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Feb. 18, 2025 - Viva & Barnes
01:32:47
Sidebar with John Eastman: Birthright Citizenship Executive Order, Lawfare, & Beyond! Viva & Barnes
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We have a very corrupt country, very corrupt country, and it's a sad thing to say, but we're figuring it out.
Now, the good thing about Social Security and what I read is if you take all of those numbers off, because they're obviously fraudulent or incompetent, but if you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security with people that are 80 and 70 and 90, but not 200.
Years old.
You know, so it's a very positive thing.
How about over here?
We have a very corrupt country.
Very corrupt country.
And it's a sad thing to say, but we're figuring it out.
Now, the good thing about Social Security...
It is amazing.
I want to see how Aaron Rupar was tweeting.
Now, I think Aaron's going for the, like, just objective.
Nobody can say he's...
What was he described as on...
Urban Dictionary?
A Lying Sack of Shiite.
By the way, the reason I started with this one and not the video that I wanted to start with was we'll try to get a couple minutes in before we drop some serious F-bombs because there is a great, great video that I'm going to play in a second.
It looks like Aaron Rupert is trying to reestablish his name.
Instead of, you know, being a lying sack of crap who will deceive and say whatever he wants for the party, so long as he just puts in quotes what is said in the video.
He should not get community noted, and it will be difficult to destroy him as a partisan lying of a hack.
We are now realizing, people, that corruption galore with the Social Security.
What I love, and I have this on the backdrop as well, is, you know, remember the response to Elon Musk?
He doesn't know what COBOL...
Is it COBOL?
Cobol. Cobol.
Yeah, Cobol.
C-O-B-O-L.
He doesn't know what Cobol is.
When you don't know the birthday, you just put in the default 1875.
That's why he saw so many 150-year-olds.
As if that's even, you know, any sort of an explanation.
But now what we're looking at here is it's not that they were putting in a default of 1875.
It's that apparently, according to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of the people in each age bucket with the deaf field set to false.
Maybe Twilight is real.
And there are a lot of vampires collecting social security.
Even his jokes are poppy, like, pun jokes.
You got one person who's 360 to 369 years old.
One who's 240 to 249.
You've got 1.3 million.
Oh, my goodness.
Millions that are over 100.
I mean, you got, like, more than there are of people that age.
And you see now that the excuse that it was, oh, just...
The default, if you don't know the birth date, then you just put in default 18 seconds.
It's not.
There's something seriously chicanery afoot.
But that is what's going on there.
But I wanted to start the show with, do you guys know Scott Lobito?
He's fantastic.
Almost a caricature of a New Yorker.
Amazing art.
Everything he does is the American flag, which is why he got so pissed off.
When he saw a bunch of Canadians booing the Canadian, the American national anthem.
Listen to this.
I love him.
I love the way he talks.
It's like music to my ears.
It's the only thing that makes me want to visit New York, but it's not enough.
American Canada always had this childish animosity towards each other for many, many moons.
Canadians always called us fat, lazy, overweight, cock-dog-eating slobs.
And we always called you Canadians a bunch of weak-ass...
Delicate, wee-wee French-talking pussies.
Then COVID happened.
And we became one.
We became buddies.
Remember? Because we were both fighting the man, the system, with this COVID mandate bullshit, the trucking industry, everything.
We got along.
We had rallies together.
I even did this beautiful painting, if you remember, of the Stars and Stripes with the Maple Leaf incorporated in it.
It was beautiful.
It was called Foster's joint.
See, but sadly, when I get back to my studio, I'm going to stop right now.
I'm going to put my fucking southpaw through that fucking painting and fucking smash it.
And I'm sorry, because I know I got a lot of Canadian fans out there, but sorry, America first.
All right, we're going to stop it there.
I love this guy.
And his artwork is damn beautiful as well.
I'm going to put my hands through it.
I'll give everybody the link to that because it's well worth watching.
But tonight...
We have actually, we have fun stuff.
No, we're not talking about the Tarifor.
We're not talking about Little Brother, you know, punching Big Brother and then complaining when Big Brother punches back.
What we're going to be talking about tonight is John Eastman Lawfare and the Birthright Citizenship Executive Order debate.
Hold on, link to tweets.
Go ahead and check that out.
We got Barnes in the backdrop.
We're waiting for Professor Eastman, or do I say Eastman Esquire?
We're waiting for him to come in, but Barnes, if you want to come on in and we'll lay the groundwork.
We'll say why John Eastman is wrong before he even gets here.
It's a joke.
Bada bing, bada boom.
I mean, I see somebody in the background, maybe him.
No, that's Encryptus, who is now the...
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The de facto Viva Fry Jamie, and he's going to be working.
I notice him tinkering with the audio level so that people don't come in too hot, too cold.
Robert, sir, how goes the battle?
Good, good.
Looks like I am going to have to go to trial in a case in Seattle in two weeks.
It's going to be a four-and-a-half-week trial.
Potentially. It might be shorter.
We'll see.
I mean, this is a defendant who had a city case and a county case, and he has a federal case.
But the city and county case are criminal cases against him.
All the constitutional issues here are extraordinary.
Now, unfortunately, I don't anticipate sympathetic judges at this level.
We're going to have to get somebody's attention at some level.
I'd requested a continuance until May or late April to absorb all the new discovery we got.
And the court denied that.
But what's interesting is, take the city case.
The Seattle city prosecuted him.
On violations of what they called violations of a no-contact order.
And what it is, they took every single time...
You wonder what the underlying crime is.
They're seeking a six-year prison sentence just for the city case.
And then they're going to seek a bunch more prison time on the county case.
The county case is what's coming up in trial.
The city case went to trial in the fall, where the court didn't allow them time to even...
Obtain counsel to defend himself.
He was jailed during that.
But what's he charged with?
That's what's extraordinary.
The core facts, I'll get to the law in a second here, the facts.
He talked to his own son.
He texted his son.
That is what the Seattle, the city of Seattle, is wanting to put a man in prison for six years, longer than they lock up rapists in Seattle, in some cases murderers in Seattle, for talking to And I'll presume that it's in violation of a court order enjoining him not to, so it's a contempt issue?
In essence, what they did is, so a court issued a no-contact order that he said he was never served.
He objected to on constitutional and jurisdictional grounds.
And the order itself appears to be patently unconstitutional.
So, like, for example, I was going to ask Eastman some questions about this.
Because the Constitutional, you have the fundamental right under the substantive aspects of the Due Process Clause of the Constitution, the Fifth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, depending on whether it's the federal government or the states.
And the Supreme Court has recognized one of those fundamental rights, there's only a few, is the right to care, control, and custody over your children.
In order to terminate that care, custody, and control, you have to go through these detailed proceedings for due process of law.
None of that ever happened here.
Instead, what you have is these liberal democratic jurisdictions deciding they can take away the most important liberty you have, which is the care, custody, and control over your own children.
We'll just issue a no-contact order.
Who needs the due process clause if you can just eliminate someone's parental rights by an overnight no-contact order?
Am I totally assuming or jumping to a conclusion?
Does this have anything to do with transgenderism or COVID shots, or is this just a...
COVID is the backstory here.
So you have a court issuing an order that it's not clear it had jurisdiction to order.
That, in my view, is patently unconstitutional.
Not clear who's ever served.
And what does the city prosecutor do?
The city prosecutor takes each day he talked to him as a separate crime.
This is a classic.
The biggest abuse prosecutors engage in is called overcharging in order to coerce plea deals and the rest and get crazy sentencing results like they're seeking here.
If you charge it as one crime, This is a city court system.
It's a misdemeanor.
It's a one-year max, right?
And it's in jail, not the state prison.
Instead, they take it and they charge it as 80-plus crimes for every single day of conversation.
And they convert this, and they think this case is so severe it has to have one of the worst sentences ever.
They cannot cite a single or similar situation where anybody has gone to prison for any extended time period based on this.
Talking about a middle-aged man with...
Practically no criminal history of any kind.
And they're trying to lock him up for six years in prison for talking to his son.
What's even more extraordinary is his son didn't testify against him.
His son didn't seek the no contact order.
His son objected to the no contact order.
His son is a teenager at the point where he is by law considered having the right to decide where he will live for parental care and custody purposes.
It was the son often initiating.
The conversation and contacts and the communications according to the text records.
And they're locking him up for six years in prison for this.
This is the insanity of the city of Seattle.
The backstory to all this, backdrop to all this, this is the gentleman, Kurt Benzhoof, who objected to the Sprouts, requiring he wear a mask simply to buy food he needed for his family, given that he had religious and medical objections to the mask.
And that's what started all of it.
Sprouts ended up going after him, calling the police on him, getting lawyers and judges to issue injunctions, prohibiting him from even going there.
And in the context of all this, the local school system wanted to issue a COVID-19 vaccine to his son.
