Dec. 1, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
40:44
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| People think that the federal government has any power except things that are expressly prohibited. | ||
| And it's actually the other way around. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| Here's my friendly reminder to click subscribe and also click that little bell if you're watching this on YouTube so that you actually get notified of our videos. | ||
| Okay, now, joining me today is a lawyer and the author of several books, including The Indispensable Electoral College, How the Founders Plan Saves Our Country from Mob Rule. | ||
| Tara Russ, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I am glad to have you here. | ||
| You actually live in Dallas, and you sort of just missed this crazy tornado situation, so I'm doubly glad to have you here. | ||
| I barely made it, but I'm here. | ||
| Okay, good to have you here. | ||
| We're going to focus heavily on the Electoral College, because there's a lot of talk about the Electoral College. | ||
| I became familiar with you because your PragerU video has 60 million views about the Electoral College. | ||
| That is crazy that that many people care. | ||
| Were you shocked that that many people care about a topic? | ||
| I mean, it's their number one video. | ||
| It came out before the election, probably a good year and a half before the 2016 election. | ||
| And I didn't really think about it. | ||
| I mean, just to be honest, then the 2016 election happened. | ||
| And next thing I know, I'm pulling up in my Facebook feed and my My face is showing up over and over again in feeds for my friends, and I was as blown away as anybody else, but I think that Prager has set up a good system where they have informational videos on all these different topics, as you know, and people were looking for information in the wake of the election outcome in 2016, and that was readily available, and I'm so happy, so happy that Prager did that. | ||
| Yeah, and as we now ramp into this 2020 election, this conversation about should we have an electoral college, why do we have it, should it be popular vote, this whole thing keeps ramping up more and more. | ||
| So we're gonna spend most of our conversation talking about that, but I thought we'd just start generally talking about the Constitution and some of the laws that govern us these days, because people seem very confused about them. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about something that we don't know about the Constitution that we should know. | ||
| The first thing that left my mind was people think that the federal government has any power except things that are expressly prohibited. | ||
| And it's actually the other way around. | ||
| The federal government only has the power that the Constitution expressly gives to it. | ||
| Everything else is reserved to the states or the people. | ||
| And if you think about that, that's a really important distinction. | ||
| The federal government can only do what the Constitution explicitly says, yes, you may do this. | ||
| And the federal government has It's grown so out of bounds that it's doing the opposite. | ||
| Every day it does the opposite. | ||
| Yeah, well, it seems that that's how we're governed now, that almost everything is through the federal government, and especially if you listen to the Democratic candidates now, that they seem to want to do all of these things regardless of what states want and things like that. | ||
| How do they get away with it? | ||
| I don't mean to make this even partisan, in general speaking. | ||
| I'll say both parties do it. | ||
| I think it starts with us, honestly, because think about anything that's happening. | ||
| If a natural disaster hits, tornado in Dallas, people hopefully in Texas a little bit less, that's a Texas girl, but we look to the government and we don't look even to the state government, we look to the federal government. | ||
| We want our governor to declare a state emergency because then we know there's more federal funds, there's more this, there's more that. | ||
| The mindsets of everybody has changed so badly that we're enabling the situation to continue. | ||
| So maybe we can start at home by, you know, I'm from Dallas, I hope we're pitching in, we're helping our neighbors, Hopefully looking to our state or our city before we start looking to the federal government. | ||
| I think that if we can work on that, that's a really big problem I just outlined. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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But-- | |
| Well, are you shocked at sort of how little it seems people know or care about our founding documents? | ||
| I mean, I talk about them here all the time. | ||
| The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are sitting on the wall in my control room right over there. | ||
| But that so few people actually really think about the documents that led to the unprecedented freedom | ||
| that we're living in right now. | ||
| We live in a world that has created that. | ||
| We have schools that teach social studies when they used to teach history. | ||
| We don't teach the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers, which were the arguments back and forth at the time of the founding about the Constitution and why it exists as it does and what they were trying to create. | ||
| We don't do any of this stuff in our schools anymore. | ||
| And then we have adults that grow up having never been exposed to this. | ||
| And so nobody knows. | ||
| Literally nobody knows. | ||
| And I think the founding generation, if you read in the Federalist Papers especially, over and over and over again, James Madison or Alexander Hamilton will say, the people will keep this in line. | ||
| And they talk about the people as if we will be educated, as if we will know, as if... | ||
| We will take all of this into consideration when we're voting, doing all the things that we do, but once you undermine education, and once that's gone, how can you possibly keep the structure in place anymore? | ||
