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July 3, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:02:17
Vivek & Friends talk Chevron Deference & the Plot to Replace Joe Biden | The TRUTH Podcast #54
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It's a pretty wild week.
No doubt about that.
I went to Atlanta, went to the first presidential debate.
I was in the spin room for that debate.
But I'll tell you what my top concern was going into it.
It wasn't that somehow Donald Trump was going to lose this debate to Joe Biden.
I don't think that was really a possibility.
I was actually concerned as somebody who's opposed to Biden entering the White House for a second term again.
I was actually concerned that Biden might underperform so badly that he would actually be swapped out as the nominee.
But that's turned out to be what was a conspiracy theory in advance.
I've been saying this for the last year and dismissed as a conspiracy theorist for saying that's exactly what they're doing.
That's exactly what has played out in the subsequent days.
The reality is, is Joe Biden even the functioning president of the United States of America?
The people of this country had a chance to see for themselves, not through media filters, not through New York Times stories, but to see with their own eyes.
The answer to that question is no.
And it raises a separate uncomfortable question.
If Joe Biden is not acting as the US president right now and leading this country, who exactly is?
And we don't have a good answer to that question.
Forget the election this fall for a second.
That's dangerous to the United States of America right now.
It's embarrassing to the United States of America.
He went to the G7 summit, Biden did, where he had European leaders about as tactfully and gently letting us know Well, you know what?
Now Americans had a chance to see it for themselves.
And this is becoming a repeated pattern that I find somewhat concerning for American democracy.
You'll hear about a lot from the left.
Well, I share concerns about American democracy.
When you have a government that systematically gets this comfortable with lying to its citizenry, especially in the lead up to an election and on matters that relate directly to the election, we have a serious cancer, a serious problem in this country.
It was the same media establishment and the same political establishment That told you that the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the last election was Russian disinformation, when we now know it was absolutely true.
That was also the year of COVID-19, where you couldn't say that the COVID virus originated in a lab in China, where we now know that to be decidedly true.
The same thing was true about Joe Biden's health.
If you said that Joe Biden was unable to perform his duties as the U.S. president because he appeared to suffer from dementia or some other type of cognitive degenerative condition, You were dismissed in the same way you were dismissed if you said the Hunter Biden laptop story was real four years ago, in the same way you were dismissed if you said COVID-19 began in a lab in China four years ago, you were dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.
The reality is if we want to save this country, I don't care if you're on the left or the right, we deserve a government and we deserve leaders and we deserve a media that at least once again tells us the truth again as Americans.
Raises some deep questions about what's ahead as well.
Can Biden actually be replaced?
Well, they did pick this debate date, which I thought was so conspicuous.
June 27th, the earliest ever recorded presidential debate on television in U.S. history.
The first ever to occur before the nominating convention of either parties.
Why do you think they actually chose it?
There's a deeper inner rift in the Democratic Party between the people who want to move Biden to one side, but lacked an ability to do it, so used the debate as a catalyst to try to make that happen.
And then entrenched interests surrounding Biden, the people closest to him that want to make sure that he remains the puppet who they can control so they can actually be close to power.
That's one question.
What exactly is possible at this juncture?
Is it literally in a technical and practical sense, in a legal sense, possible to move him to one side?
We're going to talk about that in one second.
But there's a separate question of whether they should remove him.
And if they did, what that means for public trust in our leaders and public trust in American democracy.
That comes in an interesting week when we've also had Supreme Court rulings come down that I think have changed the landscape in ways that most Americans probably don't yet appreciate.
Some of the most important Supreme Court cases of our time, shutting down the powers of the administrative state.
It's actually relevant to the discussion we just had.
If Biden isn't running the country, the question of who is?
Right now, the answer to that question is likely the bureaucrats in three-letter agencies that are the ones that supposedly report to the president, but when there isn't a mentally functioning president for them to report to, that effectively allows them to assume executive power of a scale unparalleled in US history.
Thankfully, the US Supreme Court just stepped in last week with a number of rulings that massively curtailed the power of that administrative state.
And in one of their final rulings of this season of decisions, they came down on the side of saying that the US president does actually have broad immunity for his official acts when he's in office, which takes another leg out of the stool of one of the legal attacks on Donald Trump.
So a wild week, a lot happened.
And rather than bringing on some new third parties who I was meeting for the first time on the podcast, I decided I was going to really have a conversation I was interested in having with a couple of friends.
