests at the Supreme Court, the president appeared on television to announce that his Supreme Court pick was actually constitutional adherent Brett Kavanaugh.
Whereupon the whole process began again.
Skillshare's 30 Day Challenge00:04:02
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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All right, we've got such a busy day with the Supreme Court.
We've got Jenna Ellis who's going to come and talk to us about what she thinks.
She is the director of public policy for the James Dobson Family Institute.
You've seen her here every time we get a Supreme Court decision.
She has been excellent talking about this, so we'll ask her about the court.
I have a lot to say about this.
We also have Matthew Peterson on from the Claremont Institute, one of my favorite think tanks.
He's going to be talking about the administrative state, which is a big deal because Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's Supreme Court pick, is a tremendous foe of the administrative state.
It is one of my bugbears.
It is something I'm absolutely obsessed about.
But because it sounds so boring, we need people who can describe it to you.
And Peterson does an excellent job of putting this in context.
And also, we've got the new left-wing dictionary, right?
D is for diversity.
That's coming up.
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So there are three aspects to this I want to talk about.
I hope we can get them all in today.
Jenna's going to help us with the judicial, the legal aspects of it.
Political Aspects of Brett Kavanaugh00:15:44
But first, let's talk a little bit about the political aspects of picking Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.
You know, I think the politics here, before we even talk about whether the pick is good, I mean, I think the pick is good.
I don't think it's the best pick, but I think it's a good, solid, conservative pick.
But I think the politics is absolute genius.
You always have to guess what a, you start to learn what a president is thinking.
Trump is particularly hard because he's such a showman.
He's always doing this kind of magician trick where he is distracting you with chaos while he's governing basically in a big, good central right-wing conservative way.
But he has all the noise and the craziness going on.
So people forget that he's actually doing this solid job.
But he picked the safer of the nominees.
A safe guy.
Guy has been around for a long time in Washington, been on the circuit court.
He's got over 300 decisions for people to look at, which is great.
Even though I liked Amy Barrett a little more, she has much less of a paper trail.
And I think a paper trail is more important than personality and more important than philosophy because it tells you what you actually do when you get on the court.
But I think the thing about this is, is that because he's a safe bet and because he's so credentialed, he will probably get confirmed before the midterms, right?
Unless they find that he's got buries, literally bodies buried in his backyard.
Senators from red states are going to be under a lot of pressure.
They're going to try and pull that thoughtful rejection thing.
Well, I thought about it, but I rejected it.
I do not think that's going to play in states like Indiana and North Dakota and West Virginia.
West Virginia, I think Trump won by like 40 points.
I don't think Joe Manchin is going to get away with saying, well, I thought about it, but I couldn't do it.
So they're caught in a vice.
All of these things, I mean, you know, I think because he's basically such a solid establishment candidate, he's not going to get defections from, you know, the usual suspects, Lisa Murkowski from Maine and Susan Collins from Maine, Lisa Murkowski from Alaska.
But the thing is, here's the big thing.
If the left gets hysterical and starts to scream, he's literally Hitler, as they're already doing, they've already started with this.
But if they get hysterical, they're going to shoot.
They're going to use their ammunition.
They're going to blow their ammunition.
Then, if Trump gets re-elected, as I think as things stand right now, I think he will.
And if Ruth Bader-Ginsburg dies, which after all has to happen sometime.
I mean, I've said this before, but they keep putting out these pictures of her doing the plank, you know, but they don't mention that she actually hasn't moved from that position for 35 days, so it may actually just be rigor-mortis.
I'm not sure.
But I mean, if she goes, this liberal justice, and then he picks Amy Barrett, somebody like that, a real solid, all-the-way conservative, he's got him, right?
Because they've already done the extremist, literally Hitler stuff about Neil Gorsuch, and they've done it about, they'll have done it about Brett Kavanaugh, and it just won't play.
People just will not be listening.
And then the balance of the court can really change.
So Trump, I think, has actually, on purpose, with that instinct that he has, he has outmaneuvered them.
Let us bring, as Jenna on, let's bring on Jenna Ellis.
She's the director of public policy for the James Dobson Family Institute, an accomplished constitutional law attorney.
She's appeared just about everywhere, but most importantly, she's appeared here and will continue to appear here every time something happens at the Supreme Court.