He had doubts about whether the COVID vaccine was safe.
And so during this time period, he wanted to be able to voice his objection.
And that's when the courts were like, we're not going to let you voice your objection.
Even though we have no constitutional right to do what we're doing, we're Seattle and we don't give a damn.
That's Seattle and King County.
No respect for the Constitution, no respect for law, an out-of-control legal system that Justice Department official Harmeet Dillon should be putting under Office of Civil Rights Federal Criminal and Civil Investigation.
The city of Seattle and King County are nuts.
They have lost their minds when you're trying to lock up a person for six years for talking to his own son at his son's own initiative, which would appear to be within his constitutional rights and liberties.
And then in the county case, it's the ex-girlfriend, the girlfriend of the ex-girlfriend, police following him, and now they're going to call that evasion, you know, all this other stuff.
So there's multiple layers and levels of problematic behavior.
But what was shocked, all of it rooted in a COVID backdrop.
And these are the same judges in Seattle.
Some of the judges in Seattle were ordering him to wear a mask to come to court.
And when he objected on religious and medical grounds to having to do so, they would exclude him from the courtroom, wouldn't allow him to appear remotely or by Zoom, and then issue contempt sanctions against him.
This is abuse of power of the judicial system of King County in Seattle.
And it's egregious abuse.
This is, to give you an idea of what they've done, ever since he objected to mask mandates and vaccine mandates for his son, they've taken away his car, then they took away his home, then they took away any care control or custody over his son, then prohibited him from contacting his son, have issued orders prohibiting him from filing suit in court without advanced judicial permission.
And now they want to lock him up for six years and then another 10 years.
He's not pre-trial detained yet?
He was for a long time.
We got him out on bail because they're supposed to have pro-bail standards in the state of Washington.
This is the same state led by the same prosecutor's offices, led by many of the same judges who are giving light sentences to people who created the autonomous zone of jazz.
Remember, the city had to be sued because of how complicit they were with those people in stealing people's property and depriving them of liberty and creating an actual murderous zone where people actually died.
So you've got real crime that is not being prosecuted in Seattle and Washington.
Instead, they're going after their political critics, going after those that have questioned the political system.
The government even requests that he be given a harsher sentence because...
He filed ethics complaints about prosecutors.
Because he filed ethics complaints about judges.
Because he filed civil rights suits against prosecutors and judges.
Can you imagine?
I mean, that's how brazen they are.
That is how bold they are.
I mean, if you wonder how did New York get so nuts, how did D.C. get so nuts, it's part of a collective mindset of just legal insanity by people who have grown up.
You know, COVID just basically unlocked their power dreams.
And the way in which they're trying to utterly crush an individual who's just an ordinary street preacher, blue-collar guy, doesn't have a high-end profession or occupation, doesn't have a bunch of money.
Other people came to help do the defense, to help us mount a defense.
And this is just striking behavior.
It's just, every time I was like, how is it a mask in a vaccine dispute?
has elevated into you taking away everything you possibly can from an individual.
It's like, who is it that's been physically hurt?
Nobody. Who is it that's been financially hurt?
I don't see any evidence of anybody.
Who is the supposed victim in the city case?
His son who says he's not a victim.
And this is nuts.
This is the political weaponization of every tool and technique of power in order to crush a dissident thought.
And it's an indicator of what Professor Eastman has had to experience for the last...
Five years.
Well, I was just DMing AJ.
I thought maybe they came and whisked John away again.
So thank goodness you're here.
Let me see if I...
We'll do it like that.
This looks better.
Time zone challenge.
Sorry about that.
No, no, Dorian.
I swear to you, I'm so neurotic.
I literally thought you may have gotten picked up again.
Like they found out you're going to do a podcast and they decided to come and lock you up.
Okay, but of course it's a different DOJ now.
Professor Eastman, how goes the battle, sir?
Well, you know, we had a big win in Arizona last week.
The efforts to dismiss what they call an anti-SLAPP statute.
They're the only state in the country that has that for criminal prosecutions.
And we had to show that our First Amendment rights were implicated and that we had substantial evidence that the prosecution was brought in order to deter or retaliate against the exercise of those First Amendment rights.
And, of course, the Attorney General that brought the case...
We campaigned on deterring and retaliating against the electors and the supporters.
She even used the word from the statute for us.
And then in November, we found out that they had hired States United Democracy Center, the Norm Eisen-founded hyper-partisan anti-Trump organization.
They filed the bar complaint against me.
And Attorney General Mays hired them to prepare the prosecution strategy.
That's a little like hiring a fox to do your safety plan for your chicken coop.
It's insane.
And so the judge ruled that we met our initial burden of demonstrating that it was substantially motivated by their purpose of retaliating against us for the exercise of our First Amendment rights.
Now, they've got to prove that they didn't do that, and that's going to be kind of fun.
I think you need to explain to the world.
I'll just bring up an image so people can know who Norm Eisen is.
Mrs. Doubtfire.
I forget his name now.
Has Norm always been on the side of evil?
And can you explain to the world who might not know exactly what Norm Eisen is up to in life and what he's become, like what he does?
So my recollection is that he was in the White House Counsel's Office or counselor to the president in the Obama administration.
He has since been engaging in lawfare against Obama's political opponents by creating all sorts of shell operations well-funded by George Soros and...
I suspect we're going to learn by our taxpayer funds itself through DOGE or through Department of Education and through a number of other shell game grants that they do to go after their political opponents and apply the law, the criminal law.
I think he had a hand in drafting the indictment strategy for Fannie Willis.
I think he was involved in Jack Smith's indictment against President Trump.
These groups were basically paid.
To engage in lawfare against Trump and anybody that supported Trump.
Professor Eastman, for those that may not be familiar with you, could you give a basic CV, a biography, before you suddenly end up in the middle of all this controversy for simply suggesting that maybe the Constitution should be followed in a presidential election?
Yeah, so I graduated from, at the time, the top law school in the country, University of Chicago Law School.
I think it's still second or third in the country.
I clerked for Clarence Thomas at the Supreme Court of the United States.
I worked at a major international law firm in their appellate practice, and when they wouldn't let me represent the Boy Scouts or file a brief in support of the Boy Scouts, I left and created my own public interest law firm called the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Claremont Institute.
And I went into teaching and I taught for over 20 years constitutional law and property.
But through my litigation center, we were involved in over 200 cases in the Supreme Court over a quarter century, including almost all of the major constitutional cases.
And that's what we do.
My particular specialty is to focus on the structural provisions of the Constitution, federalism, separation of powers.
The limitation on legislative authority, the fact that the executive is the president and everybody that works in the executive works for him, not the other way around.
You know, basic stuff like that.
And then President Trump called on me to represent him in some of the challenges after the 2020 election because I was one of the few people that had expertise in the Electoral College and all of those things.
I'd actually testified down in Florida back in 2000.
In that electoral college controversy.
And, you know, so when the president of the United States asks you to represent them in the Supreme Court, that's kind of a twofer for a lawyer.
And I was happy to do it.
And I remain happy that I did it, despite everything that's been thrown at me.
You know, I was an unindicted co-conspirator number two in Jack Smith's case against Trump.
I was indicted co-conspirator number three down in Georgia, and that remains very active.
I'm indicted number 13 co-conspirator down in Georgia.
I went through the longest and most expensive bar disciplinary proceeding in history in California with a recommendation that I'd be disbarred, but the trial judge doesn't have any authority to do that.
So only the California Supreme Court can do that.
So we're up on appeal, the first round of appeal there.
It's already cost me more than three quarters of a million dollars to defend that one.
But I think defending all of this stuff is important.
Because, you know, our country was on the precipice of losing freedoms that we inherited from our founders by other people that put everything on their line, their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.
And this is our moment for standing up against what is increasingly tyrannical operations in government.
And, you know, Trump understood that.
And that's why he's fighting as hard as he is.
And I was honored to be called on by him to help.
And I continue to engage in that fight.
I think you need to flesh this out, not in thorough detail.
It'll take too long.
When you say you were unindicted in the Jack Smith, indicted in Georgia, and I can summarize it.
You were essentially indicted for the legal advice you gave as to the alternate slate of electors.
And they bastardized that and deformed it into impersonating public officials, submitting fraudulent documents.
What? Specifically, do they indict you for?
And explain, I'll load the question, that it was for the legal advice of promoting a legal theory that you thought is constitutionally justified.
Yeah, you know, two or three aspects of it.
One, that the legislature has the sole power to determine the manner of choosing presidential electors.
That's unambiguous in the Constitution in Article 2. And they set that out with certain election rules that state election officials ignored or violated.
Because they thought those rules were going to hamper Biden.
And then the question is, what do you do about that?
And I was arguing that the legislature had plenary power, since the rules weren't followed, to decide what to do, including picking their own slate of electors if they wanted to.
