George H.W. Bush’s funeral exposed the media’s refusal to celebrate unity, with outlets like MSNBC and CNN twisting tributes into Trump attacks—Peter Baker called his body language "defiant," John Avlon framed eulogies as veiled jabs. The speaker mocks this politicization while defending Melania Trump against false slight claims, contrasting Bush’s grace with McCain’s divisive funeral. Blaming progressive culture’s hostility for fueling Trump’s rise, the episode pivots to Peter Wallison’s warning: Congress has ceded power to unelected agencies, issuing 101,000+ rules since 1993 via Chevron deference, turning laws like Title IX into tools for overreach. Only courts—with Kavanaugh and Gorsuch leading—can restore accountability by forcing clarity from lawmakers. [Automatically generated summary]
I used to make fun of the intersectionalists at the website Everyday Feminism, but over time I began to feel there was something fundamentally unkind about mocking the delusional rant of, for instance, a white man who identified as a pregnant black woman and thought it was unfair that he was required to have an actual womb before he could slaughter his imaginary child with a make-believe abortion.
Hilarious, yes, but fundamentally unkind.
But hilarious.
So today I'd like to set aside my cruel ridicule of those sad souls and instead turn my cruel ridicule on the people over at PETA, because let's face it, they're nuts too.
PETA is a group dedicated to making the lives of human beings miserable in order to promote causes that will have no effect whatsoever on the lives of animals.
For instance, PETA got the Animal Crackers Company to take the pictures of animals and pictures of circus cages off their boxes so that the animal pictures might run free before you open the box and bite the head off a zebra.
But now PETA has turned its googly-eyed attention to changing the way people speak about animals because the lives of animals will be wholly unchanged by that, but it might make people unhappy and thus serve PETA's ultimate goal.
For instance, PETA wants us to stop saying, kill two birds with one stone, and instead say, feed two birds with one scone.
I'm not making that up.
Instead of beat a dead horse, they want us to say, feed a fed horse.
And instead of bring home the bacon, they want us to say, bring home the bagels.
Now, there's more than one way to skin a cat, I admit, and it's possible PETA has hit the bullseye with these suggestions.
I personally would be willing to compromise and say, kill two birds with one scone or beat a fed horse to death.
But when it comes to bacon, I think PETA is just going to have to screw themselves and the horse they rode in on.
Quip and Defiance00:14:31
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing hunky-dunky-diggy.
Go on to zippity-zing.
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So there's a narrative going around.
The Bush funeral was yesterday.
President George H.W. Bush, obviously, was laid to rest.
And there's this narrative going around that the funeral and the tributes to the grace and dignity of President George Bush was an inherent rebuke to Trump, who obviously is a roughneck and has this boarish style.
But I think the true narrative is exactly the opposite of that.
I think that the Bushes had a very graceful funeral in which they included President Trump.
President Trump behaved very well.
And in doing that, it isolated the only group of people in the country who cannot put their rage and bile away for even a single day, namely the media.
I mean, the funeral was genuinely remarkable for what it wasn't.
It was remarkable that it was not a partisan hate fest.
We all still remember the John McCain funeral.
We don't have to remember the John McCain funeral.
It's still going on, I think.
There's still guys standing in the John McCain funeral screaming at President Bush.
You remember, everybody was, Bush wasn't invited because Trump wasn't invited because McCain hated Trump.
And the people who gave the speeches they gave were inherently attacking Trump and sometimes openly attacking Trump.
It was just an ugly thing.
And the funny thing about it was it reflected John McCain's personality.
He was an angry man.
He hated Trump.
And he even forsook his main campaign promise of repealing Obamacare just to get back, I think, just to get back at Trump and to stick it to him.
But Bush, the elder Bush, was a man of grace and decency, and he raised his family to be like that.
And so they reached out.
This is no matter what you thought of the man's politics.
He was just a graceful, elegant guy with a lot of goodwill for people.