Her book is The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, a guide for Christians to understand America's current constitutional crisis.
Jenna, you're going to have to start paying rent here.
Well, thank you so much for having me again.
It's always a pleasure to be on, and especially with all the things that are going on in the Supreme Court, I anticipate that we'll have many future conversations.
I hope so.
I hope so.
It really has been incredibly busy.
So what do you think?
What's your take?
I agree with what you just said, that Kavanaugh is really the safe pick.
And I have to ask, you know, why were conservatives so excited about Amy Barrett?
Well, because of who she was as a woman, who she was as a mother.
She has seven children.
She's very pro-life.
She's very Christian.
All of those things are incredibly important.
But when it comes to the legal of what a confirmation hearing is all about and what a justice ultimately on the Supreme Court is vested with doing under their oath of office, there really should be no significant difference between Barrett and Kavanaugh when we're talking about originalism.
And that's why I think that President Trump likely selected him because Kavanaugh will probably skirt some of the more difficult questions like Senator Feinstein posed to Amy Coney Barrett when she was up for confirmation for the Seventh Circuit.
And Brett Kavanaugh has been very, as you said, he's on the record with over 300 decisions.
He's been an originalist.
He has made decisions on the DC Circuit Court, recognizing his margins of being on the circuit court, not on the Supreme Court.
So he's not only a safe pick, but I think is one that ultimately will serve conservatism.
And when we're talking about what conservatism really means, we're conserving the Constitution, protecting, preserving the rule of law.
And so I'm actually excited about this pick.
I think that any one of the 25 would have been great, but especially right before midterms, this was very savvy of the president.
You know, I'm really happy to hear you say that because you're with James Dobson Family Institute.
So I know you're what the left would call an alt-right, far-right, right-right, alt-alt, you know, social conservative.
So you actually are happy.
I mean, I felt the same way.
The thing that bothered me about Amy Barrett is that the biography, the biography is great, but that's not always a good indication of who a person is on the bench.
I mean, that's where it all tells.
So let me ask you about some of these decisions that have given conservatives pause.
All right.
There's a couple of things.
They love the fact that he's a strong Second Amendment guy.
He's very big on gun rights.
But he had this decision seven sky.
And it was kind of a complicated thing, but this is where he said the court didn't have, his court didn't have jurisdiction over Obamacare, not because their penalty was a tax, but because it was assessed and collected as if it were a tax.
And this later people feel fed into John Roberts, I think, terrible decision saying that this was a tax and that's why Obamacare was constitutional.
Does this give you any pause at all?
You know, in looking at a circuit court judge, they are bound not only by the Constitution, but also precedent.
Because if we look at Article III, then there is one Supreme Court and any other such inferior courts, and that word inferior is key.
And so for this decision, as well as the others that some on the right do have concerns about with Kavanaugh, I think that the questions that need to come out from the GOP senators are asking him to explain his judicial philosophy.
And if he can explain this by saying, you know, I was bound by not only the law that Congress passed because taxation under the 16th Amendment, as well as in Article 1, Section 8, that's given to Congress.
And so he on the circuit court, it has to stay within his margin and within those lanes.
But if he describes it that way in his confirmation hearings, that should actually be hopeful for conservatism because when then something like Roe versus Wade and that type of an abortion decision and that type of case may come in front of him, then we can hope and expect that he will likewise stay in the constitutional lane and say those types of decisions, all of the social issues are fully unconstitutional under federalism and need to be given back to the states.
So I think that we can't just look at the ultimate decision.
We have to look at the rationale because the legal rationale is almost always the key to understanding a judicial philosophy.
Oh, okay.
You know, I want to ask you about Roe v. Wade because this is, of course, the scare tactic of the left.
This is always the thing that is up.
I have to read an ad.
Can you give me one minute of patience and I'll get right back to you?
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All right.
So Roe v. Wade, another decision that Kavanaugh was involved in in this circuit court, this was where the illegal immigrant was demanding that she be given an abortion before being deported, before anything else.
And he agreed with the court that she should not have the right to get an abortion before she was deported, that this was not an undue burden on her.
But he didn't attack Roe v. Wade in the decision.
And so conservatives felt that that was a red flag.
Is that a red flag to you?
I don't think so in the context of that opinion.