| Do you think that was a miscalculation by the founders, that over time, sort of, that the state would kind of slowly grow, and then as it grew, that education would kind of get worse, and maybe they couldn't envision all of that, but that that was their miscalculation, that the people would somehow always be engaged? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They assumed that people would be engaged. | ||
| You read it over and over again. | ||
| They also assumed we would always be more loyal to our states than to the federal government, which probably, by the way, comes with the education. | ||
| When you lose the education, you lose the loyalty to your states because you stop understanding why it's so important, why that's an important part of the system of checks and balances. | ||
| We talk about the executive and the judiciary and the legislative and how they work against | ||
| and with each other and how they check and balance each other, but also the state and | ||
| the federal government were supposed to be checks on each other. | ||
| That doesn't mean states always handle things correctly, just like the federal government | ||
| doesn't handle things correctly, but it's all a part of the process. | ||
| We assume that everybody's going to make mistakes. | ||
| We assume that the system, where there are so many competing powers going head-to-head all the time, that that will, in the end, protect us, because it will be difficult to push anything through too quickly and in the heat of the moment, emotionally. | ||
| And isn't that sort of the bizarre situation we're in where now it's like we've had this incredible system where the states could tinker and figure out what they wanted to do with taxes, and education, and gay marriage, and marijuana legalization, and literally every topic there is, but now we're outsourcing all of that, and it's like, well, now if the government does some bad stuff, it's not that you can leave your state, because the next state's gonna be the same. | ||
| You gotta leave the country. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| I mean, when you were talking about that, I was thinking, there's so many examples from our history where Wyoming, for instance, was the very first state to let women vote. | ||
| They did it in 1892, way before anybody else, because they thought it was a good idea. | ||
| Their reason was funny. | ||
| They wanted more pioneers, women, to come out and to join all the men, because there were too many men and they needed women. | ||
| But states used to operate for themselves, with their own interests in mind, and they made decisions on all sorts of topics. | ||
| And we don't even consider that anymore. | ||
| So we're here in California, which is probably doing most of that wrong, and we have an ever-expanding government, and we now have this progressive Governor Newsom, but you're in Texas. | ||
| What are some of the things that you think maybe Texas, which is still a little more Texas, that Texas might be doing right that maybe California is doing wrong? | ||
| I mean, I love my state. | ||
| We're not perfect, so I can also list things we're doing wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| All right, well, let's do both then. | ||
| Oh, well, you can't buy a Tesla straight from, you have to go through all these hoops, because of the automobile lobby, from what I understand. | ||
| There are things that I think are not great, but mostly what we do is we regulate less. | ||
| If you wanna use a straw, use a straw. | ||
| If you don't wanna use a straw, don't use a straw. | ||
| It's so funny you say that, because I was telling you, I was just in Dallas this past weekend, and you guys still have plastic straws. | ||
| We like them. | ||
| And I was in New York a couple days before, drinking out of this soggy straw, and I'm like, this is horrible. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Look, there's arguments for and against it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whatever. | |
| I'm not trying to diss anybody's opinion on that. | ||
| But in Texas, I think we are probably more likely, not uniformly, but more likely to say, make your own decision. | ||
| We have fewer taxes, which I consider a great thing. | ||
| You know, there's no income tax. | ||
| But we do have property taxes, but you choose to buy a house, and then you pay the property tax when you choose to buy the house. | ||
| I hope that we're a little bit more free down there just to kind of make up our own minds, but I think the founders would have liked that. | ||
| They definitely would have liked that. | ||
| So right now we're seeing what I think are major assaults, particularly on the First Amendment. | ||
| So we'll start with that, particularly on free speech. | ||
| Now, people are very confused about encroachments on free speech relative to the government versus just sort of mob rule that we see all the time. | ||
| Are you, well, do you agree with me that free speech really is in a tenuous state that maybe it hasn't been, say, the last couple of decades? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| Yeah, I think we kind of went from a place where there were a whole bunch of things that we were trying to become more tolerant of, and then we got to the place where we were more tolerant of a whole bunch of stuff, and now we're at a place where we're on the other side, where now you're no longer to even say things that were the norm 20 or 30 years ago. | ||
| It's like you flipped on it. | ||
| It's very weird to me, and there's certain things that I think you can't say without All sorts of bad things coming down on your head. | ||
| If you had to sort of grade the way the system's kind of functioning right now. | ||
| We're broken. | ||
| We're broken. | ||
| I've been saying that for a while and we're just, we're broken. | ||
| I do think we're talking about the electoral college a little bit. | ||
| I think that is one thing that will help. | ||