So I've got Steve Roberts, who helped me immensely on the campaign last year, has become a friend and somebody who I talk to on a regular basis.
And my older friend, Paul Davis, who I know from our days in Matthews Hall, back at Harvard, we met when we were 18 years old.
He was a history buff, and he's a guy who I've turned to ever since when I want to know something about the present and the context of American history.
Besides that, also a great friend who I've enjoyed spending many decades with at this point.
And so Paul and Steve have themselves gotten to know each other, and we're going to have a bit of a conversation today about what was a pretty seismic week, I think, in American history.
And that's not overstating the case.
So Paul, Steve, welcome to the podcast formally this time, but continuing conversations we've been having for a long time.
And Steve, I guess I'll kick off with you since you are the lawyer in the room.
You know the law and you've written about this.
I saw one of the articles that you put out in recent weeks before the debate, I should give you credit for.
Logistically and legally, is it actually possible at this point, now in the month of July, this is the month of the Republican convention, Democratic convention is literally next month, Is it actually feasible and possible for the Democrat Party to move Biden to one side, or has that ship effectively sailed?
Vivek, first, thanks for having me.
It is incredibly simple at this stage of the game to replace Biden as the Democratic nominee for president.
Let me say, you're brave, frankly, for even having this conversation, for going where many in conservative circles are simply refusing to go.
They're engaging in this wishful thinking where they actually believe that a vegetable is going to be, must be, the Democratic nominee for president.
That's simply not the case.
There are many ways along the path by which Biden can be swapped out as the nominee.
So like what?
How exactly would they do it?
Sure.
So where people get it wrong is assuming that the Democrats have a nominee at this point.
Where we are in the process is that the primaries have merely elected delegates who will go to the convention and choose the nominee.
So here are the ways that this could actually happen.
First off, Biden may never make it to the convention in the first place.
There could be a different nominee put forward.
And so much of the narrative has been, well, all of these delegates that came out of the primary process are pledged, must vote for Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Under the Democrats' own rules, that's not the case.
In fact, the rules, and I'm reading right here, delegates to the National Convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elect him.
Very different than the way the RNC rules read, which say that a delegate is bound to the candidate who sent them there on the first ballot.
So under the DNC's own rules, delegates don't even have to vote for Biden.
And we'll know by the night before the vote to actually select the nominee whether there's another candidate that's going to be put forward.
That's the first way.
It's possible.
Right.
I mean, I think that's actually one of the people, this idea of the delegates or whatever, being pledged.
The whole procedure, the ritual exists.
Turns out, not just a ritual.
We treat it as one.
But it turns out, actually, even since the 70s, they've been running open conventions, right?
Where the nominee was decided at the convention in the first place.
And this could be revitalizing a tradition that's long existed in American history.
Isn't that right?
That's right.
Yeah.
You know, we go back to the 68 convention, which, ironically, was also held in Chicago.
And what you saw there was a floor fight.
That was the one where Lyndon Johnson pulled out, decided not to run.
He announced that in March of that election year.
So there was a little bit of time for things to play out.
You saw Bobby Kennedy come forward as a candidate.
You saw actually McCarthy come forward as a candidate.
But then, you know, during the process, it was Hubert Humphrey, who the Democratic elite basically said, this is going to be the candidate, so everybody line up and vote for Hubert Humphrey.
We could see something like that again.
Yeah, I have my thoughts on what's coming, but legally, mechanically, it's possible.
I actually thought it was pretty interesting to bring Paul on because Paul is, for those people who don't know him, not some right-winger, Republican, partisan, or anything like this.
I know him from college.
I don't know how you'd describe yourself, Paul, but certainly not a Republican, certainly not some sort of standard political conservative, but I thought it'd be interesting to get your perspective, including from the vantage point of American history.
What does it mean when you have a party that for this long has attested that this man is fit to serve?
You saw the number of times it was dismissed, even to the Democratic Party's own base when this concern was raised.
Just in a historical context, in the context of American history, how meaningful is it if he does now get swapped out after all those attestations?
And I just love your own personal perspective on whether you think that actually is something that should happen speaking as an American citizen and a voter in this country.
Well, first of all, to answer your final question, I think he has to be replaced.
I think it is a bit farcical to imagine that we're going to form our years of this, that our enemies abroad have seen this and are going to not take advantage of his incapacity.
And I think fundamentally, it's something where the Democratic Party has really put itself forward as saying, we're about preserving these norms in American life.