Because again, whether or not he wanted to do what we call in the legal world dicta, which is kind of the off subject and indicating where the court may go if a case arose in front of a judge that they actually had that particular subject matter.
But for him, again, this is just staying in his lane because Planned Parenthood versus Casey is unfortunately currently the precedent from the Supreme Court.
It's unconstitutional.
We've talked about that, Andrew, and why.
And yet, being on the D.C. Circuit Court, he is still bound by that and respects the rule of law, respects starry decisis as a principle.
And so to not go out of his way to attack from an ideological perspective is actually what a judge should do.
Because remember, these judicial officers are not vested with political commentary.
In fact, the Judicial Code of Ethics, which covers all federal judges and even state judges, doesn't cover Supreme Court justices.
They are not supposed to indicate their political preferences.
And so when we look at the confirmation hearings, this type of line of questioning is totally irrelevant to his fitness on the bench.
And we also have to remember, I agree with what you said in the beginning as well, that this is totally just a political talking point, because this is the left attacking President Trump.
Trump is not the one being confirmed here.
It's just a judge and whether or not he will follow his oath of office to uphold the Constitution.
Okay, great.
That's a really good take.
I have one more.
I want to run by you because these are the things that conservatives were worried about before he was picked.
Some of the reasons that they were looking at Amy Barrett and giving her better marks, basically, than Kavanaugh.
The other one was one where the Obamacare was trying to force some priests to pay for contraception, priests for life, I think the organization was called.
And Kavanaugh came down, made the right decision.
He came down on the basis of the priests' rights to their religious convictions.
But he did concede that the government had a compelling interest in providing contraception to the employees.
Now, as I read the decision, and I thought he was just saying that this is what the Supreme Court had decided through Anthony Kennedy in, I guess it was the Hobby Lobby case.
But this made conservatives very nervous.
Here's another one.
Does this, as an alt-right, right-right, alt-alt person, does this bother you at all?
Yeah, you know, that's another one that I think that that would be an appropriate line of questioning to ask him to say, where do you balance This sort of strict scrutiny versus intermediate scrutiny and these types of constitutional principles where you're balancing a legitimate or compelling governmental interest, how do you define those, versus a fundamental right.
And so the fundamental free exercise of religion.
Judge Kavanaugh has been through the Federalist Society.
I mean, I think he led one of the religious liberty groups while he was there when he was still in private practice.
I mean, he has a remarkable record on issues of First Amendment and religious liberty.
And so for these types of opinions, that's where the Senate really does need to come in and say: if this is something that's genuinely bothering conservatives, and I think that is a legitimate question for him, to just have him explain that and say, how do you, in your judicial analysis, balance this so that we can have that on the record?
Because that would be a function of his capacity as a judge.
Well, I have to say, you've given me a lot of hope.
You have a very optimistic view of this.
You obviously feel this is a strong pick.
Am I getting that right?
I do.
And I think that all four of the top candidates, as well as the list of 25, I mean, President Trump had a vetted list.
This was open and transparent more than any other president.
And so he really couldn't make a wrong decision here.
Kavanaugh was not my particular first choice.
I don't think it was with the James Dobson Family Institute.
But at the same time, we recognize that President Trump had a great list of excellent jurists to pick from.
And as long as the nominee and the eventual confirmed justice will conserve the Constitution, that's what we need to really, really care about, not their political preferences and not their personal lives.
I couldn't agree more.
Can I tell me who the first pick was?
I really liked Amy Barrett.
I also liked Kethledge.
And I liked her from the standpoint, frankly, of not only optics, but I think that we just had a trust in what her judicial philosophy was, not because of who she is as a person, but I really liked her Notre Dame Law Review article on Starides.
I think as a professor, she had a lot of judicial philosophy that was very transparent that we don't necessarily see in some of these opinions because they don't get as philosophical as they are legal.
Okay.
Jenna Ellis, Director of Public Policy for the James Dobson Family Institute, should probably just stay on the line until we talk to you again.
That was good.
Yeah.
Well, you have me on speed dials at any time.
All right.
I hope to see you soon.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Thank you, Andrew.
So that was very optimistic.
I'm really happy to hear that.
I kind of feel the same way.
I think this is a good, solid pick.
Remember, you know, the guy is, well, let's take a look at his judicial philosophy just a little bit.