| I do think we've been broken before and we've come out of it. | ||
| We were broken in the years after the civil war. | ||
| It was a big mess then. | ||
| We had multiple elections where You know, the electoral vote and the popular vote did not match up, and there were two elections where the recorded national popular vote winner did not win the election. | ||
| There was year after year where the electoral map looked really, really similar, very closely divided. | ||
| The red areas always seemed to be red, and the blue areas always seemed to be blue, which is what we're doing now. | ||
| And eventually, because of the Electoral College, we came out of that, is my belief, because If you think about it, if you're a Democrat in the South in those years, you cannot win the White House at all, period. | ||
| Because you don't have enough electoral votes in your safe areas. | ||
| But if you are a Republican, you kind of have the opposite problem where you have enough in the North and Northwest, which is where it generally was, to win, but kind of just barely. | ||
| And if the Democrats make any inroads at all, you're going to lose. | ||
| So both sides over time had to reach out to the other side and listen and figure it out. | ||
| And so that's why I I think we're there now. | ||
| I do think that's what's happening. | ||
| But I also have hope that this, because of the structure of the system, | ||
| even though we're not educated enough about it, that we will come back to a better place | ||
| where we just have to figure it out. | ||
| All right, so before we do the full dive on Electoral College, | ||
| which we'll spend the rest of the conversation talking about, because I really, really want people | ||
| to understand why the founders started this idea and why it actually is the right idea and all that. | ||
| But in terms of the system working or not working at the moment, | ||
| I think part of it is just the way we operate, that the presidency, the cult of personality | ||
| around the presidency is. | ||
| is such that people think that it's the president's job to do everything. | ||
| So if you like Trump, you kind of think, oh, he should just do whatever he wants, and executive actions are okay. | ||
| The same time when Obama was for it, you probably weren't for executive actions. | ||
| Or right now, listening to the candidates, everything that they want to do, they don't realize they're actually not the ones that are supposed to write the laws. | ||
| They're just supposed to sign the laws. | ||
| Do you think that that's just a cult of personality issue, that we just pick one person Almost like we yearn for a king in like some really perverse sense or something like that. | ||
| So to really get geeky on you, it goes all the way back to the 17th Amendment, which of course changed the way that we elect United States senators. | ||
| And it used to be that state legislators would pick those. | ||
| And now of course we have a popular election, just like anybody else, which makes senators more like the House of Representatives, which is not what they were supposed to be. | ||
| They were supposed to actually represent the state. | ||
| as a state in the Congress so that the laws and the process and all of the stuff that | ||
| was happening in Congress would reflect the interests not only of the people from the | ||
| House side, but also the state legislatures, which are expected, of course, to be an important | ||
| check and balance on the national government. | ||
| Well, unsurprisingly, when we turned the Senate into something more like the House, we lost | ||
| a check and now the Congress has just become a place to try to get the people as much as | ||
| we feel like we want, whether it's good for the country, whether it's good for the state | ||
| or not. | ||
| And so that has, but then also it's hard and Congress, I think they defer, like they push it off into an administrative agency or they delegate power to the president or they do these different things to be able to give as much as they possibly can without always having to be as Blunt about it, as maybe they would have to be otherwise. | ||
| So before the 17th Amendment, did things function a little bit differently? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because they were chosen by their own states, they had to come back and deal with... The state legislature. | ||
| Yes, their own state legislature. | ||
| If you're a United States Senator before the 17th Amendment, and you vote for a bill that includes an unfunded state mandate, You're not going to get re-elected because the state legislators are going to be really mad at you. | ||
| So you're accountable to just a different set of people, which is healthy. | ||
| Say the federal government wants to take power in some area, whatever it is. | ||
| You know, they changed the drinking age and federal funds for roads went along with that. | ||
| But if you're a state senator and you know that your state, a United States senator, and you know that your state legislature prefers to be in charge of its own roads, you're not going to vote for that bill. | ||
| It changed the dynamics completely and made it much, much easier for the federal government to swoop in and take over from the states on a whole variety of issues. | ||
| But I think it also made it easier for the Congress to delegate to the president or to an administrative agency or There was just less accountability overall for any of this. | ||
| And of course, the more power the president's delegated, exactly what you're saying happens. | ||
| We think the president, the president has become such an all-important elected official in so many ways that didn't used to be true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| So with all that in mind then, let's do Electoral College. | ||
| 101. | ||
| Where did the idea of the Electoral College first come from? | ||
| Well, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention spent the whole summer going back and forth. | ||