We're about ensuring the stability of the country.
This is not stable.
This is not something that can be sustainable over the course of the next election cycle.
But forget about the next election cycle.
It's not sustainable now.
I think, fundamentally, people are worried.
I think a lot of people who believed the narrative that the media had been pushing for a long time about his mental state are disillusioned and shocked.
And I think, fundamentally, if a political party exists for anything, it's to win elections.
And I think they see that he's really, at this point, compromised to the point where I don't think it's realistic that he's gonna be the winner.
Yes, a floor fight and a convention dispute is going to be messy.
I think there's a lot of risk that entails.
But I think there's a lot of risk with the current status quo.
And I think fundamentally, any party that's operating under the assumption that they want to win, they can't continue on the current path that they're on.
And what are the lessons from that LBJ experience?
That's the moment it seems like we're in.
There are even some deeper parallels.
We were in the middle of war.
We were in the middle of U.S.-involved war that, perhaps in retrospect, it's clear we should not have been involved in.
In that case, it was the Vietnam War.
We're now closer to major conflict, World War III, than we've ever been at any time, certainly in our lifetime, Paul.
I don't think that's a controversial thing to say, given the brewing conflicts in the Middle East and where we are With Russia's conflict in Ukraine and the challenges presented by China, what parallels do you see?
And just how do you think this is going to go down in American history, where if we're looking back nearly 60 years at that Johnson 68 moment where he looked the Americans in the eye and said, I will not and shall not accept my party's nomination for president of the United States, it feels to me like that moment is coming.
It's just a question of when and how that's going to be delivered.
How's that going to go down in American history, in your view?
Look, I think it's going to be seismic, as you said.
I think that this is a case where it's not simply a matter if Biden had done this a year ago and he said, look, I came into office to serve a term to restore stability, and now it's time to pass the baton to the next generation.
I think that would have been received pretty well by the Democratic Party base.
I think the fact that he crowded out opposition, never held a debate with any competitors, basically tried to ensure that his path to renomination was locked in, makes it very difficult to now suddenly turn around and say, well, actually, I'm not going to do it.
And the reason why is because I've been lying to you for a long period of time about my mental condition.
I think it's a real problem.
I think a real fundamental problem, too, is what the media is going to do, because they don't like to think of themselves as propagandists.
They don't like to think of themselves as party hacks.
And I think to the extent that they feel that they've been hoodwinked by the Biden administration, that's going to lead them to be pushing back even more aggressively over the coming months to demand that he do unscripted, you know, unscripted interviews with journalists, having unscripted, you know, opportunities at the podium to answer questions from them. you know, opportunities at the podium to answer questions from And I think he's not ready to do that.
I think if he were capable of doing that, they would have done it already.
So I think that this is a case where it could be really substantial.
It could be something along the scale of Watergate or the church committee in the 70s where people are beginning to really distrust certain elements of what they assume the government was doing.
So I think that the answer to, you know, the parallels to 68 are obvious with respect to the war, with respect to divisions within the Democratic Party over issues like Israel's war in Gaza.
I think that there's a lot of fissures that will emerge in a competition for the nomination.
But I don't think they have an alternative.
I think telling the American people not to believe their lying eyes is just not a sustainable strategy over so many months.
I think, you know, dementia doesn't get better.
It gets worse.
And I think the idea that they can sort of He can limp his way to the finish line is just unrealistic given the modern media environment and the reality that he is being recorded all the time and his slip-ups will continue to draw attention.
They were able to obscure it for a long time, but now people are paying attention and I'm not sure they can keep that obscure any longer.
It's a pretty interesting point that The dishonesty has been actually a disservice even to the final decision they're going to reach versus, I think Biden had done basically two things.
He could have gone down as a pretty memorable president in a positive way rather than the memorable president he's going to go down as now.
If he had pretty early on in his term said, you know what?
I ran against Donald Trump.
I defeated him.
But I am going to say this to everybody in my party that you at least deserve the chance to hear my opponents.
I'll call on social media companies.
I'm not going to force them to do it, but I'll make it known that it's my view that the US president or any former US president or presidential candidate from a major party, the people of this country at least deserve to hear from them.
And that's what it means to unite the country.
And by the way, I am going to be a one-term president to reunite the country to what he promised to do and say, I'm going to pass this on to a different generation because that's what it's going to take to move the country forward and even my party forward.