He put it forward as Trump made the appointment.
He put it forward in a very succinct statement.
This is cut number two.
Diversity Means Same?00:05:38
My judicial philosophy is straightforward.
A judge must be independent and must interpret the law, not make the law.
A judge must interpret statutes as written.
And a judge must interpret the Constitution as written, informed by history and tradition and precedent.
For the past 11 years, I've taught hundreds of students, primarily at Harvard Law School.
I teach that the Constitution's separation of powers protects individual liberty.
This thing about separation of power is very, very important, okay, because it means that he will defer to the executive and he will defer to the legislature.
And you have to remember this about Obamacare.
We hated, we conservatives hated Obamacare, and we thought it was unconstitutional to fine people for not doing something.
I think that that is definitely an unconstitutional thing to do.
But also, when you respect the separation of powers, Barack Obama and his legislature were duly elected, legally elected.
They passed the law.
The Supreme Court, you want the Supreme Court to be very slow to say, no, no, no, we're going to decide what the law is.
You don't want him doing that.
And that is one of the things that makes these guys more modest, you know, more restrained than people who are strict originalists like Clarence Thomas, who just say, nope, that's against the Constitution.
You're out of here.
So he is going to be a little bit more restrained on that.
But, you know, I don't think the question is whether his philosophy of restraint, you know, he's trying to protect what they call the sovereign.
In England, the sovereign is the king or the queen, right?
And then that her power goes down through the parliament.
Here, the sovereign is the people, but the sovereign are represented in government.
They're not allowed to touch the controls of the government.
So the sovereign picks the people to represent them, then the representatives put forward.
And what he's saying is the separation of power means the judiciary, and Matthew Peterson is going to come on and talk about this and explain why this is so important.
And what the judge is saying, he doesn't want to get in the way of the separation of powers.
I think he's going to be more conservative than we fear.
It's always true that the danger is always from the left.
You know, they always say the left always gets their judges right.
Simple reason for that.
The left, all the temptations of power move you to the left.
Anybody who falls prey to the temptation of power and overuses his power will be essentially on the left, right?
Because that's what leftism is.
It's the state.
It's statism.
It's the state dictating what you do.
So it's harder to find a guy who says, yes, I'm going to make decisions that limit my power.
I'm going to make decisions that limit the power of the judiciary.
That's hard to do.
But if this guy comes through and he is more conservative, I think it's very doubtful to me that Roe v. Wade will be overturned.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, it's not going to stop people from getting abortions.
You can get abortions over the counter at this point.
Abortions are not going to go away.
But I think it would be great, not just for us, but for the left.
Roe v. Wade, repealing Roe v. Wade, would increase and strengthen federalism, the rights of the states to make their own laws about important issues.
That means that you have to go to the state, meet the people in the state, convince the people in the state that you are right, and get them to elect representatives who will vote what you want.
That would be really good for the left.
It would get them out of New York.
It would get them out of LA.
It would help them meet the people in the rest of this country, understand who they are, understand who they're talking about.
And if they really still hate them, then they can leave, which would be great for everybody.
All right, the left-wing dictionary, we'll probably be talking about this for days and days.
The fight goes on.
The hysteria from the left will be fun.
Don't forget to get your leftist tears tumbler.
You are going to need it.
But right now, let's do the lefties dictionary.
The new one is D for diversity.
D is for diversity.
In lefties, diversity is the property of being the same as everyone else.
When leftists achieve diversity, it means everyone now agrees that diversity is good.
So they are diverse because they are the same.
If anyone disagrees that diversity is good, he is different and therefore not diverse.
And that's bad.
He must be forced to agree that diversity is good.
Then he will be the same, which is diverse, and that's good.
Now, this may seem a bit strange to people who think diversity means being diverse.
Let me try to clear up the confusion.
Diverse people look diverse.
That is, they have different color skin and have sex in different ways, and some of them may even be women instead of just regular people.
But under leftism, diverse people must not be diverse in important ways, like in their thoughts or beliefs or opinions.
In those ways, they must be the same.
In lefties, that's what diversity means, being the same.
Here is a brief Q ⁇ A to help clarify things.
Q. Let's say you have a group of white men with many different opinions and viewpoints.
Some are right-wing and some are left-wing.
Some are religious and some are atheist.
Some are creative and some are more analytical.