| Should we have a national popular vote, just like people want now? | ||
| Should we do something else? | ||
| And they had crazy ideas. | ||
| Maybe we'll have three presidents. | ||
| They talked about legislative selection. | ||
| That was one of the main ideas on the table. | ||
| Maybe we'll have Congress select the president. | ||
| They talked about governors selecting the president. | ||
| They had a whole bunch of ideas. | ||
| But the two ideas that were there at the end, the primary ones, were a national popular vote and Congress picks the president. | ||
| Nobody knows exactly what happened because there was a committee for unfinished business and they went behind closed doors. | ||
| So things haven't changed that much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And so there was one report that James Madison took a pen and paper and sketched out the idea. | ||
| They came back and presented to the whole convention. | ||
| The convention was surprised that they had deviated from national popular vote. | ||
| But this is what they had decided on. | ||
| And it solved the concerns of the big versus small states that have been going back and forth the whole summer. | ||
| The big states By and large, we're more comfortable with national popular vote idea. | ||
| The small states were really uncomfortable. | ||
| They thought they would be tyrannized. | ||
| And there's a great quote from a Delaware delegate. | ||
| And he says, I do not trust you, gentlemen. | ||
| If you have the power. | ||
| He's a gentleman, which I think is funny. | ||
| I do not trust you. | ||
| He's like underlined in italics. | ||
| Gentlemen, if you have the power, the abuse of it could not be checked, and you would exercise it to our destruction. | ||
| And that's what the small states felt, that we will be destroyed if you have this kind of a system in place. | ||
| And I think it's important to note, by the way, that the divide here was not slave versus not slave. | ||
| It was small versus large. | ||
| And there were some large states that had more slaves than not, and vice versa. | ||
| And the same thing with the small states. | ||
| Some had slaves, some didn't. | ||
| It was not a slave versus not slave divide. | ||
| It was a small versus large. | ||
| Were there any reps, say, from big states that actually were for the Electoral College? | ||
| Because that would have been giving power away, but we do know that a lot of the founders were trying to curtail that power. | ||
| So James Madison's from Virginia, and I think he was more comfortable in the beginning with just a national popular vote, but he felt like this was a better compromise in the end. | ||
| Obviously, he sketched it out behind closed doors. | ||
| Right now, when people say, and we're hearing this more and more, we should just have the popular vote, that the current president lost the popular vote, he's an illegitimate president, what is the counter-argument? | ||
| I really wish people would stop and just think about Why the Democratic Party lost. | ||
| The people who are upset on the Democratic side because they lost, they've spent a lot of time blasting the system and criticizing the system, criticizing Trump, and I wish they would spend more time thinking about why they lost. | ||
| And the reason they lost is because Hillary Clinton spent too much time doing exactly what the Electoral College does not want her to do, or any candidate to do, which is she focused too exclusively on one kind of voter. | ||
| She's the kind of voter that happens to live in big cities in New York and California, mostly. | ||
| She got 20% of her vote from only New York and California, and most of her vote in those two states came from the big cities. | ||
| Towards the end of the campaign, she, people don't usually know this, but she thought she was about to win the electoral vote and lose the popular vote, so she actually doubled down on that strategy, and she started spending a lot of time and resources on safe areas areas that she was already expecting to do well | ||
| because she wanted to drive up the popular vote in those safe areas so that she would not have | ||
| that discrepancy between the electoral and the popular vote. | ||
| But of course, if she had said Gonda, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, spread out her base of appeal, | ||
| built coalitions, worked on that, she probably would have won. | ||
| It was within reach and she could have done it, but she didn't. | ||
| So is the main argument then that basically you will create a situation where a state like California, | ||
| which has what, like the 10th biggest economy in the world or something like that, this huge population, | ||
| it's a huge land mass, and then New York with a huge, huge population concentrated in big cities, | ||
| that if we get rid of the electoral college, that almost everything, but especially the middle | ||
| of the country, will just be completely ignored So it's the same issue from 200 years ago, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, if you're a candidate, you have limited time, you have limited resources. | ||
| That's just human. | ||
| That's not good or bad. | ||
| It's just what it is. | ||
| And you cannot, physically cannot, go everywhere. | ||
| You cannot It's not productive or efficient to try to strategize how to bring in people from different parts of the country. | ||
| What is most productive, as a purely strategic matter, is just to go to where people already like you and just start drumming up support. | ||
| I mean, if you're a Republican, maybe you go to Houston and you look at the oil interest and you say, I'll give you this, I'll give you that, I'll give you this. | ||
| And you just try to drum up as many people as you can. | ||
| If you're a Democrat, maybe you say, I'm going to give the environmental lobby everything they want. | ||
| I'm going to go to LA and San Francisco. | ||
| I'm going to start drumming up support there. | ||
| I'll ban plastic straws in the whole country or something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So it's just, it is just practical. | ||