I'm somebody who ran for president on the opposite political party, so I'm not saying that that's something that I would have agreed with everything he had to say on policy.
But I think that that would have been admirable and it would have had him, I think, properly go down in American history as at least an honorable president who actually put his country over his own self-interest.
And in this case, we're talking about him like it's him, but really it's likely his family.
Maybe it's Jill Biden or somebody else around him.
And yet the failure to do that now puts them in this Hobson's choice where either they ride it all the way through And they, you know, go straight where the car is headed right now, which is driving off the cliff.
Or they have to really do something extraordinary, which is, in a best case scenario, at least admit to the American people, hey, listen, we weren't really straight with you.
We weren't really shooting it straight, and we're going to own that.
I think that's his best case scenario now.
I mean, the worst case scenario is they just sort of yank him, pull him, they just disappear, claim he's not going to run after further reflection.
All of that is disaster, but I think the best case scenario is still not great, but at least it's one where they own that dishonesty.
Because without that, I think it is obvious that just because you don't say it doesn't mean that it actually isn't the reality.
And so I think that that's interesting, and I think it'll be historical...
It'll be in its significance regardless of how that ends up playing out.
Steve, this is also a pretty important week with a number of decisions coming down from the Supreme Court, including on the immunity issue, right?
Is the U.S. president immune from...
Civil or even criminal liability for official acts conducted while in office.
That came down effectively.
I mean, there's more questions to be answered, but effectively on Trump's side of this question, which takes the legs out of a lot of the cases against Trump, possibly even more cases.
We're going to see that soon.
It just seems like the dominoes keep falling for Trump in a way that I actually think is very premature to declare any kind of victory.
I think it's a It's all a lead up to the starting line of this race.
I'll get back to that in a second.
But what do you think were the further implications of that?
On the heels of the debate, Biden isn't going to be the nominee.
They still have holding out these prosecutions against Donald Trump.
And then you get this immunity ruling from the Supreme Court.
What exactly was the scope of that ruling?
And what do you see as its implications now for the race going forward?
It's hard to overstate how important that immunity decision was.
What it did was it directly said that there is no possibility for a president to be prosecuted criminally from any acts that a president takes within his or her exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.
So that means when a president makes a pardon, when a president appoints or removes executive branch officials, recognizes foreign governments, gives a direction to one of his cabinet secretaries, those actions are entirely off limits for future criminal prosecutions.
Then there's another category of actions within what the Supreme Court called the outer perimeter.
of the president's official responsibility, that he at least enjoys a presumption of immunity for those things.
What's within a president's official responsibility?
Pretty much the entirety of their day, right?
Unless they're going to a campaign rally, that's something, their entire day is some kind of representative activity.
Going to an event, being seen in public, rallying crowds, all of that can be within a president's official responsibility.
And let's think about how that might apply in the context of holding a rally on January the 6th.
That is essentially grassroots lobbying, right?
Trying to get another agency of government, in this case the Congress, to take action on a particular policy position to do a particular thing.
If a court were to find that that is not within a president's official responsibility, then under the same argument, taking the trip down the street to give the State of the Union once a year is not within a president's official responsibility, his official authority.
I just think in terms of the dynamics of the race and the dynamics of where we are in a lead-up to what I think could be a historic election, but maybe a messy few months to get there.
Paul, I'm curious for your take on...
It seems like right now it's just been raining winds for one side of this, right?
You got the conviction that was supposed to turn the poll numbers against Donald Trump.
Actually, it surged his grassroots fundraising numbers.
The one advantage that Biden had on Trump was already closed last month with Trump now having raised more money than Biden.
When you think about the debate that Biden challenged him to to try to reset the race, it completely has backfired, blown this through.
And then now the immunity ruling coming down from the Supreme Court, it seems like the cards keep falling.
What do you think that portends for the next few months?
And what do you predict is actually going to happen?
Well, you know, the Chinese would say it suggests Donald Trump has the mandate of heaven or something along those lines.
But I think what it suggests is that the status quo is not going to work.
They're going to have to shake things up.
I think it suggests that the Democratic Party, which is afraid and a It has to take radical action.
I think that the normal course of business campaigning is not going to win.
I think they look at the poll numbers the same way you and I do, and they're seeing what we're seeing.
I think, fundamentally, it's a challenge to their idea of who they are, too.
The Democratic Party has been the one saying, we're for democracy.