Are they diverse?
A.
No.
A group of white people is not diverse because they're all the same.
Q.
But isn't being the same the same as being diverse?
A.
No.
Diversity means being the same in that you are diverse.
Whereas if you are all the same and not being diverse, you are not diverse, but the same.
Q.
But wait, if you are the same and being not diverse, aren't you actually diverse because you are the same?
A. You are beginning to get on my nerves.
Q. Is that diverse or the same?
Battlers of the Administrative State00:15:56
A, shut up.
All right.
That didn't work out as well as I'd hoped.
But the important point about diversity is this.
It is wrong to exclude a person because of race or sexuality or gender because everyone is the same.
And it's important to include every race and sexuality and gender because all of them are so different.
So we must be the same in including what's different because what's different is the same.
And what's the same is, of course, very different.
If this makes sense to you, you are beginning to get the hang of lefties.
D is for diversity.
I'm Andrew Clavin with the lefties dictionary.
That man is out of his mind.
All right, we've got a break from YouTube and Facebook, but come on over to thedailywire.com and listen to the rest of the show.
And while you're there, subscribe so you can be in the mailbag tomorrow.
The conversation next Tuesday.
Ask your questions.
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I mean, what else do you want for your lousy 10 bucks a month?
I mean, come on.
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I don't talk about the Claremont Institute enough.
I think it is a great think tank.
Their Claremont Review of Books is one of my favorite journals.
I don't know what to call it.
It's not really a magazine because it comes on newspaper paper, but it really is a wonderful journal of review of books and just politics in general, very deep stuff.
But they are battlers of the administrative state.
And one of the great things about Brett Kavanaugh is he has come out and said that the rule of unelected administrative bodies is not in the Constitution.
This chevron law, they call it.
Well, we'll talk all about this with Matthew Peterson because Matthew Peterson is the vice president of education at the Claremont Institute.
He directs the Institute's fellowship programs, which educate each rising generation of leaders dedicated to constitutional government.
He just completed two weeks of intensive seminars with the impressive 2018 Publius Fellows.
I know some of those guys.
It really is a great program.
Here is Matthew Peterson from the Claremont Institute talking about the administrative state.
Matthew Peterson, thank you very much for coming on today.
It's great to be here.
Thanks for having me.
You know, I want to talk to you.
Before I begin to ask you questions, I want to say that one of my gripes against conservatives is they give very boring names to things.
The left always knows to make things sound scary.
So they say like racial profiling to describe police work or objectifying women to describe the fact that men like to look at women.
But we come up with the administrative state, which is very hard even to understand what it means.
So let me begin there for in words of one syllable, describe to people what exactly the administrative state is.
Sure.
First, let me just agree with what you said.
I mean, deep state is much better.
Deep state is scary and it signifies, it's a much better signifier.
The administrative state, very simply, consists in all the departments and agencies that are ostensibly technically underneath the president of the United States.
So the administrative state is really just a collection, a large collection, a growing collection of federal agencies and departments from the EPA to the IRS, the Social Security Administration, all this, the alphabet soup of modern life, all these federal agencies and departments.
That's really what the word refers to.
So why should we fear and hate it?
As indeed I do.
Therein lies a tale.
I mean, I think most people naturally, naturally, many Americans are suspicious.
We know this from polling and our experience in our own lives of the administrative state, of this colossus, this confusing morass of bureaucracy.
So the reason I think you should fear it, though, is not, it doesn't have anything to do with numbers or statistics or the kind of buzzwords that experts use.
The reason we should fear it is because it's grown into a thing that keeps on growing, that seemingly can't be stopped, and that violates the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution.
And that, I think, is the important thing for everyone listening to understand.
We need to be able to articulate how the administrative state deviates from the principles of American constitutionalism and government.
Well, okay, how does it?
Why does it do it specifically?
Well, here we have to understand something about the founding itself and our system of government.
So from the very beginning, we had this notion of separation of powers, right?
And the idea wasn't that you separate power for its own sake.
You separate power just to throw a wrench in the machine so government isn't efficient.
The idea was you separate certain kinds of power because different kinds of power have a different kind of character.
And if you combine different kinds of power, it's tyrannical.
Everyone knows this from watching Westerns.
If anyone still watches Westerns, which I hope they do, we all know that judge, jury, and executioner is a problem, right?