So that was number one.
The second was, while all of this stuff was going on, the alternate electors needed to meet because the only authority Congress has...
In the Constitution, in the election of the president process, is to pick the day that the electors have to meet and vote.
And the Constitution requires that that day be the same throughout the country.
And so if the electors don't meet on that day, and a court decision or a legislative decision says that actually Trump electors won and they hadn't met on that day, you can bet that the Democrats and Norm Eisen would have been arguing, you can't count them.
They didn't meet on that day.
So my advice only, I didn't have anything to do with the drafting of the certificates or anything.
People said, do we need to do this?
I said, absolutely.
They need to meet on that day.
That was my sole involvement.
And that's true.
I mean, that's what John Kennedy's electors did in Hawaii in 1960.
If they hadn't met on the designated day, when the election recount went their way, if they hadn't met, they arguably could not have been counted under the Constitution.
So that was it.
And then the third piece was, When all of this stuff was going on and these contests, these election challenges were not being resolved.
The courts were ducking him, but they were still pending.
Did the vice president have any authority to accede to requests from state legislators who had advised him that their elections were illegally certified?
Did he have any authority to delay for a week or 10 days and let them try and sort out what to do about it and then report back?
And if Biden had actually won after they were able to conduct that analysis, they would report back that Biden won.
But if Trump had won, doesn't consent of the government require that the guy that actually won be the one that gets certified?
So that was it.
And all of those questions are either solidly on my side or open questions of constitutional law.
And it's for that that I've been charged in Georgia with racketeering?
And conspiracy to commit forgery because the electors signed certificates with their own names?
That wasn't a forgery.
I mean, you know, it's just bizarre.
But this is what I don't think people understand, is that in Hawaii, Nixon and JFK, there were literal alternate slates of electors that were submitted saying that each respective person won the respective state.
They charged you with, I'm not going to pull it up, but fraudulent documents.
Claiming Trump won the state.
The fraudulent documents were not people signing in other people's name.
It was alternate slate of electors saying, we believe that we should be the slate of electors recognized.
And there's judicial precedent for this.
I mean, in your mind as a professor, how do they even get past the point of set aside thinking up these ridiculous charges, but getting a grand jury or whoever to approve them?
Well, you know, the grand jury was...
Fed a line of bull, and they went along with it.
They said these people wanted to destroy our democracy and undermining the legitimate votes of millions of Georgians.
That's what the district attorney, who campaigned for her re-election, by the way, and how important it was that she got Trump and all of his supporters.
The Attorney General in Arizona campaigned for retaliating against these electors.
That was the word she used.
And to deter anybody from ever doing this again.
Now, in my documentary that's been made about the lawfare against me, it's called The Eastman Dilemma, Lawfare or Justice.
One of the people that's interviewed in that documentary is Alan Dershowitz.
Who was on the other side of the case from me down in Florida in 2000.
And he relays on that documentary that the Gore team was actually considering having alternate electors meet and vote until the Supreme Court put an end to the whole thing with its decision two days before the electors met.
But this was something they were considering doing because they understood the importance of having them meet on that day.
By the way, this goes back.
I was in Milwaukee last night and gave a speech up there and we did a screening of the film.
And I told them, this all begins with Wisconsin in 1856.
There was a blizzard and the electors couldn't get there in time to vote.
And the vice president, the acting president of the Senate, decided to count their votes.
People objected in the joint session of Congress and he ruled the objections out of order.
Why? Because they're only to be present.
They have no role in the whole process.
And then he gaveled the thing ended and that James Buchanan was the victor.
Now, the Wisconsin votes weren't determinative.
But if you look at the count that he reported, it included the Wisconsin vote.
So he made the determination about that dispute.
And then he gaveled the session closed.
And then they fought for three days on whether that was proper or not.
And they never came to a resolution of it.
To qualify the votes or disqualify the votes, they were all tabled without any resolution or any resolution on whether the president of the Senate had the authority that he had exercised.
So that's the sole precedent that deals with this.
I thank the folks of Wisconsin last night for putting me in this mess, but there we are.
Well, I mean, in fact, you look back, all the way back to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, we had some sort of disputes about electoral slates.
And they exercised the power as if, in fact, there was some right or role or obligation, as the case may be, to certify who actually won the election, who actually is the correct electors.
And even though there were certain rule issues about whether you could...
And we had founding fathers arguing for both sides at different times in that.
So the idea that...
That questioning how the electoral college process works and certifying a presidential election, which is unique because it's the only election that's across multiple states for one office, right?
I mean, everyone else, you have your own state local protocols that govern because it's only that state or local area that is concerned with the election.
Presidency is unique.
But there's been a long extended history.
In fact, there were law review articles written right on the eve of the 2020 election laying out many of the things that you did, saying here's how this would work and here's how this would work.
And this came from people who were on the opposite side politically.
They were arguing, you know, what if we lose Pennsylvania?
Well, we can do this.
And what if Trump wins?
And there was an article in October or September in the Atlantic magazine laying out this strategy.
The notion that I invented it without any basis, which is, you know, Liz Cheney jumped on that when my memo, and by the way, it was an internal memo.
I think only two people saw it.
Vice President Pence and his general counsel have sworn under oath that they never were given the memo.
It wasn't designed for that.
It was a back-of-the-envelope brainstorming memo.
Here are the different scenarios and how they might play out.
It doesn't even have a recommendation in it.
And yet Liz Cheney gets a hold of this because somebody leaked it to Bob Woodward at the Washington Post 10 months after the fact, and she thought she had her smoking gun to fit her narrative, and so she decided to make me the grand puppeteer that was controlling everything.
I mean, it was just laughable.
These were discussions that were going on both inside and outside, in public and in private.
About what we can do about this election and legality when the courts are not stepping up and even addressing the issues.
Professor Riesman, I had to go back and refresh my memory.
I was alive but barely conscious during the Hanging Chad 2000 recount.
The issue back then was which counties did they recount?
Do they do a manual versus electronic?
Was it a question of disqualifying the ballots that had a Hanging Chad on them?
Was that one of the issues?
Well, that was part of it.
There were a dozen or so different trial cases.
The issue that goes up to the Supreme Court of the United States is whether the state courts can alter the rules after the fact.
And the issue, and this was not the ultimate holding of the Supreme Court, but it was the holding of the concurring opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist, joined by three.
And that is, you know, the legislature has plenary power.
And when they set the rules, the state courts can't alter those rules.
Now, the final decision by the Supreme Court said, oh, and when you're doing counting under different standards, one county to another, that violates equal protection.
That was the holding that got seven votes.
People that claim it was only five votes, it got seven votes that had violated equal protection, and then only five votes to say, and it's too late now to continue the counting under the correct rule, and so they decided the case.
But that was the holding.
Now, I will say, the hanging chads, I was involved in one of the trial litigations that didn't go up to the Supreme Court that dealt with the mechanics of hanging chads and dimpled chads.
You remember that one?
And experts on both sides of the case, both the Gore people and the Bush people's experts, agreed that it's impossible to put enough pressure on a ballot to actually cause an indentation, a dimple, without putting it through and forcing it either a complete chad or a hanging chad.
And yet we had tens of thousands of ballots with dimpled chads, and they both agreed it was impossible.
You can't put enough pressure with that stylus without kicking it through at least partially.
And so we asked, well, then how did we have all these tens of thousands of dimpled chads?
Well, it's possible if you stuff three or four ballots in at a time, which meant every dimpled chad was proof of fraud.
Mother kabri.
So I understand correctly, you had never represented Trump until 2020.
Right. And not to say obscure, but as it's mentioned in the documentary, a lesser known name as far as lawyers go on the public sphere, and then your public enemy number one overnight.
You got to tell the world what that has to feel like, where you literally feel like they're burning effigies of you.
Yeah, they are.
But, you know, when we look at bringing a lawsuit against the University of Colorado that canceled my classes on the night before they were supposed to start.
We were going to sue them for damages.
And somebody said, well, Eastman, what are your damages?
I said, reputation.
He said, yeah, but on our side of the political aisle, your reputation's as high as it's ever been.
I mean, I go into big, you know, David Horowitz's folks gave me the annual award, Courage Award.
The Annie Taylor Courage Award, it's called.
I had to look up who that was.
Annie Taylor is the first person to have gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel and live.
So I began my talk down there.
I said, there may be a fine line between courage and crazy.
I hope I'm staying on the right side of that line.
But yeah, no, look, I think our country was on the precipice of losing all of our freedoms to an increasingly tyrannical government.
And the fact that I've been cast into a role on the front lines of that battle, I can't think of anything more important to be doing to protect the future for my kids and now increasingly my grandkids.
And, you know, our forebears, I mean, they pledged their lives and they meant it.