And the Bush family reached out to the White House and said, look, we want you very much to be included in this, and we want the funeral not to be about you and not to be about politics, but to be about this man who has passed away, this obviously a patriot who has passed away, and that's what we want to talk about.
And so we retreated to what was a show of what you would either call grace and unity, or if you're a cynic, you would call it sentimentality and hypocrisy.
And I think it's good to pause for a minute and figure out which it was.
What is it when five presidents who clearly, some of whom don't like each other very much, what is it when they gather together and sit comfortably with each other and speak kindly with each other?
What is it when Washington is so divided stops for a moment and starts to talk about this man in good glowing terms?
What is it when you don't talk about a man's failures and flaws?
But it's at a funeral you talk about the things that he did well.
You know, I am not a sentimental person.
I am probably the opposite of a sentimental person.
I have a real hard-boiled streak at bottom, and I don't like sentimentality because a lot of times it doesn't, it doesn't, it turns away from the truth of things and it gets things exactly wrong.
However, I approve of funerals like this.
I approve of shows of unity, of speaking well of the dead on the day you bury them.
I approve of people putting aside their differences for a moment and coming together around a grave or a coffin and being kind to each other and treating each other kindly.
And the reason I believe in this is because of a little thing that I like to call death.
Okay?
Death is a big deal.
It is a big deal.
No matter what you believe in, no matter what you think comes after death, whether you believe in heaven or nothing or rebirth, this life does not repeat itself.
And this life is an urgent, important, and beautiful and sacred and fragile thing.
And it ends when it ends forever.
This life ends forever.
And that means all of us are in the same boat, all of us with our flaws, all of us with our problems.
Death is bigger than our flaws.
It's bigger than our political differences.
It's bigger than our grudges.
Look, the way you can tell it's bigger is because you don't die for those things.
You don't die for your grudges.
You know, you die over big things.
And death isn't bigger than freedom.
It's not bigger than right and wrong.
But it's bigger than these little things that are most of the things that we argue about, especially in this country where we're really not as far apart as we like to pretend we are.
It's one day, every other day, we measure each other by our failures.
It's one day when we measure a man's life by its successes, which is probably the real measure of a person's life because we all have so many failures.
We all have so many things that we do wrong, so many thoughts we shouldn't have, so many actions we shouldn't have taken.
We all have things that we regret, but not all of us achieve anything.
Not all of us actually accomplish anything.
Not all of us have the kindness that it takes to raise a family well.
Not all of us are able to put aside our differences and act well with other people.
Not all of us can use our talents to the full.
Not all of us work hard enough to use the talents that God gave us to the full.
And those people who have done those things, they deserve to be celebrated.
And all of us, I think, except for those who are truly evil, all of us in the moment of death deserve to be celebrated.
And, you know, I've been to funerals.
You've probably been to funerals.
It works.
It works.
When you speak about a man in glowing terms, it makes all of us sort of look within and say, have I done enough?
I mean, every time I'm at a funeral, I saw a cartoon once of two people walking out of a funeral and one says to the other, you know, I should probably live a better life, you know.
And that's true.
You know, when you listen to a man's life summarized in glowing terms, it causes you to look within and maybe try to be a little bit more patient and kind, maybe try to work a little harder at what you're supposed to do and speak to the people you don't like with a little bit of kindness.
And the Bushes, in keeping with the family that George H.W. Bush raised, in keeping with the values of that family, they managed to organize just a couple of hours when Washington stood still, when people stopped screaming at each other, and when we talked about a man in glowing terms and forgot a little bit about the things he did wrong and forgot a little bit about the things we disagreed with and remembered that we are all, all of us, living under this sword of Damocles called death,
and it makes all of us a lot smaller than we think we are and all of our problems a lot smaller than we think they are.
And we're going to take a look at some of the really nice things that happen, but first, let's talk about your teeth.
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The big moment at this funeral and the one that has just, I think, really reached out and touched everyone was when George W. Bush got up and saluted his father.
I want to play the second cut of this.
We don't have time to play them both, but play the second cut, which was just an amazing moment.