We don't want the judge to be the judge, jury, and executioner.
Why?
Because we're combining different kinds of power into one man in a way that gives that person tyrannical control over our lives.
So, of course, we have three branches of government, a judiciary, an executive, and a Congress.
Congress is supposed to make the law, and Congress creates these agencies and departments that the executive directs, executing the law, and the judges then judge disputes concerning the law.
Well, the problem with the administrative state is Congress now has devolved power, has given power to these agencies underneath the president.
But A, they're not really underneath the president in the sense that the president can fire whoever he wants.
It's enormously hard to fire federal employees, as everyone kind of sort of knows, as President Trump has been talking about.
You can't fire them, so the executive really isn't in charge.
They last from generation to generation, from administration to administration.
Most people in the large pyramid stay there.
So they're not really being controlled by the executive.
Second, Congress is supposed to oversee them.
Congress is supposed to make sure they're doing a good job.
And as we see lately, Congress isn't overseeing them very well.
Congress gives away its power to these agencies, and Congress is supposed to make the law.
But when Congress has created these agencies over the last hundred years, it allows the agencies themselves to make law in the form of regulation.
And every year, Federal Register comes out.
There's hundreds of thousands of pages of regulation of essentially law with force behind it that these agencies are creating without any sort of political oversight from Congress.
So right there, you have, in a nutshell, I think, the problem of separation of powers, right?
The administrative agencies have combined the powers of Congress and the executive without political oversight and without being beholden to the people.
Okay, that is a very clear explanation of what's happening.
Give me a specific example of how it doesn't have to be a real thing, but how this could play out in a person's life.
Well, I mean, there's so many different kinds of examples.
Take one from today's headlines that I rather like.
Many, I'm sure, in the audience remember when Obama was president, it turned out that the IRS was targeting organizations that they deemed to be on the right.
They were essentially treating them unfairly, right, when it comes to taxation and auditing them and going after them in all kinds of ways.
Well, that impacted a lot of people's lives.
I've talked to people who ran nonprofits during that time who had to deal with all kinds of problems because the IRS made their lives miserable.
Now, when you think about this, this was exposed over time, right?
Congress is in charge of the IRS.
Did Lois Lerner, did these people get in trouble for what they did?
I mean, Congress should be able to turn around and say, we make the laws, we oversee the IRS.
We think you were acting unfairly, unjustly, and you helped, you know, you screwed with these people's lives.
But what really happened from that?
Who was accountable, right?
And you see this now in, of course, the really controversial stuff when it comes to the FBI and the Russian collusion and all this stuff that's in the news, right?
What you see is federal agencies, parts of the administrative state, looking over to Congress and saying, yeah, maybe kind of, we'll sort of get you the documents you want.
What you see is in the text messages between these people, a disdain, right, for the power of Congress to oversee them.
And many people's lives have been impacted throughout.
We've seen this.
They're in the headlines today.
And if you get abused by this state, by one of these agencies and you want to appeal, you have to appeal to the agency, don't you?
Yeah, that's a tremendous problem.
There's a whole administrative law system, right, a kind of shadow court system that deals with administrative law.
There's administrative law judges.
When they change their regulations, there is a process that they go through, and you can complain or say you think they should change the regulation this way and that way, but you really don't have a lot of say.
They listen.
They'll publish what they want in the Federal Register from those proceedings.
And if you really want to, you know, let's say you really feel like you need to go to court, you're facing a colossus.
I mean, you're facing a very, very powerful entity that, again, it needs to be under political control.
The real secret here to controlling the administrative state or railing it back is making sure that elected officials have say and power over it.
I keep hearing about the Chevron decision at the Supreme Court.
Is that part of this?
Is that part of the problem?
Yeah, so Chevron, I mean, the idea there was that the courts should defer to the administrative agencies when they do what they want to do.
And what we're seeing now, I think, is hopeful.
I mean, if we're going to turn this around, we need people in the courts who are willing, just like Congress needs to be willing, to really shake up the administrative state, to shake up these agencies and say, hey, we're going to hold you accountable.
You can't just do what you want according to your own regulations.
We're not going to defer to you anymore.
So one of the hopeful things for people on the right who want this, solve this problem, is that we do have a rising generation, a rising tide of people in the courts who are going to be, I think, increasingly are being put into place by the president.