Their fortunes and they meant it.
Ask Robert Morris, who, you know, helped fund the revolution.
And most importantly to them, they pledged their sacred honor.
I think that was even more important than either of those first two for them.
And they gave us a nation that has been the freest, fairest, most successful in human history.
And we were about to lose that.
And we may still lose that if we don't stand up.
Thank God Trump is standing up with a fighting spirit.
Motivated in part by assassination attempts, but also motivated by him witnessing firsthand just how deep the corruption in the deep state is.
And deciding that his mission in life now is to do something about it.
Just like now my mission in life is to continue to fight to do something about it.
How have you survived economically during all of this?
Well, you know, I mean, I was close to retirement age, so...
We've got our retirement funds.
Unlike poor Rudy Giuliani, they haven't been able to take that away.
I've not opened myself up to any false defamation type of lawsuits.
But we've spent about $1.6 million in legal fees in 18 different actions that I've been dealing with.
But my legal defense fund has raised nearly a million.
And then other people are helping on the side of that as well.
We're keeping our head above water, keeping up with the legal fees.
But if the Georgia and Arizona things don't get dismissed and they go full to trial, I mean, they're predicting a five-month-long trial in Georgia because you got still like 14 different defendants and 14 different legal teams and second chair lawyers and technical staff and secretarial staff and paralegals.
I mean, you're looking at $100,000 a week.
For a five-month trial, you're looking at a million to two million dollars for each of those.
And that's what they're trying to do.
They are trying, even if they lose the cases, they're trying to bankrupt people, not just to try and shame me and, you know, look what you did.
You're trying to undermine our democracy.
You know, yes, but that's what they believe, or that's what they claim to believe.
But they're trying to send a signal to anybody else that would dare challenge.
Elections, fraud, election illegality, CRT, men in your girls' locker rooms, boys swimming against your daughters in swim meet or running against them in track meets, anybody that would dare stand up to that.
They're trying to prevent lawyers from being willing to take on those cases.
Professor, there's a question here from Dapper Dave in our Locals community.
It says, on the subject of corrupt judges, it says...
What do you think of the nationwide injunctions, ignoring separation of power, unconstitutional decisions, and what do you think can be done about this?
Well, the one that was so clearly beyond the pale, telling the Secretary of Treasury he couldn't look at the books of the Treasury Department, I thought was going to set up an immediate Supreme Court decision that would...
Not only invalidate that injunction, but invalidate the very idea of nationwide injunctions.
When they're issuing orders that are essentially second-guessing the executive, how he's going to run the executive branch, you're right.
It's a complete violation of separation of powers.
And the president's got a very good legal team.
I mean, the executive orders they've signed.
Are fully consistent with the original understanding of separation of powers under the Constitution?
The example I like to give, you know, they're saying, well, he's violating some statute with Congress directing how he should run his own department.
And, you know, and this is all because of the Congress has the appropriation power, the power of the purse, we call it.
And the example I like to give is what if Congress in 1944 had passed a statute in appropriation using their power of the purse?
Telling Franklin Roosevelt that he couldn't let our troops land in Normandy.
They had to land in Dunkirk instead.
Well, that would be a direct violation of his commander-in-chief power.
And you can't violate that constitutional power with a statute.
And a lot of what's going on here, micromanaging how the executive branch runs, is infringing on the president's power to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
A power that he has directly from the Constitution.
And Congress intermingling with that is the problem.
And what these judges are doing is relying on those unconstitutional meddling statutes to issue injunctions to compound the separation of powers problem.
So we now got a congressional statute trying to order the president how to do the president's affairs.
And then the court saying, you can't do that, president, because I'm the court and I get to issue an injunction.
It's a double violation of separation of powers.
And I think the Supreme Court, in fairly short order, is going to weigh in in a very big way on these things.
And that might be part of the 4-D chess game that Trump is playing, because the court has let this go on way too long.
And forcing the issue now in such an egregious way may be just what the remedy we need is.
Can I share your sentiments on all of that?
One area of controversy where I'll acknowledge some role for the courts, which I think they should have limited themselves to rather than trying to play president or overturn.
What they accused you of doing is what the courts are currently doing, overturning an election.
They don't like how people voted and they want to overturn it.
They wouldn't be doing this if Biden was president, in my opinion.
But the other big controversy is the birthright citizenship issue, which is also going through the court system.
And I've told people that policy-wise, I agree with Trump.
Constitutionally, I'm not sure if we get there.
But you have articulated, I think, the best argument for why the 14th Amendment should be constructed in a way that does not automatically grant, in every single case, citizenship if you're born on U.S. territory.
Could you explain some of that?
Yeah, and there are only four or five scholars in the country that have done a serious deep dive into this, and most of them have come to the same conclusion that I did 20 years ago.
The case that got me involved in this issue was the enemy combatant case of Yasser Ismail Hamdi.
He was captured in Afghanistan.
He was a Saudi.
His parents were Saudi.
But it turns out he'd been born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when his Saudi father was working on a temporary work visa on the oil rigs off of the Gulf of Mexico, as it was called at the time, off of the Louisiana coast.
And Ed Meese, the former Attorney General under Reagan, and I filed a brief saying he's not a citizen.
He was here as a temporary visitor.
And it's important for people to understand how this original argument of what the Constitution actually means is, And to get past the simplistic errors, like Senator from Hawaii, Hirono, a couple of weeks ago on her Twitter said in response to Trump's executive order, the Constitution is clear.
Anybody born here, dot, dot, dot, are citizens.
And of course, that's not what the Constitution says.
The dot, dot, dot hides the key phrase.
All persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction are citizens.
That's what it says.
And then the question is, what does that mean?
And modernly, we just think it means, are you subject to our laws?
I've even seen people laughably say, well, if illegal immigrants aren't subject to our jurisdiction, then we can't criminally prosecute them for being here illegally.
That's utter nonsense.
There were two meanings of that phrase at the time it was written and put into the Constitution.
One they called partial or territorial jurisdiction.
If you're visiting here, say you're a tourist from Great Britain, you've got to follow our laws when you're here.
You drive on the right side of the road, not the left side of the road.
You're subject to our territorial jurisdiction.
But you're not subject to the broader, complete jurisdiction that they meant with that clause.
You don't owe allegiance to the United States.
You can't be charged with treason if you take up arms against us.
You might be charged with other crimes, but not treason because you're not violating any oath of allegiance.
And when the drafters of that language were asked specifically which of those two understandings of jurisdiction they meant, they said the complete jurisdiction.
Not any partial jurisdiction, such as applies to temporary visitors or people that owe allegiance to a different sovereign.
And the discussion centered on Native Americans, Indians they were called in that day, and they said no, because they're not subject to the complete jurisdiction.
They owe allegiance to a different sovereign, their tribe.
Even if that tribe is a dependent of the United States, it's still a separate sovereign.
So if the children of Native Americans, whose tribe was itself in turn, you know, subject to the United States, and that didn't give them citizenship, then the notion that somebody who's temporarily visiting or visiting here illegally would automatically get citizen is just contrary to everything they said in those debates in 1868.
I'm just reading what Grok has to say, where it says, you know, citizens can be charged with treason, resident aliens.
Others owing allegiance, and then it says this is the murkier, but theoretically anyone present in the U.S. who benefits from its protection might owe a form of allegiance.
I had actually never thought about that, where you would not charge, let's just say, a Chinese tourist with treason if they decided to take up arms against the government.
Many other things, but not that.
And if that's the concept of jurisdiction, the dot, dot, dot subject...
Born from people subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof would then seem to exclude anybody who's here on birth travel thingy things, whatever they call it.
There's a very important discussion in the debates that make this...
It's the only one that addresses the question outside of the context of Indians.
And some people that take the other side of me on this just say, well, Indians are kind of a unique example, so you can't take any...
Anything and extrapolate to, but there's a conversation and a guy named Cohen asks one of the sponsors of the bill, the name Kahnis, would this apply to the children of Chinese in California and the children of gypsies in Pennsylvania?
And Kahnis says yes.
And my detractors take that to mean that means anybody born here is a citizen.
But the actual question was, are they entitled to greater protection than mere sojourners are?
Sojourners being the word they use for temporary visitors.
And he said yes.
And so the presumption of the question is that sojourners are not going to get automatic citizenship.
Are the Chinese and the gypsies who are here permanently and lawfully going to get it because we don't like those people was the basis of the question.
And he said, yes, it's not going to have any distinction based on race or national origin as long as they're not temporary sojourners, temporary visitors today on a student visa or a work visa or a tourist visa or coming across the border without any consent of ours in violation of our laws at all.
And so I think this is long overdue.
I've been arguing both with members of Congress to get bills to try and clarify their understanding of what this constitutional provision means.
And now the president has done it very forcefully.