And if you were watching it, it was even all the more amazing.
We're going to miss you.
Your decency, sincerity, and kind soul will stay with us forever.
So through our tears, let us know the blessings of knowing and loving you.
A great and noble man.
The best father a son or daughter could have.
And in our grief, let us smile knowing that dad is hugging Robin and holding mom's hand again.
That's beautiful stuff.
And to see the former guy who was once the most powerful man in the world crack, break down like that for his dad is a beautiful thing.
You know, my sister, Caitlin Flanagan, who writes over at the Atlantic, wonderful writer, she tweeted that when your son says that about you, the best father you ever had, that's the victory of life.
And that you should imagine that moment and live your life backwards to that, to make sure you earn that moment, because that is a beautiful thing.
There was also some humor.
My favorite came from the historian John Meacham, a terrific, terrific story that he told.
This is, let's see, this is cut four.
He never slowed down.
On the primary campaign trail in New Hampshire once, he grabbed the hand of a department store mannequin asking for votes.
When he realized his mistake, he said, never know, got to ask.
You can hear the voice, can't you?
As Dana Carvey said, the key to a Bush 41 impersonation is Mr. Rogers trying to be John Wayne.
That was good stuff, especially good stuff because when he was alive, those kinds of gaffes, he was very gaff-prone.
Apparently, in person, I never met him, but in person, he was very eloquent.
But when he was on stage, he was not the best public speaker in the world and was frequently making gaffes like that.
And of course, our lovely press always ripped him to shreds.
So listen, I think this was a beautiful thing and reminded us really of who we really are.
I mean, this is the thing.
This is the great thing about death.
It reminds you of who you really are.
It's the only good thing I think I've ever said about death, which I'm not a big friend of.
But it does remind you that you're much smaller than you think, that you probably shouldn't judge others on their failures because you have so many of them yourself and judge them by their successes and then think about your own life and whether there are enough successes in it.
And of course, by success, my sister was right.
It's not the success measured by fame.
It's not measured by money.
It's measured by having the people who love you talk the way W spoke about his father there in that beautiful moment.
So the idea was, of course, in the press that this is what we're doing as a nation.
This is what we're coming together.
Only one segment of society, besides the clowns who come out from under their rocks on Twitter, only one segment of society could not bring themselves to join in, and that was the media.
I mean, it was just amazing.
They could not stop.
They could not stop talking about Donald Trump and comparing everything, anything that anybody said good about George H.W. Bush to Donald Trump.
One of my favorites came from MSNBC, and I try not to pick on MSNBC because they're an openly liberal thing, but this was just so interesting because he just couldn't help himself.
This is Peter Baker at MSNBC.
It was, I think, a moment for Washington to pause and reflect on the way things have gone lately.
You saw the President of the United States, President Trump, sitting there watching all of this, not given a role to speak, pretty unusual for an incumbent president.
At times, seemed to be a little defiant.
Dan Rather's Take00:16:33
He held his hands up, arms up like this, as if he wasn't quite happy with what he was hearing, but otherwise kept quiet, decided not to make any remarks to spoil the occasion.
So, you know, it was a coming together for Washington, I think.
So President Trump had reading his mind, first of all, he's reading his body language, and he says he kept quiet and didn't make any remarks to spoil the occasion.
But you know who didn't do that?
You.
It's the media that just couldn't do it.
It could not leave him alone.
And the other guy was John Avalon, who is at CNN, and he was a speechwriter.
And here's the thing.
Of course, you go to a funeral of a man, and they're going to talk about his good qualities, right, as we said.
And they're going to talk about also the fact with this man that he was graceful and dignified and all this stuff.
Now, you can look at that as a rebuke to President Trump, who's not graceful and not dignified.
It's true.
But you cannot do that too.
It's you who impose that.
So John Avlon, you saw Peter Baker was reading the mind of Donald Trump.
John Avalon was reading the minds of the speechmakers, thinking that their tributes were obviously attacks on Trump.
The eclipse that we just played for Meacham and Mulroney were not an accident.