| It's not even malevolent or anything at all. | ||
| It is just what it is. | ||
| It is a huge, big, diverse country. | ||
| And if you don't give candidates a reason to care, they're not going to. | ||
| What would you say to the people that would just say, tough, that we should do this by how many people vote for somebody? | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| If you live in Missouri in a small town, that's tough. | ||
| You don't live in a big city, but the big city person's vote doesn't count less than yours. | ||
| You know, it's just, it's so interesting to me that people think that, because there is not any other context where we would just say, tough. | ||
| You know, we wouldn't say, if one race can outvote the other race, tough! | ||
| You know, we can do whatever we want. | ||
| Nobody would say that. | ||
| We shouldn't say that. | ||
| So why is it okay to say, yeah, if the big city people outvote the farmers, eh. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| I don't think that's right. | ||
| I think what's right is to create a society that is just and to do our best to take into account a wide variety of needs. | ||
| And if you think about it, I mean, if you let the big cities dictate to the farmers, where they do most of the producing in this country, by the way, you're telling the people who are the end users that they can tyrannize over the producers That's going to create a really bad situation. | ||
| We see this in California all the time. | ||
| If you drive up the coast where all the farmers are complaining about water rights and then the big cities are getting all the water and it's like, guys, they're the ones growing the food. | ||
| Does anyone care about the food? | ||
| And so you have these dynamics in the states. | ||
| It's in New York, too. | ||
| It's in a couple of other states. | ||
| And it's in Texas, really. | ||
| Why do we think that we can change the system and that these problems that already exist at the state level will not happen at the national level? | ||
| Of course they will. | ||
| So I have actually long said, I think California, Texas, a handful of the big states, for their governor, should have an electoral college kind of thing going on. | ||
| I think it would produce better governance in the big states. | ||
| Interesting, so you would take an electoral college concept and apply it even to those big states because that way you could sort of control their need to just serve the big, you know, Dallas and say Los Angeles. | ||
| Why should farmers in California be tyrannized by the people in the big cities? | ||
| Why should people in, you know, in the middle of Texas where there's, you know, very small population cities, why should they be tyrannized by, I live in Dallas, but why should they be tyrannized by us in Dallas or in Houston or in San Antonio or Austin? | ||
| They have different needs and concerns. | ||
| And I, you know, I'm not sure the gubernatorial processes always reflect that. | ||
| So I know that we don't know everything that went on in these meetings where James Madison's sketching this all out, but where did all the numbers come from? | ||
| Well, the numbers come from Congress. | ||
| So you have the same number of electors as you do members of the House plus your two senators. | ||
| So that is true for every single state. | ||
| I'm from Texas. | ||
| We have 38 electors. | ||
| We have 36 congressmen plus two senators. | ||
| So these can change over time, right? | ||
| They do change over time, yes. | ||
| And how does that affect the way everybody's drawing up demographic maps and all kinds of stuff? | ||
| Well, I mean, it's really just based on the census, and so, you have, and it's based on, after the census they decide how many people are going to be in the House, and then we reallocate the electors just to match it. | ||
| So do you feel that the system is actually functioning as it should then? | ||
| Even if the people aren't being as responsible and maybe don't know civics the way you would want them to and all of those things, do you think that the basic election system, and especially again, because we're rolling into an election, we're gonna hear about election rigging, we're gonna hear about foreign influence, we're gonna hear about popular vote versus electoral college, but do you think that the elections are basically safe and secure and that this is sort of the best way that they can operate? | ||
| I do. | ||
| Look, I think we're a mess right now. | ||
| I think both parties are being really super stubborn about fixing themselves. | ||
| I think pretty much everybody could do a better job of working to build coalitions and being inclusive and trying to understand the people that don't fall in line exactly, you know, where I am. | ||
| And until we figure that out, it's going to look like this. | ||
| I hope I hope we figure it out soon because I'm kind of tired of it, as everybody else is, but the system is not not working. | ||
| And the reason we're having closed elections is because everybody's being stubborn, which is, like I said, what happened after the Civil War. | ||
| Is the irony here, though, that if the states would actually take back some of the rights that they've been sort of outsourcing to the federal government, That none of this would matter that much, right? | ||
| Because the presidency would have less power. | ||
| So that really is the, that to me strikes me as the answer, right? | ||
| Like you keep as much as you can local, and then it won't matter that much what the executive branch can do. | ||
| And if the states were back in charge, then there would be less for the judges to do, which means the judicial nominations would be less of a, you know, less of an influence. | ||
| I think people are just so worried that Their preferred policy preference on whatever it is is going to get decided by judicial nominations or by the president or by, you know. | ||
| And so it becomes so important. | ||