Now, I think what's essential also to realize, though, is that the reason we have some of these people who will help hold the administrative state accountable in the courts is because of generations of really conservative scholarship and action that was smart, that was organized, and that looked back to find out what's the real problem.
And that's at the Claremont Institute, that's 40 years of scholarship.
I mean, we pride ourselves in kind of pioneering the notion of the progressives, the administrative state, and explaining how they arose and what the problem is.
And organizations like us, I think we really spearheaded this in many ways in scholarship.
But then we go out, you go out to people and start educating them, and then you have a whole class of new leaders who can actually tackle the problem.
Education here is an enormous problem for us, right, in solving all of this, because in most schools, you'd be taught if you're a lawyer that the administrative state is A-OK.
It's the evolution, it's progress, right?
It's evolutionary progress.
It's all good.
It is one of the things I find very frustrating.
It is great to have you come on and speak about this as clearly as you are, because it obviously is a complicated subject, but just getting to the basics of how these people can come in and really ruin people's lives.
And Brett Stevens, the columnist, once wrote that the press doesn't understand this because we're protected by the First Amendment, but you're not protected if you're running a lumber yard or just a business somewhere.
And that's where they get you.
Recently, Scott Pruitt had to resign from the EPA.
And I understand enough journalists I trust have said that Pruitt was being a little careless with his ethical decisions, but it did still seem like a kind of assassination to me.
How powerful, how hard is it going to be to go into an organization like the EPA, which has been sanctified by the left, and really reform it?
It's obviously very difficult, right?
You've seen this your whole life.
I mean, every time everyone likes to say they're going to reform things, they're going to make it more efficient.
And when you try to do that in any way whatsoever, you're fighting more than City Hall.
You're fighting the Imperial City.
So in Pruitt's case, look, I don't know the details about, you know, he resigned, but let me say that there are certainly cases I'm aware of where people were going to be appointed recently to be put in charge of these agencies.
And the agency's own lawyers, okay, their council, did everything they could, right?
Did everything they could to kick up the dust and to screw over whoever was trying to come in.
And you have to understand, I mean, there's an enormous amount of power here, and they live in symbiosis.
They live in a symbiotic relationship with Congress.
And that's what's unnatural.
That's what we need to change.
When Congress holds them to account, they should be able to say, look, we control your budget.
You better come in here and tell us, you know, Congress should put the fear of God into these departments and agencies to hold them accountable.
But they're not afraid anymore, partly because Congress doesn't even pass a budget, right?
I mean, we're just continuing appropriations, but also because Congress now, in many ways, is a creature of the administrative state.
And that's an enormous problem.
But there's a deeper, I guess, issue here, and it really is a way of simplifying the issue, all these particulars that we talk about.
And that is to understand that the progressives, the progressives really started this around the turn of the last century.
And when the administrative state was created, the people who created it, including, say, Woodrow Wilson, right, who's president two terms, president of the Princeton University, they explicitly said the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is outdated.
We need a number of experts who are rational, right, in the sense that they're not political.
They're going to have expert knowledge, and we're going to put them in charge of this.
all this change happening in modern times, and they're going to make things go smoothly.
And they specifically said this.
Wilson said progress.
He loved that word.
No word, he said, comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern men.
And everyone else in the past, they didn't think or talk about progress.
They looked to the past.
But Wilson said, we think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in comparison with which the present is nothing.
So in order to attain this glorious future, we need to put up all these experts.
And PhDs were just coming into American society at the time.
The first research universities after the Civil War, John Hopkins is the first of them.
They modeled the German research university.
And the idea is we're going to have all these PhDs.
Expert Class Professionalization00:02:52
Shudder, right?
Red flag.
PhDs and lawyers, right?
I mean, Lincoln didn't go to law school, right?
He just went to a panel and proved he knew stuff about law from apprenticeship.
We're going to professionalize these expert class.
And what you see is over the last century, that expert class being put into place through the administrative state.
So the problem here is that we've got 100 years or more of education telling American society that we need these credentialed experts who are objective, right?
They're not political.
They don't get into these debates about what's just and unjust.
They're just going to go in in a programmatic, procedural way and solve our problems.
And of course, as we all know, they haven't done a very good job.