That was an implicit diss at the current president.
And that's just, and it's because the contrast between the two men.
And, you know, you make choices when you write speeches.
And when you all of a sudden talk about all the leaders of the world, understood they were dealing with a true gentleman.
That's one thing this president has rarely been accused of.
And I'll also say, you know, I don't think you want to give out too many medals for not screwing up a presidential funeral.
The president was on best behavior this week, but that's a fairly low bar.
Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy.
You know, when you read somebody else's mind, you're usually reading your own mind.
And so that's what you got from Avalon there.
It's just this insult.
We're not going to give him any medals for.
Let me ask you this.
If Trump doesn't get any medals for not being graceless, for being graceful at this funeral, what does John Avalon get for not being able to take the time of this funeral off for just a few minutes and put a sock in it, you know?
Like just zip it up a little bit.
So this was the stuff that really was really disturbing, the fact that they couldn't stop talking about Trump, the fact that they saw everything as a rebuke to Trump, anything good that anybody said about President Bush.
That was not the spirit of the place.
It was really quite amazing.
Even some of the commentators on the right, I thought, when Melania and Trump came in, they shook hands with all the other presidents and their wives.
And Hillary Clinton was down at the end of the line, and she nodded at Melania.
She didn't get up.
And people thought that that was a diss against Melania Trump.
I actually didn't think so.
I hate to let Hillary Clinton off the hook because she's spent her lifetime getting off the hook for many worse things.
But I thought in this case, if I had been sitting there, I might also have nodded.
She greeted her.
That was all I want.
My favorite, my absolute favorite of all these people is Dan Rather.
I mean, you have to think about this for just a second, but Dan Rather treated the Bushes like dirt.
His career ended, basically, and his honor was lost trying to destroy George W. Bush over nothing.
He was so desperate to destroy him.
He was willing to use forged papers.
He got caught by the internet, those evil people in pajamas, which is where pajamas, PJ Media got its name.
And this is what he did to the elder Bush.
When George Bush I started running, he invited him on TV for what was supposed to be a candidate, you know, one of those, it's a general thing about who this candidate is, a profile, a candidate profile.
And instead, he sandbagged them with questions about the Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan administration, something the press was absolutely obsessed with because it was the only glove they ever landed on Ronald Reagan.
People loved Ronald Reagan.
They didn't care about the scandal.
They shouldn't have cared about the scandal.
It wasn't even a scandal as far as I was concerned.
But he sandbagged them, rather sandbagged Bush with this scandal.
And Bush came back at him for it.
And what he's referring to here when he says there's six minutes or something like that.
This was an incident that happened when at Miami, Bush got at Bush.
Rather got angry that his newscast was being held up by a tennis match and he was a diva and he stormed off.
And because the tennis match ended, CBS was caught with nothing to put on and there were six minutes of dead air.
So rather in this unprofessional moment stormed off and that's what Bush is referring to.
But listen to this exchange.
This was supposed to be a candidate profile and instead turned into this.
I don't want to be argumentated, Mr. Vice President.
This is not a great night because I want to talk about why I want to be president, why those 41% of the people are supporting me.
And Mr. Vice President, if you judge a whole career, it's not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran.
How would you like it if I judge your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?
Would you like that?
Mr. Vice President, for you, but I don't have respect for what you're doing here tonight.
Mr. Vice President, I think you'll agree that your qualification for president and what kind of leadership you'd bring the country, what kind of government you'd have, what kind of people you have around him is much more important than what you just referred to.
I'd be happy to help you.
I want to be judged on the whole record.
And you're not going to be able to do that.
And I'm trying to set the record straight.
You invited me to come here to talk about, I thought, the whole record.
I want you to talk about the record.
You sat in a meeting with George Schultz.
Yes.
He got apoplectic when he found out that you and the president were being part of sending missiles to the Ayatollah of Iran.
Can you explain how you were supposed to be the, you are, you're an anti-terrorist expert.
Iran was officially a terrorist state.
You went around telling...