| And it's the system that was created by the founders is very decentralized. | ||
| There should never be that much power in one place. | ||
| There shouldn't be that much power in the Supreme Court or the presidency. | ||
| It should be spread out. | ||
| And if it were, Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Why would it be mad about anything? | |
| Why would a Texan care what a Californian decided about straws? | ||
| It wouldn't matter. | ||
|
unidentified
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Who cares? | |
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| As it shouldn't matter. | ||
| As it shouldn't, exactly. | ||
| What do you make of the executive action portion of this? | ||
| What do you think the founders would be saying about the way we govern? | ||
| And again, everybody does it, so this is not a partisan thing. | ||
| No, it's not partisan. | ||
| Both sides do it. | ||
| GWB did it. | ||
| Two, and then Obama reversed a lot of it, and now Trump reversed a lot of that. | ||
| I mean, that's a really dangerous way to govern, right? | ||
| I agree completely. | ||
| I see it all the time, and I wish it weren't happening. | ||
| I wish that people cared enough to say something, or to call their congressman and say, you know, go take that back, that power that just got usurped from you, go take it back. | ||
| Do you think it's maybe that everything seems to be more about optics than the way things are supposed to be governed? | ||
| Like you never hear anybody talk about, well, I can't say never. | ||
| I'd say you get a guy like Rand Paul maybe and Mike Lee from your home state, like a couple guys that will actually talk about the Constitution and things like that. | ||
| Did you see that moment during the debate? | ||
| When they were asking Kamala Harris about confiscating guns via executive action and Joe Biden said it has to be constitutional, which of course is the correct answer, and Kamala basically laughed at him and said, Joe, can't we just say yes we can? | ||
| Like this terribly smug answer meaning, because what she's saying is I will take whatever power I can to literally take away one of your, the second Bill of Rights. | ||
| Again, I think it goes back to not knowing history. | ||
| Because if we knew our history, what we would know is that the British, when they were trying to keep us down, the first thing they did was we went after our guns and our ammunition. | ||
| And that's why the shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. | ||
| The British were marching to go take it. | ||
| And we said, no, you can't do that. | ||
| And it actually happened in several cities. | ||
| Lexington and Concord is the one we know about from our history books. | ||
| There were several places in 75, 76, where the British were trying to take our arms and ammunition because they knew we wouldn't be able to put up a fight without it. | ||
| And so the founders, when they created our Constitution, it was one of the most important things to them. | ||
| They felt like our liberty is protected when we can protect ourselves. | ||
| And it's not only about hunting, you know, it's about protecting your liberty. | ||
| And, you know, people like to laugh at that, I guess, and say, Well, our arms don't match the army's, and you know, I guess that's true, but at the time of the founding, the arms, it's not like they had cannons on their farms, you know? | ||
| Right, some well-armed people that are really committed to protecting what's theirs. | ||
| But over and over again you see examples of the British. | ||
| There was the Battle of Pell's Point in New York. | ||
| The British were, they had trouble because there was literally a colonist behind every bush with a rifle. | ||
| And they were just having trouble. | ||
| And it changed their strategy and it changed what they were doing. | ||
| And so, and it actually, they got Those people that were behind the bushes and stuff, they delayed the British so much that George Washington's army got away. | ||
| That's the outcome of that story. | ||
| But you just, if you know your history and you know what happened in the revolution and you see these stories, what you see is a founding generation that knew the government cannot be the only one with arms. | ||
| And so that's why they created the Second Amendment. | ||
| All right, so another thing that people always talk about with elections is that now we're in a position where we know that certain states are basically always gonna be blue. | ||
| We're in one right now. | ||
| States are pretty much close to always being red. | ||
| You live in one in Texas, although that one's even getting a little iffy these days. | ||
| But that now we're putting so much pressure on these few swing states. | ||
| So Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, things like that. | ||
| Do you see a risk in that? | ||
| That then they do almost like an overcorrection Where they pretty much ignore, like if a Democrat's like, well, I've got California in the bag, forget California, and then I'm gonna spend all my time focusing on these three other states. | ||
| I'm not one who thinks that red states stay red and blue states stay blue. | ||
| I think that there are periods of time where there is a stretch and that might happen, but if you look at California, as recently as 1988, you guys voted for George H.W. | ||
|
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Bush. | |
| That wasn't that long ago, really. | ||
| And you can look at any, if you look at the whole history of states voting, what you really see are states that Well, let me back up. | ||
| I also don't buy the idea that only swing states matter. | ||
| Safe states are important. | ||
| Like you just said, no Democrat wants to go to the election without California in its back pocket. | ||
| So what do they do to make California happy? | ||
| It has to do with the governance. | ||
| It has to do with the laws that are passed. | ||
| I mean, California is happy and blue because it's happy with what Democrats have been doing in office for the four years that preceded the election. | ||