It doesn't work out that way.
I'm running out of time, but I want to ask you the last question.
Trump seems to me to have done a really good job in rolling back specific regulations or the numbers of regulations.
But has he made a dent in the state itself?
Has he done anything to reform the system?
And is there anything you'd like to see him do?
Well, anything, I mean, this is turning around an aircraft carrier, right?
This is moving an iceberg.
It's going to take time.
So whatever he does, getting rid of regulations is certainly good.
That's been great.
But this is a long-term project.
So number one, we have to keep up with the judges.
We need judges, and this they've done a fantastic job of.
The president has done a fantastic job of this.
We're going to put in judges who will last for a long time and will help roll things back from the judiciary side.
The second thing is more complicated.
We need Congress to energize itself.
We need Congress to come back to life.
We need a new class of congressional leaders who don't look to the president and they don't look to the courts.
They look to themselves to legislate and to hold these agencies and departments accountable.
And that, I think, is something that the president is doing in many ways.
They're frustrated because many times they're complaining.
They don't know where he stands, right?
They have to stand up for themselves.
He's telling them to legislate, God forbid.
And that's making them very nervous.
But that's a good thing long term.
And I think a lot of people are getting out because they're frustrated with the situation.
Things are changing.
And that's fine.
But we're going to need to elect and look for a new class of congressional leaders who understands this problem and are dedicated to fixing it.
Really good explanation.
Matthew Peterson, thank you very much.
The Claremont Institute, one of my favorite think tanks.
Their review is one of my favorite magazines.
Thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
I hope you come back and talk again.
Thank you.
I look forward to coming back.
All right.
Before we go to sexual follies, I just have to say that this Thai rescue where they pulled those 13, 12 kids and their coach out of the caves were just an amazing act of heroism.
One of the Thai Navy SEALs, Saman Gunnan, died in the effort.
Identity and Judgment00:02:30
I have been spelunking mostly against my will because it is the most terrifying and uncomfortable experience.
Spelunking is cave exploring and to be trapped underground in a cave, truly a nightmare.
I mean, you never experienced darkness until you've been underground in a cave and turned off your headlamp.
When they talk about you can't see your hand in front of your face, you cannot see your hand in front of your face.
That's how dark it is in your underground and it's scary.
Incredible heroism, incredibly good news that they got them all out.
Sexual follies.
So, I don't, sometimes the world is so corrupt that it just becomes hilarious.
It's probably, this is probably not one of my best personality traits that I find the utter corruption of the human race kind of hilarious sometimes.
Here is pedophiles are moving to be included in the LGBT community, which I think is great.
They can call it the LGBTM community.
It'll be lesbians, gay, bi, trans, and monsters who destroy the lives of children for their own sexual gratification.
I think that's going to really increase the love that people feel for LGBTP, LGBT people.
This is this new thing.
Pedophiles are rebranding themselves as MAPS or minor attracted persons in an effort to gain acceptance and be included in the LGBT community.
This is what they call in philosophy a category error.
And I think it is part of the category error of declaring that gay or lesbian or bi is an identity.
It is not your identity.
It is something that you desire and something you do, and it is open to being judged by other people, just like all the things that you desire and do are open to being judged by other people.
If I desire to steal something out of your store and I steal something out of your store, you are allowed to say, oh, that was wrong.
You shouldn't do that.
You shouldn't desire.
You may not be able to help desiring it, but you shouldn't do it.
You are allowed to judge what people do, and that includes being gay.
We have discussions on the show and arguments on the show about the morality of being gay all the time.
That is an open discussion because people are doing things.
And when you do things, you can be judged.
I am not without sympathy for people who are attracted to things that they cannot or should not have.
I think that must be a terrible, terrible experience.
We know how powerful the sexual urge is.
If you are attracted to children, that is just, I mean, the self-hatred and compulsion must be terrible to deal with.
Too bad.
The Struggle Within00:01:05
Too bad.
You've got to deal with it.
You've got to do the right thing.
You have to.
And if you don't, you are a monster.
It is not your identity.
It is something you want.
It is a stitch, a glitch in your system, and something you want that you should not want and should not have.
And you should not identify yourself with that.
That's what I have to say about it.
All right.
We'll be back tomorrow with the mailbag.
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Send them in.
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I'm Andrew Clavin.
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