I didn't explain that, Dan.
I wanted those...
I wanted Mr. Buckley out of there.
But you've made us hypocrites in the face of the world.
How could you be sign on to such a policy?
Even Sam Donaldson, a left-wing haranguer of presidents, criticized this.
And so after doing this, blowing his career trying to get W, embarrassing himself in this interview, Dan Rather tweets, watching today's eulogies, I thought about our national reckoning.
We can't rely on the consciences of those who have shown no humility from those who refuse introspection.
Forces of change must swell in the population at large to shake our republic into a more just future.
How can a man be that unaware of who he is and where he stands in the culture?
We'll get back to that in just a second.
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All right.
Let me just finish this.
We got a great interview.
I want you to hear this.
It's an amazing interview.
But before we talk about that, I just want to say that this funeral brought up who has brought us to the pass that we're in, the path of hostility, of poor manners.
Who created the world that put Bush, that put a man like Trump in office?
It was the left.
Trump is a reaction to the left.
I've said that a million times, but it's true.
You know, you talk about family values.
Who attacked family values, the kind of family values we saw on screen during this funeral?
Who just told us that family wasn't important, that men were toxic, that it was okay to curse in public?
Who degraded this culture until somebody with the poor manners of Trump not only could become president, but had to become president?
What did they think?
What did they think?
They were going to poison every well of culture, and somehow that wasn't going to touch the halls of the government.
It wasn't going to reach into the White House.
Why did they think that they could turn us against each other, call us racist, sexist, all the things they call us?
Why did they think that that was never going to come back and bite them?
They are the people who have brought us to this pass.
I admit, I admit that I wish we had a president of more grace.
I've said that a million times, I know.
But why is it that it takes a man like Trump to do the things that he's doing, which are basic, all-American, successful, conservative things?
Why does it take a man like that to win?
Because they have unleashed this culture of hate and division and nastiness and anti-patriotism.
They're the ones.
They are the source of this.
And really, you could see it in Dan Rather.
They do not look in the mirror.
They may not even own a mirror, but they ought to start because all of us are looking at them.
Hey, this is a terrific interview.
And I'm not going to close out, but that's no reason for you not to go to dailywire.com and subscribe.
It is a great, it's now, look, it's how about a subscription?
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Anyway, come on over and subscribe.
But meanwhile, we will play this interview for you.
Peter Wollison, he is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
He was counseled to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and White House counsel for President Ronald Reagan.
He's the author of several books.
His latest title is called Judicial Fortitude, The Last Chance to Reign in the Administrative State.
And the reason I invited him on is because I find it's very difficult to get people to understand, even for me to understand, what exactly the administrative state is.
He does an excellent, excellent job of clarifying the issues and defining them.
So listen, please, to Peter Wallison.
Peter Wallison, thank you so much for coming on.
My pleasure, Andrew.
Thanks very much for inviting me.
Your book is called Judicial Fortitude, The Last Chance to Reign in the Administrative State.
One of my big gripes with conservatives is we don't know how to name things.
Like the left comes up with great things like racial profiling and objectifying women and all kinds of, they always have a great term for things, but we use the term administrative state and people don't really know what it even is.
Can you describe what the administrative state is?
Yes, of course, it's a term for all of the federal regulatory and other administrative agencies, starting with, say, the cabinet agencies like the Treasury Department or the State Department, all the way down through hundreds and hundreds of sub-agencies and offices and bureaus, and includes, of course, the independent agencies like the SEC and the FCC.
But we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of federal government agencies.
So all I ever hear when on the left-wing media when they talk about this is, why would we ever want to attack these dedicated public servants who are serving our country?
It all sounds very benign.
What's the problem with the administrative state?
Well, the problem is really very simple, and everyone should understand it.
And that is, we are living in a democratic republic.
That is, the people are supposed to make the rules.
That's the idea.
They elect a Congress.
They tell Congress what they want.
Congress debates it.
Congress passes laws.
That's not what's happening with the administrative state.
The agencies of the administrative state are making the rules that we are living under.