| And when they start to become unhappy, they're going to let people know pretty quickly. | ||
| I don't even know that they're happy in this state anymore. | ||
| I think it's just like, oh, we're blue, we're blue. | ||
| That's just kind of how it is. | ||
| And the Republicans here who I've talked to, some of them are just so defeated. | ||
| They're like, we're trying so hard. | ||
| We're watching our state crumble in high taxes and more homeless people and more drugs on the streets and all this stuff. | ||
| But they're just kind of throwing their hands up like we've just lost so many times in a row now. | ||
| I always wonder what would happen if people just voted without regard to how they felt about it. | ||
| How do you mean? | ||
| For every state. | ||
| Like, what if all the Democrats came out in Texas? | ||
| It didn't assume that they were going to lose, that they just came out. | ||
| What if all the Republicans came out in California? | ||
| It didn't assume they were going to lose, just came out. | ||
| Just came out, yeah. | ||
| To see what would happen. | ||
| But also, if you look historically, you can find lots of examples of states that just changed unexpectedly. | ||
| Or they threatened to change, and the parties reacted. | ||
| Utah, in 2016, was threatening to vote third party. | ||
| Okay, so they were just unhappy. | ||
| They were ready. | ||
| And Mike Pence was dispatched to the state to make things right. | ||
| Because Republican Party did not want to lose its small, Safe little red state of Utah. | ||
| In 2000, West Virginia flipped. | ||
| They flipped because they became really unhappy with the environmental policies of the Democratic Party. | ||
| And they swung the election. | ||
| We all focus on Florida. | ||
| But without West Virginia, there was no way that George W. Bush was going to win that election. | ||
| So a safe, small state flipped and changed everything. | ||
| And you can look through history and you can see states changing their allegiance You know, back and forth over time. | ||
| So I tend to say, look, you know, the safe states matter. | ||
| They just are, they made up their minds earlier in the process based upon the governance that came before. | ||
| And swing states are just late to make up their minds. | ||
| They're indecisive. | ||
| And, but everybody's important. | ||
| You can't get to 270 without some combination of safe and swing states. | ||
| You simply can't get there. | ||
| So you got to do something to get them on your side. | ||
| So is there anything you would do with the way the Electoral College is set up to tweak it, to tighten it, or anything? | ||
| Or do you feel it's basically as perfect a system as we can do in a country of 320 million-some-odd people? | ||
| I like it. | ||
| When I first started this close to 20 years ago, there were small things I would change. | ||
| I thought, well, maybe we could automate the electorate so there's no possibility of electorate independence. | ||
| Or maybe we could change the contingent election process where the president's elected by the House if nobody can get a majority. | ||
| And I thought maybe we could tweak it. | ||
| But the more I study it, the more I look, the more I think, this is just a really delicate balance. | ||
| And if you change one thing, you don't know what kind of domino effect that might have. | ||
| And so I would just leave everything. | ||
| And it may not be perfect, but it's the best we're going to do in an imperfect world. | ||
| I steal something Winston Churchill said sometimes, and he said, democracy is the worst form of government. | ||
| Except for all the others that have been tried. | ||
| So I say, the Electoral College is the worst possible form of presidential election except for all the others that have been tried. | ||
| It's the best we can do and in a perfect world. | ||
| And it's got a lot of benefits. | ||
| So this is a slight deviation from Electoral College specifically, but what do you think of sort of the state of people believing that the system itself works, that the election process works and is untampered with, and Russians, and hacking, and all of these things. | ||
| Right, just fraud in general. | ||
| Because it seems to me that no matter what happens in the next election, half the country is gonna claim that it was illegitimate, and we're seeing this even now. | ||
| I mean, just in the last couple weeks now that Hillary's sort of reappearing, She's basically calling Trump an illegitimate president because she did win the popular vote, as we talked about. | ||
| So it seems to me that, again, comes to the optics part of it, where it's like we're setting up something where half the country, no matter what, every four years is going to think that something illegal or immoral or awful has happened. | ||
| Well, this is what I would observe. | ||
| Again, there's no such thing as perfection. | ||
| There will always be people that want to cheat. | ||
| There will always be people that will look for a way to steal an election if they can. | ||
| I can't fix that. | ||
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Nobody can fix that. | |
| The Electoral College can't fix that. | ||
| But what we can do is we can make it as hard as possible. | ||
| We can throw up as many hurdles as we possibly can. | ||
| And if you have a national popular vote system, then what you have is one centralized national database that or just voting system tabulation, whatever, | ||
| you just have to hack one thing. | ||
| And that means, by the way, also, that you have to be on defense | ||
| in every single precinct of the country. | ||
| So you can be in the bluest blue California precinct, and if votes are stolen there, you affect everybody. | ||
| Or the reddest red Texas precinct, that vote affects everybody. | ||
| Right now we have a situation where you don't have to be on defense absolutely everywhere. | ||
| You just have to be on defense in a few danger spots, which means you can focus all of your resources there, | ||