We were watching very carefully as the line attorneys at the Department of Justice, before the political appointees were even there, were they going to do a good job?
And I tell you, the briefs they filed in these cases have been spectacular.
They're not only making all the arguments, but they're relying on all the evidence, even the obscure evidence that I would have relied on if I'd been doing the briefs myself.
Robert, let me get this one for you, Robert, because I know you disagree with Professor Eastman.
No, I got him coming my way.
I can see you looking.
Well, this is from Law of Self-Defense who put out, we'll call it a Twitter treatise, an ex-treatise.
And he's, Robert, citing Salisbury, Turnbull, and he says...
Talking about complete jurisdiction, where I do not presume that anyone will pretend to disguise the fact that the object of this birthright citizenship clause is simply to declare that free slaves shall be citizens of the United States.
Salisbury, you got Turnbull talking about complete jurisdiction.
Robert, when we discussed it a couple of weeks ago, you had a retort to that.
What is the retort to that?
And then I would love to hear Professor Eastman's retort to your retort.
Yeah, I think the next thing to overcome...
Aside from that debate about what subject to the jurisdiction means or doesn't mean, the second aspect, and I think this plays both ways, is that this was not the focal point of the amendment.
In other words, it wasn't like anchor babies were a common problem in 1862.
And I think that cuts both ways in the sense that on the side of those that say, okay, this doesn't reach that issue, and thus it should be presumed that everybody is subject to the jurisdiction under the interpretation that birthright equals power and control and authority.
And the opposite side, President Trump's argument, that clearly nobody at the time...
Yeah. Is it fair to say that nobody necessarily anticipated the scale of the problem we face today?
And how much does that, like when you're trying to do an originalist interpretation, like one area of my nervousness has been to advocate, I mean, I think you make the best argument for it, is to argue, stay within the originalist argument and don't be tempted by the policy outcome argument.
In other words, hey, I'd love to change the meaning of this.
And I think there's some parts of conservative legal world, particularly more political world, where there's a temptation to say, man, I really want this to mean this.
So don't worry about trying to interpret it originally.
Let's just have a living constitution.
And I always think that's a trap that we should always be wary of.
But the one is, is it fair to say this wasn't they weren't addressing this topic because it wasn't a big problem?
They weren't addressing the topic in the context of illegal immigration.
And so my arguments about that are extrapolating from the principle of what they were addressing, which is the question of Native Americans.
And the issue there was not, well, these people have their own sovereign territory, we'd call them reservations, and so they're not even really part of the United States.
That was not the argument.
The argument was that because they owe allegiance to that tribe, they don't owe complete allegiance to the United States, complete and direct allegiance.
And that argument...
applies even more forcefully to people who are temporarily visiting or people who are here illegally, who retain their membership in their tribe, their home country, whatever that country is, and their children derivatively retain that same membership in that tribe or that country, that home country.
And so you extrapolate from the argument they did make.
The only thing that gets close to what we have now is that exchange over temporary sojourners, temporary visitors.
That was not in the context of Native Americans.
It was a broader principle directly tied to at least half of what the president's executive order addresses, which is people who are here just temporarily.
And so we do have that as part of the original discussion.
The other thing that I think is important is this doctrine that people go the other direction or relying on is the old English feudal doctrine of use solely, born on the soil.
What people forget is that You solely, born on the soil, yet you were entitled to the king's protection.
But for that, you owed the king perpetual allegiance, which you could never renounce.
You were basically his subject, his property, in exchange for the protection he provided to you.
Well, we repudiated that with the Declaration of Independence.
In very clear terms, the last paragraph says, these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states, and we hereby absolve any allegiance to the king, right?
That repudiated this doctrine of borth on the soil is for a lever allegiance.
And we won that Revolutionary War, but we fought another war over this very question, because the English refused to recognize that we could repudiate that.
Old birth allegiance to the liege lord, and they were impressing American sailors under British ships that led to the War of 1812.
So we repudiated in the declaration.
We later fought another war over this very issue.
And the people that say, well, we've always had birth on the soil as our rule, just don't know the history.
Now, the two other questions.
To what degree do these arguments help or not help in terms of the birthright citizenship argument?
One I've heard is that it was recognized, almost universally, that if you were part of an invading army, you had a kid, your kid didn't suddenly become a citizen of that region you've invaded.
How much can the current illegal immigration be compared to that legally and empirically?
And in the same respect, I hear part of your argument as if they can't be drafted, they don't have the privileges of citizenship.
And has that ever arisen?
I mean, it probably hasn't, but has anybody ever disputed whether they could be drafted based on claiming they're not citizens, for example, but even if they're born here?
There's actually a statute that says if you're here, we can draft you.
I think that statute may be unconstitutional.
That's never been challenged as far as I understand.
And you can see the problem.
If you're here from a country...
Let's say you're here visiting from Saudi Arabia, like Yasser Yusuf Hamdi was, and Saudi Arabia joins with the Taliban in waging war against the United States.
Can we really draft you here to fight against them?
You'd be committing treason against your home country.
You know, there's a real problem with that.
There's a federal statute that says you can be drafted just by being on the soil, notwithstanding you're not a citizen?
It has, I don't know the exact phrasing off the top of my head, but my recollection is some people who are here on the soil can be drafted, even though they're not citizens, which seems rather bizarre.
Anyway, and it's a conflict of allegiances, you know?
Anyway, but the other thing is the evading armies.
I think the argument that, let's say, Everybody agrees that subject to the jurisdiction excluded the children of diplomats or the old English doctrine of youth solely.
By the way, the English got rid of that about the same time we were passing the 14th Amendment.
Most of the countries in the world and all of what we used to call the first world countries don't have birth on the soil.
And they don't seem to have any problem figuring out who's properly citizens by birth and who's not, even though, you know, everybody's going, oh, this would be too complicated here.
But the French don't have any problem with it.
The Brits don't have any problem with it.
Anyway, everybody agreed that under the old English doctrine, children of diplomats were not citizens and children of occupying, invading armies were not citizens.
I think it's a stretch.
This may be an invasion, but it's not an occupying army.
The idea there was if they're occupying part of our territory, it's not really our territory at the moment.
Just like the fiction of diplomats, that they are the embodiment of their sovereign, that wherever they are is their sovereign soil, not ours.
So they're really not even covered by the subject of the jurisdiction clause.
They're covered by, are you born on U.S. soil?
And under that fiction and under the occupying army exception, they're really not.
So I don't, you know, yes, it's an invasion, but it's not, it doesn't fit within the old exception of the common law.
I think my understanding of what they drafted was subject to the jurisdiction.
And by the way, everybody agreed they were trying to codify, constitutionalize the 1866 Civil Rights Act.
And that one was even more clear.
Anybody born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power are citizens.
All right, well, oh, well, we changed the language.
Therefore, we must have meant to make it broader.
No, no, the debates are very clear.
They changed the language because not subject to foreign power was being used to not cover Indian tribes who were domestic powers, not foreign powers.
So they changed it to cover both.
And when there was an effort to amend the new language, to add in the phrase, excluding Indians, not taxed, they said, we don't need that.
It's already covered by the subject of the jurisdiction clause.
I don't want to, Robert, I think I've been thoroughly convinced now.
That's why I recommended Professor Eastman for this.
My main advice for conservatives is just don't take the bait of...
Getting into any kind of living Constitution interpretation because you like a policy outcome.
Follow what Eastman and others are doing which is making the most persuasive originalist interpretation for why this is more consistent with what they intended at the time the amendment was passed.
Making a joke that I'll be drafted to invade Canada as the 51st state.
Yeah, that was my first thought.
I mean, imagine if we were traveling to some other foreign country and they could suddenly just draft us and force us to fight for some war.
You know, I go over to London, all of a sudden they draft me and send me to the front lines of Ukraine.
And that's exactly what the Brits did in 1812.
That's why we fought that war, because that's exactly what they were doing.
By the way, if we're going to make Canada, can we leave Montreal and Toronto and go back to the Canadians and we'll take where the minerals are up in the north and over in the west?
By the way, I think the tariff war ended immediately as soon as somebody pointed out that they blocked the pipeline across Canada and their pipeline from west to east to all his friends.
went through U.S.
states. They weren't going to get any energy if he had that terror of war.
Well, now that you mentioned it, the idea of the invading force is interesting, and then the diplomats is also interesting, because diplomats are recognized in virtue of foreign relations where the expectation is not that any kids would be of the jurisdiction of where the diplomat is going to represent, and then whether or not you analogize the invasion as an invasion...
The question then becomes, the native question is very interesting because when you see the language was changed because subject to a foreign jurisdiction could not apply to Native Americans who were independent but not subjected to a foreign...
And then the complete jurisdiction, which would mean whether or not you could be drafted.
Grok says there's been a few cases of people who contested the draft based on their not being citizens.