In other words, the administrative state is inconsistent with a democratic republic.
They are not supposed to be lawmakers.
They are supposed to be administering the rules that are made by Congress.
And so if we want to consider, if we want to continue to live in a democratic environment where we, the people, make the rules through our representatives in Congress, we have to do something to restrain the administrative state.
So how did it get to be like this?
I mean, we need to, I assume we need a bureaucracy to administer rules.
How did it get to be where they're making the rules?
Well, there are a couple of ways that it's happened.
One is a decision of the Supreme Court in 1984 called Chevron versus NRDC.
And in that case, the court said to the lower courts, which they direct in effect, they say to the lower courts, when you're confronted with a challenge to an administrative agency's authority to make a rule, you should defer to the administrative agency's interpretation of its authority.
It's not your choice.
It's the administrative agency's choice.
And as a result, of course, that gave tremendous latitude to administrative agencies.
So they could use laws that had been passed years ago, generations ago, to make new rules and are challenged.
The courts look at the rule and they look at what the legislation says and they say, well, I guess it seems sort of reasonable what you're saying, but that isn't necessarily what Congress actually wanted these agencies to do.
So my book is all full of examples of cases where agencies have gone well beyond what Congress could ever have considered authorizing them to do.
And that's continuing on day after day and year after year.
I should mention that each year, probably people don't know this, but each year since 1993, when people started actually to count, and every year, more than 3,000 rules and regulations have come out of the agencies of the federal government.
And that means more than 101,000 rules and regulations in 25 years.
No one can possibly get his arms or his head around all of those regulations, yet the American people are subject to each and every one of them.
Can you give me an example of what you were talking about of how the agency can interpret a law so that it actually changes the meaning of the law?
Well, here's an example that I use in the book, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
In there, the Congress said, if you, a school, are accepting money from the federal government, you have to make educational resources available to women as well as men on the same basis.
So I think most people thought they were saying women had to be able to have basketball teams and engage in sports and they should have equal access to classes and all the things that happen at a university.
However, the Education Department since then has made a series of rules about sexual harassment, defining what it is and explaining what the punishment should be and how the trials should be held, all of those things, as though Congress had actually authorized them to make rules about sexual harassment, when in fact, Congress was only talking to the schools,
not to how one student reacted or acted with another.
Chevron's Impact on Administrative Power00:09:02
It had nothing to do with the school.
The Congress was talking only about how schools used the money that they got from the federal government.
So this is an example.
And if you think that in 1972, Congress was actually interested in making rules about sexual harassment on campus, you'd be very wrong.
So this is an example of how an agency can take statutory language and then spin it out into something that Congress did not have in mind at all.
And that's what we have to stop.
So what Chevron says is that if some unelected guy in an agency, or in fact, if the president instructs the agency to change what the law means, to say, oh yeah, this means that you can be thrown out of school, even if you're just charged with sexual harassment.
If somebody sues, the court is, according to Chevron, is supposed to say, well, the agency must know what it's talking about.
Am I getting that right?
No one has actually sued under the Chevron doctrine on that particular statute, as far as I'm aware.
So they've never talked about Chevron in that case, but there are many other cases in which the same thing has happened, where the agency has gone well beyond the language that Congress actually adopted or the intention that Congress had when it adopted the language.
And when the courts have been confronted with it, they have said, well, as far as I can tell, you're not being unreasonable here.
You're enacting, you're adopting a rule that could be consistent with what Congress had in mind.
But in any event, I'm supposed to defer to what your interpretation is, and that's what I'm doing.
Wow.
Wow.
So that's the problem.
And this is happening across the entire federal government.
And the only way to stop this from happening is to make sure that the courts look at what Congress did in terms of the language that it adopted.
And they decide in the first instance whether the agency has that kind of power.
Now, we're talking to Peter Wallaceon, the author of Judicial Fortitude, The Last Chance to Reign in the Administrative State.
Now, Brett Kavanaugh is kind of famous for having a bit of a gripe about the administrative state.