| and that's better. | ||
| Also, by the way, if you're talking about hacking, it's not just hacking one national tally. | ||
| You have to actually hack. | ||
| Multiple tallies around the country, because there are 51 different election systems. | ||
| 50 plus DC election systems. | ||
| So you'd have to identify which one would be, you know, the most relevant. | ||
| Which state's going to be close? | ||
| Which state could swing this? | ||
| Can I hack it? | ||
| And you have to be able to do all, have to have all of these things working for you before you can actually steal an election. | ||
| Is it impossible? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| I'm not going to claim that. | ||
| But you, again, you can make it as hard as possible and make it so that they have to get through as many hoops as possible before they can influence you. | ||
| Right, so okay, so as somebody that obviously you like states' rights and you're trying to set up | ||
| a system the way it was originally set to be, which is that you're trying not to give too much power | ||
| to the federal government, would you leave the voting mechanisms to the states? | ||
| Or should we have a federally mandated system of voting? | ||
| Because right now it's like we got hanging chads in one state and we got electronic voting | ||
| in another state. | ||
| Some states have receipts after the electronic voting, some states don't and a zillion other punch cards | ||
| and a gajillion different things, which that in and of itself seems really messy. | ||
| I think one of the most important things that people don't. | ||
| appreciate or know about the Electoral College is how important it is to protect its state's | ||
| prerogative just to choose to run its own election, choose its own electors, and to | ||
| be in charge of itself. And maybe the best way to demonstrate that is to show what would happen on | ||
| the opposite side. If we did have one national tally, well, what that means is a national | ||
| election code, a national bureaucracy, a new presidential appointees to run this whole thing | ||
| that you've put in place. | ||
| And so now you've got potentially an incumbent president in charge of his own election because he's in charge of the federal machinery that will make it happen. | ||
| But how it is now, every state makes its own decisions. | ||
| Some states will make better decisions than others. | ||
| Again, it's like the Laboratories of Democracy kind of idea. | ||
| They'll see what works, what doesn't work, they'll change, but everybody will be in charge of themselves, and that by itself is a protection. | ||
| If we wanna isolate one clip, and next time somebody says to me, Dave, why do you think the Electoral College is good? | ||
| Can you give me the sort of bumper sticker video that we can use to just push out to people in a couple minutes, like the cleanest, clearest? | ||
| I just always say it makes presidential candidates reach out to a wide variety of voters. | ||
| Given how big and diverse our country is, it's important. | ||
| The founders thought that 13 states was too large and too diverse to have anything else. | ||
| Well, we're so much bigger right now. | ||
| And so people say it's outdated and I say the opposite. | ||
| It's more important now. | ||
| How can we expect such a diverse country to govern itself if we don't have? | ||
| This is the only person expected to represent all of us. | ||
| The only one. | ||
| There are senators that represent states, you know, or congressmen that represent districts. | ||
| Everybody else represents a smaller subset of people. | ||
| The president must elect the most liberal person, or represent the most liberal people in California and the most conservative people in, you know, Mississippi or something. | ||
| So it's just, you gotta have a special system in place for that, to make him or her take into consideration as many people as possible. | ||
| I think I know your answer to this one, but would you say that our founding documents are basically the greatest man-written documents? | ||
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I do. | |
| I think so. | ||
| I think they came together at a special moment in time. | ||
| They were not perfect people, but they had no partisan interest in the way that we think of it today. | ||
| There's so many misperceptions about the founding generation. | ||
| It's become so easy to demonize them. | ||
| It makes me sad. | ||
| Look, they owned slaves and they did some things that we obviously don't want or approve of. | ||
| I think it was a big mistake. | ||
| But also what I think is, look, they lived at a moment in time where the king could tell you what religion to be. | ||
| Women couldn't do anything. | ||
| Yes, there were slaves. | ||
| But my point is there was a whole mess of problems. | ||
| And it wasn't just America. | ||
| It was everywhere. | ||
| And so our founders did something amazing. | ||
| And they broke free of part of that. | ||
| And they said, we can be self-governing. | ||
| You can just make up your own mind about religion. | ||
| And there were some things they got right. | ||
| And they took an important first step down the road. | ||
| And we look at them and we criticize them for not running the whole marathon. | ||
| Right then and there. | ||
| And it's not, it was more like a relay race where they ran the first leg and they passed the baton to the next generation. | ||
| And the next generation took it a little bit further. | ||
| And what I'm really proud of in America is that we are always going for more freedom. | ||
| Every generation has done more. | ||
| And so instead of criticizing the founding generation, I wish we would just look at them and say, thank you for running the first leg of that race so well. | ||
| You did great. | ||
| That is how you end an interview. | ||
| For more on Tara, follow her on the Twitter at Tara Ross. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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