I'm going to try to look into that afterwards.
This is fascinating.
I'm torn between Professor Eastman and Big Brain Robert Barnes.
Well, look, look, the drafters of the amendment said this.
The ratifiers all understood they were codifying the Civil Rights Act.
And then you get the Supreme Court and the slaughterhouse cases say exactly the same thing.
It's a dicta, but they say the same thing.
The leading constitutional treatise writer of the day, Thomas Cooley, says the same thing.
The Supreme Court in a case called Elk v.
Wilkins explicitly holds that subject to the jurisdiction meant complete jurisdiction, owing direct and immediate allegiance, not any subsidiary corollary allegiance like through the Indian tribes.
You get the Secretary of State in the 1880s dealing with non-Indian cases.
There was a child born of a Scottish visitor, and they said, sorry, You were just temporarily visiting here.
Your kid doesn't get automatic citizenship.
And then you get this case called Wong Kim Ark in 1898 by the Supreme Court that handed us the egregiously bad decision, Plessy v.
Ferguson, that gave us a half century of separate but equal.
But the parents in that case were permanently domiciled in the country.
That was the question presented.
That was 28 times mentioned in the case, that they're permanently domiciled here.
Now, there's language in the case that says anybody born, no matter what, they're citizens.
But beyond permanently domiciled here, that's all dicta as well.
And if it had settled this question, anybody born on the soil for whatever reason, no matter what, are citizens, except the children of diplomats, then why did Congress offer citizenship to Native Americans in 1924?
In the Indian Citizenship Act, if they were already citizens under Wong Kim Ark.
Nobody thought Wong Kim Ark stood for that broader principle until recently.
And it gets mixed with anti-Trump fervor as well.
And, you know, scholars that had long recognized Wong Kim Ark didn't settle this question all of a sudden hate Trump so much, they now act like it was settled law for over a century.
How much did the 14th Amendment change the original construct that you are a citizen of the country if you are a citizen of the individual state?
So we don't have a definition of citizenship in the original Constitution.
We have a requirement for the Office of Presidency to be a natural-born citizen, and we have a requirement for members of the House of Representatives or the Senate to be citizens for a fixed amount of time.
But we don't have a definition of what that is, and each state kind of did it on its own.
One of the key cases against me is a case called Lynch v.
Clark in the 1830s that adopted the English common law rule of youth solely, birth on the soil is all you need.
But that was a case out of New York, and a provision in the New York state constitution required them to follow the English common law until the legislature had altered it.
So you can't, you know, that's just a state constitution mandate.
It's not that the federal government had adopted that rule.
And then you get the 14th Amendment because of the egregiously wrong decision in Dred Scott that said African Americans, former slaves, not only are not citizens, but can never be citizens.
And the 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause was designed first and foremost to repudiate that.
But it also, for the first time, set the rule nationwide on what we're going to do as citizens.
And by the way, it's the floor.
If Congress wants to offer citizenship to temporary visitors who have children here, it can do so under its naturalization power.
It can go as far above the floor as it wants.
But what this broader interpretation of the 14th Amendment does...
It's basically move the line on where Congress has any policy-making judgment about how far to extend citizenship and obliterates it for a large class of people when under the original understanding that was going to be a policy judgment.
How much immigration can we take to allow assimilation without altering the fundamental nature of our country?
That's the policy judgment that Congress has given the authority to decide.
And when you expand the notion of citizenship as a mandate in the Constitution, you take away a lot of that policy discretion that was originally designed for Congress.
Professor Susan, can you take a few questions here?
I want to get to some in the chat.
Sure. Some are questions, some are statements.
Then we've got, I think it's, this looks like it might be something of a joke.
It says...
On the principle of Jus Soli, could a Canadian-born person living in the 51st state refuse U.S. citizenship and refuse an oath to the United States?
Let me see here.
There was one that said, John is a brilliant and happy warrior.
Thanks for taking the time to share and educate on Sidebar with our heroes, Viva and Barnes.
So Congress could then come in and legislate the resolution that the courts can come in and say, it doesn't mean this, but if you want to go ahead and wholesale abandon your country to, what do they call it, a birthright tourism?
There's a word for it, I forget now.
Birth tourism, yeah.
Our enemies, Russians in Miami and Chinese in Los Angeles, laying claim to citizenship that they have no intent of fulfilling any obligations for, only to come here with a free pass later on.
It's nonsense.
And I think Trump has really tapped into something there.
Let me go back to the first question, though.
It gets complicated by the question of majority rule and the question of consent.
But Congress has no authority to confer citizenship on everybody in Mexico City, for example.
They can offer citizenship, but it requires that the offer be accepted.
This is social compact theory 101.
Mutual consent is what forms the body politic.
We can offer citizenship to Canadians to become the 51st state, but if they reject it, we can't force them to be citizens.
Now, the interesting question is, well, what if 52% of people of Alberta want to become the 51st state and 48% don't?
Don't we violate their consent?
By dragging them in along with the 52. Well, you've got to give deference to majority rule at some point, because you're never going to get unanimity.
And we have that same question at the founding.
Well, not everybody in the original 13 colonies were keen on the Declaration of Independence.
But the majorities were, and they were part of a political community that basically conceded the consent to the majority.
And so you've got those kind of things.
But if we just offer citizenship and they choose not to accept it, then they're not citizens.
There's a Native American tribe, I believe, up in North Carolina that rejected Congress's offer of citizenship.
They continue to assert their separate sovereignty and issue their own passports.
So, you know, the offer of citizenship is an offer, right?
It requires mutual consent.
And the problem with illegal immigration in particular is they have no consent from us to be here.
It's got to be consent on both sides.
We've got to consent to you becoming part of the body politic, and you've got to consent to becoming part of the body politic.
And without that mutual consent, you don't have an agreement.
You don't have a compact.
Who would one call in order to be offered citizenship, just out of curiosity?
Okay, bada-bing, bada-boom.
Professor Heisman, there's another one here that says, were alternate electors first used in the 1800 presidential election between Adams and Jefferson?
No, they weren't.
What was at issue in the 18 election was an illegal slate coming out of Georgia that didn't meet the Constitution's requirements.
And without that slate being counted, nobody gets a majority.
And the top five go to the House of Representatives that was still under Federalist control, and you would have had a constitutional crisis.
And very likely, the...
Carryover Federalists would have voted for somebody other than Jefferson.
Now, with the Georgia slate, both Jefferson and Aaron Burr ended up with majority votes because everybody cast two votes at the time, and you didn't distinguish between president and vice president.
I think we went to 28 votes in the House before somebody finally, Hamilton, finally said, this is nonsense.
Everybody knows it was Jefferson.
We've got to give it to Jefferson.
That's what, by the way, leads to the...
The duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton a few years later, that animosity.
Because Burr got a big head and he thought, I might actually become president.
That's what gives us, by the way, the 12th Amendment.
They fixed that problem.
Let me see here.
There's another one.
Now it says, Robert, and I'm not sure if it's Robert Gouveia or Robert Barnes.
Robert has a different perspective on subject to the jurisdiction thereof.
Robert, what are his thoughts on Professor Eastman and what he's said thus far?
Yeah, I mean, I think it does come down to whether or not the just soli principle is reflected in that amendment or not.
And I think Eastman, Professor Eastman, makes the best arguments as to how, from an originalist perspective, that it does not incorporate the British construct of just soli.
Now, speaking of which, what do you think is going to happen with the court?
How much does the legacy of this interpretation back from the 1890s, how much does that ultimately shape?
Can you hear me, do you think?
I think he can hear you.
Basically, it's how much does that impact the Supreme Court's willingness to embrace a skepticism of what the Supreme Court seemed to say back in the 1890s.
I think that was my last question for him, was how practical can it be?
That happened.
It would be really hilarious if Professor just took off.
He's done with us now.
Oh, wait.
I think something might have gone dead, actually.
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Now I'm thinking something might have gone dead there on his end, but hopefully we'll get it back.
Let me text.
Let me text him.
Hold on one second.
Did your computer go dead?
Come back in if you can.
Smiley face.
Okay. Now that Professor Hitchens presented it that way, Robert, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, what would be the attenuated scope of the jurisdiction?
So the argument is whether or not this old principle...
That if you are born on the soil, you're both entitled and obligated to whoever governed that soil.
That he's referencing just soli, J-U-S-S-O-L-I in the Latin.
That that is the main best argument for allowing birthright citizenship to anybody simply born on the land.
As he explained, he explained why he thinks that that argument is not determinative.
I think he's here.
Yeah, let's see here.
No, I don't think so.
Hold on a second.
Let me see here.
Oh, yeah, there is.
Professor Reisman, activate your camera if you can, or maybe Encryptus does this now.
I'm there.
I'm thinking he got a knock at the door.