Do you have any hope that the Supreme Court will turn this around, maybe overturn Chevron?
I have big hope that they do.
And that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book, because it seemed to me that with Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, the two appointees of President Trump, we now have five people on the court who say that they are constitutionalists and believe in reading the Constitution and laws strictly.
The book, in fact, is dedicated to Justice Thomas, who has been talking about this since he's been on the court and has been saying we have to get back to having the courts do judicial review of legislation, not having the agencies make a decision about what their powers are, but the courts in the first instance making those decisions.
And so with five members of the court, I think who are this majority, this conservative majority, I do think it's entirely possible that they will at least deal with the Chevron rule.
There are other things they have to do also, which are a lot tougher, but they will at least deal with the Chevron rule.
You know, one of the things that I think has struck not just me, but a lot of people is the fact that Congress has essentially stopped doing its job, that they sit around and complain about illegal immigration, but nobody makes a move.
Nobody does anything.
Is that connected to the administrative state?
Have they lost, has Congress lost power because of this?
Yes.
Strangely enough, the framers thought Congress was going to be the most important of the three branches of the government.
They now are the weakest by far.
And one of the reasons for that is that they have found it very convenient to give up their authority to administrative agencies.
That means they don't have to make the very difficult decisions that make their reelection difficult.
And as a result of that, Congress is no longer in the game.
I mean, they look to the president to tell them what they ought to do.
Then they adopt very general language in many cases, which empowers the agency to make all the decisions.
And the people do not understand this.
I mean, they do not yet grasp the fact that the rules are really being made by an unelected bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., when they think that actually Congress makes the rules.
So here's a person who is complaining about a farm pond being subject to federal regulation under by the EPA.
And he's saying to his congressman or his senator, what's going on here?
How did that happen?
And the congressman says, well, I didn't do that.
That was the administrative agency.
Wow.
Well, the fact is that Congress gave the agency the power to do that, but didn't tell anyone.
What they told their constituents was, ah, I've made a rule.
I've endorsed a law now that will assure that our waters are pure in the future.
And that's what the constituents hear.
But the real tough decisions, who pays the cost, whose property is burdened by the rule, that is made by someone else who's unelected and unconnected to that whole process.
That is amazing.
So keeping your job in Congress by not doing your job.
That is amazing.
And you just cast it off.
So you call your book, Judicial Fortitude, the last chance to reign in the administrative state.
What do you want to see happen?
Well, I think the answer is the courts.
And the reason it's the last chance is that Congress is going to be unable to do anything about it.
Can the president do something about it?
My answer to that is no also.
When you're dealing with more than 3,000 rules every year, there isn't any way that the president or his staff is able to review each of those rules and make sure they are consistent with the policy that this particular president wants to pursue.
So it can't be done by the president.
It can't be done by Congress for the reasons we've already discussed.
So what's left?
That's the judiciary.
And the reason that the book is called Judicial Fortitude is that it is following language by Alexander Hamilton in one of the Federalist papers, Federalist 78, in which he said that we, the framers of this constitution, have given the judiciary lifetime appointments.
And why?
Because they need the fortitude to stand up to the power of the elected branches, by which he meant, of course, Congress and the president.
So this is a responsibility of the courts.
They are supposed to be policing the line between legislation, which is supposed to be done by Congress and only by Congress, and just simple administration, which is supposed to be done by the executive branch.
But they have not in 200 years effectively done that.
So what I am doing is saying you have this responsibility, folks.
Get to it.
And what do you want from them, aside from obviously overturning Chevron, you want them to say that laws are made by Congress.
You want them to essentially define what an administrative agency does, I guess.
Exactly, exactly.
And they haven't done that, and they can do it, but it's going to be hard work.
It's going to be as difficult for them as it is for Congress to sit down together and make the tough decisions that Congress is supposed to make.
But the courts have to do that.
And the Supreme Court is equipped with the people they have on it now.
It's equipped to do that.
What they have to realize is that they need the fortitude to go ahead, even though there will be tremendous blowback from the people who like what the administrative state is doing.