The FBI comes and pulls out the plug for his computer.
This is where my head goes immediately.
Oh, you know, Canada gets a chance at redemption.
They get to play the U.S. in the final game of the Four Nations on Thursday.
What is the hockey tournament?
I don't even know what the hockey tournament is going on.
It's some special tournament.
It's like one of those Nations League deals.
They're getting in soccer these days where in between the Olympics and the World Cup, they're doing these other competitions.
But Canada was early on the prohibited favorite because it's in Canada and it's hockey.
And yet, I think the U.S. is now favored in the rematch.
I see it in there, but...
No, now it went dark again.
Hopefully there's not a technical glitch.
Let me see what else we got in here while we got time.
This is from SpamRanger.
How does this citizenship issue play out in the case of Islam, which is both a First Amendment protected religion and a hostile transnational state?
I mean, essentially it would be that just Congress sets the rules of naturalization and you just follow those.
And maybe Congress has rules of naturalization.
Keen, as he said, extend to birthright citizenship.
Maybe it's by ancestry.
Maybe it's by other dynamics.
Interesting of note, though, this impacts, indirectly, cases like Roger Ver's, for example.
Because Roger Ver tried to exit.
And they're saying, no, we're not going to let you exit, basically.
We're going to tax you after the fact and put you in prison on it.
There are a bunch of people that have been hit with huge tax bills by the IRS who did not know they were considered citizens of the United States.
Because they either were born there and that was recorded in some manner or because their parents were Americans and they're citizens of another country.
And all of a sudden, out of the blue, the IRS says, you know what?
You didn't disclose your foreign bank account in the nation that you actually live in.
That's wild.
And massive fines and threatened them with criminal prosecution.
Who was the example of the terrorist that was born in Louisiana?
He mentioned the name, but I'm terrible at remembering those kind of names.
It was a lot of the 9-11, post-9-11 type cases where those issues kind of arose in different contexts.
But he was saying his role in that was whether or not the person was a U.S. citizen under the law when he was arrested because the Bush administration's argument was that these people were taken on the battlefield.
Now, I never shared that Bush argument.
I don't believe in a foreign battlefield exception to the Constitution without that being risky.
Now, you can see why, practically speaking, Could you enforce the Constitution on a daily basis on the battlefield?
Probably not, for obvious reasons.
So I understand the logic, but I don't like anything that carves out holes in the Constitution.
So I have an instinctual opposition to it.
But Eastman's coming from a very sincere perspective, motivated by continuing a constitutional originalist interpretation.
That's why I advocated for that, because there's a fair number of people in the conservative space.
That are just, without realizing they're doing it, they're making the argument of a living constitution.
They say stuff like, you know, this was not anticipated back then, which is true, which is important for an originalist interpretation, but then they take it another step.
They say, if they knew then what we now know, they would change the constitution.
And I'm like, that's starting to get into living constitution.
Well, I see him trying to come back in here.
We'll see if we can...
If he activates the camera.
But the idea of the drafting having been modified.
There we go.
Ah, voila!
The final question that I had for you on this topic.
I dropped off when you said, I think Eastman makes the best constitutional case.
So you didn't hear the part where I said you might have gotten a knock at the door.
I get so...
No, I had moved my computer and it wasn't fully plugged in.
And I just ran out of juice.
That was all.
Sorry about that.
No problem whatsoever.
When you look through all of this in terms of the big decisions the Supreme Court's going to make, I thought they really missed an opportunity in the election context.
You know, clarify, use your original jurisdiction to clarify what happens when states have disagreement over whether they followed the rules for a presidential election.
It finds everybody.
That's a very unique set of circumstances.
I was disappointed they didn't take that opportunity.
There was a report in the New York Times that Thomas and Alito said, we need to take this case.
It's just like Bush versus Gore.
We need to settle this.
And Roberts reportedly yelled at them in response, saying, it's not like Bush versus Gore.
If we take it, they're going to burn down our cities.
If that's true...
And I suspect there may be a bit of truth to that.
If that's true, that means the summer of terror and burning down Portland and Kenosha and all these other places had what I believe was its intended effect, which is to cower the judges and justices from taking on the election challenges.
Well, this might be a stupid question because I guess once someone is recognized as a citizen, if it were to come down from the Supreme Court that no...
You know, being born here does not grant citizenship.
That will not be retroactive.
That will only be prospective.
Under Trump's executive order, it's only prospective.
But I do think it creates somewhat of an anomalous situation for people for the last 50 years that have been being told by officials in our government that they're citizens.
And I'm very glad that Trump's executive order is prospective only.
But what I've recommended to Congress is that they...
Settle that question by conferring citizenship on those folks that we've led to believe we're citizens and have come to rely on that, but make it explicit that they're doing it pursuant to their naturalization power.
And that means that we've got some policy judgment going forward on how broadly or narrowly we're going to go above the floor that the Constitution mandates.
And that's a policy judgment.
Always has been.
Absolutely. In fact, that relates to the question I was going to ask.
What do you think the Supreme Court's going to do?
Because I agree with President Trump has set this up on, I think if you try to go retroactive, there'd almost be no chance of getting judicial approval.
Whereas I think making a prospective does afford that opportunity.
Congress can fill in the gap where necessary.
So that I think there's actually a fighting chance where I didn't think there was before.
What do you think the odds are?
I'm a betting man, so I even make bets on Supreme Court decisions.
There's no market yet, Robert, for how it's going to rule.
But what do you think?
That's what we ought to do.
We could retire a good portion of the debt if we put the Super Bowl pool money into the Supreme Court pool money.
Look, I can almost guarantee that if he had not made it prospective only.
The case that goes to the Supreme Court is probably some Guatemalan kid asking for a passport to go do Peace Corps work in Uganda.
And, you know, I mean, I would even not want that.
But with this one, you know, there are three very solid originalists.
There's one or two others that lean that direction.
There are three that clearly don't.
And one that plays, unfortunately, in my view.
Too much politics.
I think I've got a fighting chance we win this 5-4, but there's also a chance we could lose at 6-3 or 7-2.
Interesting that because it's perspective, there would be no issue about sort of annulling retroactively annulling citizenship, which would then also create some tax issues if they were not citizens.
Did they have to pay taxes for the last 50 years?
So all of that mess, legal quagmire gets avoided, it being perspective only.
And maybe this is covering Barnes' head here, but Eastman is saying that the founders rejected Jurisoul, if I'm remembering the name.
If I'm remembering correctly, Barnes didn't hold the same opinion.
Where does the difference come from?
Is it vague what the founders believed?
And I think that's a fair assessment.
Robert, how do you feel?
It's because this issue wasn't before them.
And so, as Professor Eastman points out, we only have a few analogous examples.
And then there's a few examples that go counter to the argument.
But as Professor Eastman points out, there's unique facts behind those two.
And so it's why it's a novel question.
I agree in terms of fundamental public policy.
Had this been known to the generation that passed this amendment, they would have made clear that they were not opening up the borders to anybody who wanted to claim control over American government from now into eternity based on just happening to be physically here.
I think it's fair to say there's not a lot of historical debate about that side of the aisle.
Yeah, and if you had presented that question in 1868, it would never have gotten past that that's what this thing meant.
I will just make one slight correction.
I think it's absolutely clear at the time of the founding, not necessarily at the 14th Amendment, that the founders rejected you solely.
Now, to put a caveat on that, to give the other side of this their due, that was only one side of the you solely coin that was clearly repudiated.
They could have, I presume, have accepted if you're born here, you're a citizen, but you retain the right to expatriation.
We reject the only half of the youth solely doctrine.
Now, there's no evidence one way or another that that was even considered.
It's quite clear that they rejected at least that half of youth solely.
We repudiated the king's allegiance, right?
That was a feudal doctrine.
Allegiance comes from liege.
You know, you owed your life to the liege lord, right?
And the liege lord was first your manor lord and all the way up to the king, the ultimate liege.
And, you know, I mean, the Norman invasion of England goes back into, you know, and Henry V's claim to France all follows from that old feudal stuff.
And we rejected that.
And we said, no.
You form a body politic based on consent.
And therefore, consent requires this mutual thing I was talking about earlier.
Social compact.
Both sides have to agree.
And one of the key things, and it's not racist or nationalist, we can only absorb so many people who come from different cultures, who have different views of governing than we have.
And if you can't assimilate them and they overwhelm, You alter the very nature of the social compact.
That's why it's a policy judgment.
How much can we absorb and at what cost versus what benefit?
None of that is a legal judgment.
It's a policy judgment.
There's a question over on YouTube and it says, In Wong versus the United States, could you expand upon the executive branch position and the two dissenters?
Seems they predicted our current condition majority tempered by limiting to lawful status.
Yeah, so two things I think is driving it.
And by the way, I think the dissenters in that case have it right.
But what they're taking issue with is the broader dicta in the case.
The case itself is limited, as the question presented puts it, to children of parents who are lawfully permanently domiciled here.
And even that, my colleague Ed Earler at the Claremont Institute says even that was wrong because they weren't citizens.
They remained subjects of the Emperor of China.
And here's where it gets very complicated, because the treaty we had with China refused to let them recognize their right of expatriation to renounce their allegiance to the Emperor, the very thing we claimed as a fundamental human right in our Declaration of Independence.
So the fact that we wouldn't let them do what we claimed as a human right when we did it kind of colors the case.
They've done everything humanly possible to demonstrate their allegiance here that we will allow.
We're going to say that's enough.
So you can almost see why the court went that way.
But you can also see the more purist version in the dissent saying that's not what it's required.
For whatever reason, they're still emperors of the subjects of the emperor of China.
Therefore, they owe allegiance to that foreign power.
Now, they didn't.
They had repudiated it.
Unfortunately, didn't recognize that repudiation.
Bad on us.
But I think that's part of what's driving the majority opinion in that case.
And we got a couple of...
Oh, wait, hold on.
Regular Jane has become a member.
Welcome to the club, Regular Jane.
This may be the best sidebar ever, says Kaden5.
Thanks, Professor.
And I guess we'll end it on this because you've already given us more than what we agreed to beforehand.
You don't consent to being born, so that concept is clearly not at play.
It's a huge weakness of Professor Eastman's argument.
You don't consent to being born.
Well, I understand.
The question is to what degree, either way, that in the social compact theory model...
It's what Abraham Lincoln said the Civil War completed.
Was the original American Constitution intent?
Is Lincoln and Gettysburg of the people, by the people, for the people?
The idea was that what legitimates and validates the existence of the government is my consent to it when I can be in a position to consent to it.
There's always been a unique dynamic to where we are binding our children to a particular agreement, but it's within our custodial power and control to do so.
So it's basically an extension of parental rights to recognize that as a consent model for citizenship.
Does that make sense, Professor?
Yeah. Children don't have the capacity to consent.
They don't consent when they get baptized into the Catholic Church or one of the Protestant dominations.
They don't consent to that.
They don't consent to...
First Holy Communion or Confirmation to bring my faith into it.
They don't consent to...
This is why you can have statutory rape.
They don't consent to sex, even if they're old enough to say yes.
And they don't consent to enter into contracts.
We presume the consent based on the parents.
That's always the way it's been, and it's the only way it's possible to be.
Because you can't ask a two-month-old, do you consent to be in a citizen?
I mean, it's nonsense.
And we therefore presume the...
Now, interesting question arises, if you've got a Canadian citizen mom and an American citizen dad, and they have a child, and under the laws of both countries, that child is considered a citizen of that country.
It's kind of held in abeyance until that child comes of age.
And then they have what's called the right of election to choose which of the...
Now, our State Department has a long time been eye-winking this problem and pretending that you can have dual citizenship, which is a contradiction in terms.
You can't owe ultimate allegiance to two different masters.
And the whole theory behind this is when you reach age where you can consent, you elect which of those citizenships you're going to claim.
Now, nobody fills out a piece of paper, say, I choose Canada or I choose the United States.
But we take certain presumptions by your actions.
Where are you living?
Where have you taken up domicile?
What are you laying claim to?
And by your actions, you've demonstrated that which of those two options you've chosen.
That's the way it ought to work in theory.
But like I say, for a long time, our State Department is saying, well, you know, the Brits won't recognize if you choose American citizenship.
So we'll kind of pretend you're a dual citizen.
And that creates all sorts of problems, but it really is not compatible with the underlying theory.
Professor, where can people go to find your work and also to support the ongoing unfortunate legal defense you may need for forever?
Where can people go to continue to keep, because you've done fantastic work, fantastic work through the election, fantastic work before that.
I was familiar with your work before that.
I was part of President Trump's team briefly in Georgia on the election, so got to see and witness a lot of that up front and personal.
So credit to you.
How come you aren't a co-conspirator with me down on the indictment?
I got out of Dodge just in time.
Yeah, just in time.
I never was in Dodge.
I mean, I don't know how.
Anyway, I responded to an invitation from a legislator to testify about what their authority was.
And that was, as Fonnie Willis says, that was soliciting the legislature to violate their oath of office.
And she can't tell me what provision of the Constitution I was urging them to violate.
But anyway, that's beside the point.
Most importantly, and with your massive audience, I think you could get me over the hurdle from 910,000 to 100 to a million.
GiveSendGo.com slash Eastman is the Legal Defense Fund site.
I've got it up here.
It's just that it's stalled in Rumble, and I can't share the screen, but I'll give the link to everybody because it is forward slash Eastman, 914,382.
And people are going to say, look, we've got to be cynical.
People are going to say, you already got a lot of money.
How many cases do you have left to currently fight?
The California bar currently on appeal.
Each round of the appeal will probably cost us between 50 and 100 grand.
The Georgia criminal indictment and the Arizona criminal indictment are still alive, although the Georgia one's kind of stalled right now.
But even if the disqualification of Fannie Willis is upheld, a new prosecutor will be appointed.
And they're still looking at a five-month-long trial.
And in Arizona, they're fighting tooth and nail against my motion to dismiss.
And nobody has any idea what's going to happen.
But it'll be several rounds back and forth in the appellate courts.
And if we lose those appeals, then they'll start with a trial.
We've got a trial scheduled for January of 2026.
And it'll last at least 10 weeks in all likelihood.
And getting to that point, you got...
You know, a terabyte of data of discovery that we've got to sort through.
I mean, they've been sending out search warrants to all of our social media, all of our email accounts, all of our phone records, everything.
So all of that's got to have gone through, and it's expensive.
Those are the only three that remain alive.
The other 18 are kind of in the rearview mirror now, but those are the big ones.
We've already spent $1.6 million.
We're looking at probably $2 million more before it's all said and done.
The other thing that website allows you to do is send prayers.
I want to emphasize the importance of that.
My wife and I read them.
They're heartwarming, particularly in the down cycles of this roller coaster ride we're on.
Even if you can't do more than $5 or $10 or something, send us a prayer as well.
We also use that site as a bit of a blog to kind of give updates on major significant developments or articles that really seem to get it on what we're dealing with.
So that's there.
And also the latest update has a link to where they can watch the documentary film for free at the moment.
EastmanDilemma.com is that link.
And it's still available for free streaming until one of the...
The platform, paid subscription platforms, put it up on their platform.
There was one question that I almost missed, actually, and it always gives me a good excuse to say his name, Super Buff Shaft.
Professor Eastman, I'm going to read Super Buff Shaft's question here.
Mr. Eastman, thank you for fighting.
I asked for us to look into Joel Oltman's case, court case against Eric Coomer.
Can you confirm that he, and I presume that means Oltman, was supposed to go to your case and help testify in California?
Is he a deep state plant?
I don't want to start fights.
I just want to miss a...
I know, Joe.
I don't think he's a deep state plant.
I think he's a data analyst and expert and saw some very wonky things going on.
And he offered to come testify.
But we were at the end of the trial and things were being so delayed.
We just had to make some cuts.
And his testimony wasn't particularly central to the issues that were in play.
But Joe's a terrific guy.
And I think he's gotten a raw deal up in Colorado.
Not quite nearly as raw a deal as Tina Peters has gotten.
And I hope people will help her with her legal thing.
I haven't checked, but I think she's still in prison for this ridiculous claim.
Oh yeah, but not nine years.
She's still up in there.
Yeah, and for folks out there, thank you Professor Eastman.
To understand the consequence of this case, well, first of all, to me, there's no greater courage a lawyer can take than fighting for the Constitution.
Constitution first, Constitution forever.
Professor Eastman's been one of the most noble advocates in that respect in quite a long time.
And second, if you care about access to the law, if you care about not having lawfare destroy people's lives and careers because you could be next, Eastman's case against the California State Bar and these rogue prosecutors is on the front edge.
Of those cases.
So that's why his cases are so important.
I encourage your support for it.
The Court of Public Opinion, the Court of Prayer, and where you can help out financially, help out financially, because this is a case that impacts all of our freedoms and liberties.
Professor Fiesman, thank you immensely.
Stick around.
We'll say our proper goodbyes after I hit end stream, and then we'll make sure that we're actually over.
Everybody, if I missed your chat, I'll be live tomorrow.
I think, Robert, what's your next appearance?
I've got to prepare for a trial.
You're not willing to let me prepare for the trial in time.
And Professor Reisman's got to prepare for more lawfare.
The documentary is amazing.
We watched it at Mar-a-Lago for the panel on lawfare.
Amazing stuff.
Professor Reisman, thank you immensely.
Everyone out there, goodnight.
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