The Supreme Court has to stand up to that.
And what it will do is remake, re-establish our democracy, because that will mean that the major decisions for society will have to go back to Congress.
They'll have to fight them out on the floor of the Congress and adopt legislation that is specifically intended to give administrative agencies only administrative power and not the power to make the laws.
Water's Thirsting Soul00:04:34
Really interesting.
Peter Wallace, an author of Judicial Fortitude, The Last Chance to Reign in the Administrative State.
Thank you so much for coming on.
That was really informative.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure, Andrew.
Thanks very much for inviting me.
Thanks.
That was the clearest explanation of Chevron I've ever heard.
I actually finally got what he was talking about with that.
Stuff I like.
Things he likes.
These are things he likes.
Listen to some things that he's living likes.
No X.
I don't want to say we're scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but it's James Caldwell.
Good.
All right.
So you may have heard me talking about this on the Daily Wire backstage, the ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Suddenly, everybody was recommending this to me, including Shapiro.
And I just thought it was great.
It's a Cone Brothers film that is on Netflix.
It's an anthology of Western stories that apparently they've written over the years.
They are funny.
There's one of them with James Franco that I thought was not that good, but the five others I thought were all of them terrific.
And Shapiro and I have been having this kind of ongoing discussion about whether the, he thinks the Cone brothers are nihilist.
I think they have become increasingly conservative and increasingly Christian, certainly spiritual.
I mean, obviously they're Jewish or secular Jews.
But the Christian imagery in this is amazing.
And in my opinion, it was a masterclass on how to make a Christian film without being preachy and silly and in your face about it.
I just want to play the opening.
This is the ballad of Buster Scrubs.
It's Tim Blake Nelson, who plays Buster Scruggs, who is, despite what he looks like here, is a deadly gunman.
But he sings this opening song.
Just play 30 seconds of it and then fade it out.
All day I face the barren wait without the taste of water.
Cool, water.
Old An and I with throats burn dry and souls that cry for water.
Cool, clean water.
So this scene to me makes no sense unless they're thinking about, he says his soul thirsts for water.
And because of clues in the rest of the film, I thought back to T.S. Eliot's famous poem, The Wasteland, that has a very famous passage in it where he says, there's not even silence in the mountains, but dry, sterile thunder without rain.
There's not even solitude in the mountains, but red, sullen faces sneer and snarl from doors of mud-cracked houses.
And he says, if there were water and no rock, if there were rock and also water, and water, a spring, a pool among the rock, if there were the sound of water only, not the cicada and dry grass singing, but sound of water over a rock where the hermit thrush sings in the pine trees, drip, drop, drip, drop, drop, drop, drop.
But there is no water.
And of course, Elliot was talking about the absence of faith and the absence of baptism, which ultimately Elliot found.
He found his faith and he did become a member of the Church of England.
And when you watch this film, the stories progress from that yearning for water and a sort of funny and hilarious meditation on death and the afterlife through a beautiful, beautiful discussion of certainty in this story about the wagon train.
I don't want to give anything away, but where there is certainty and where there is none.
And finally ends really with a depiction of the doors of death.
And if you look closely, you'll see on one of the doors there is an angel and on one of them there is a satanic goat clearly indicating that there is judgment and an afterlife.
And I just thought it was a very Christian story told as Westerns.
And I believe that the Cone brothers are doing this on purpose.
Ben thinks they are mocking it all, but I just don't see that.
I don't see how that plays, especially after Hail Caesar and No Country for Old Men.
All right, I got to go.
The Clavenless weekend begins.
Do not forget to get your penultimate chapter of Another Kingdom starring the lovely and talented Michael Knowles.
And I will be back on Monday for those of you who survive, gather here.
Andrew Klavan Show Begins00:00:52
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Coming up on the Ben Shapiro Show, we review the massive memorial service for George H.W. Bush.
We explore his political legacy, and we take a look at why Elizabeth Warren's presidential chances may have just flamed out.