We're the ones who are supportive of ensuring that every vote counts, that we are the party that has the most democratic process for electing our nominee.
Now, that's no longer true.
I mean, with the superdelegates, that became obvious in past election cycles.
But I also think that a scenario where they swap out a new candidate who has not won a single primary or single caucus Is going to really create headaches for them.
But I just, I don't understand what else they can do.
I mean, in a world where the cards are continually landing in one direction, radical course of action is kind of the only sane course of action.
You have to be able to take some big risks and some big swings.
So I think that's probably what we're going to see.
Yeah, it's an interesting...
Reflection on the nature of conspiracy, right?
I think this was a year ago about outside the Overton window, but what is the nature of that conspiracy?
I personally don't believe that this is some sort of backroom, smoke-filled room plot where you have a small group of actors that surreptitiously know exactly what's going to play out and say, hey, let's put up Biden and then swap him out around this date.
But what I do believe is that in some ways, if you look at this from the vantage point of next January, wherever we are as a country, and look back, and suppose it is a Democrat that ends up winning the election, you will look back and say that this played out exactly as they would have wanted, because there's two things that happens when you nominate a candidate, right?
You have the initial honeymoon phase, where the public's falling in love with them, and then you have the scrutiny phase and the skepticism phase.
And so if you play this out, the Democratic nomination comes after the Republican nomination of the president.
Their convention's in August.
The Republican convention is in July.
And so you will have the Republican convention already behind you, presumably Republican vice president already named, that cake already baked.
And then you get to August, which is literally, you're talking three months, less than three months, two and a half months before the election.
If that's really the moment where you're swapping a new candidate, two and a half months, you're still in that honeymoon phase.
Where when you don't even know who that candidate's going to be, it could be one of 10 people, it limits the ability to dig up the dirt or even have the other side planned, let alone the ability for that to cultivate itself in the public mind.
And I think in retrospect, you could say that it couldn't have been planned any better, not because somebody was actually planning it, but because it's a certain kind of Occam's razor principle I guess you could apply, which is to say that most institutions, all else equal, not all the time, but most institutions, be it a company, be it a political party, tend to do what is in that institution's long-run best interest.
That doesn't always happen.
To be clear, it's often hard for an institution to define what is its own best interest.
But if your political party, as you said, Paul, it's a pretty simple objective for why a political party exists.
It exists to win elections.
That's the raison d'etre for a political party.
It doesn't have much other reason to exist other than an umbrella to say, okay, we're going to win elections with this banner of people who fall under our umbrella.
If that really were the path that maximized the likelihood of winning an election, then yes, the organizational version of an Occam's razor is not a conspiracy theory.
It's just an analysis of an incentive and rational plan.
If you're an investor in a company, if you're an investor in American politics, You might ask, what's the likeliest mode for the party you're investing in to achieve its result?
And for Democrats, the likeliest mode would be to say that pick the candidate as late as possible, make it somebody who rises above the fray, somebody who would be the toughest opponent for Donald Trump possibly, but do it in a manner where that person is not subject to the scrutiny that they ordinarily would be, and ride it out from August all the way through November after the other side has baked its ticket and everything else.
So in a certain sense, that could be going Exactly according to plan, not because it was a smoke-filled room that hatched the plan, but because it's just the collective incentives that suggest that would be the best possible plan for winning an election.
And that leads me to my view, at least, of who I think it's most likely to be, which is, I mean, no secret of this, I've been saying this since Last year when I said Biden wasn't going to be the nominee, I think if you really believe that set of collective incentives, you got to believe there's a reasonable likelihood that this is actually going to end up being Michelle Obama, somebody who is widely loved by many independents who don't follow politics particularly closely, somebody who has already in some sense been tested.
People, I think, correctly anticipate that it would be Barack Obama pulling the strings behind the scene, but not in a negative way.
I think they would be very comfortable with that for many Democrats.
And somebody who would rise above so-called the fray of the otherwise conflict of ambitious next generation governors or senators who would otherwise be vying for that position.
And, you know, I think in some ways calls out the truth of what's probably been happening if you look at who's been in control.
Every time when Barack Obama or Joe Biden's in the room, there's no doubt who actually commands greater respect is not the current president of the United States.
But in those rooms, a guy who previously served as President of the United States and appears to not be averse to playing that role of being in control again.
And Steve, I'd be curious for your view on this, which is suppose it were Michelle Obama where it's not going to be some sort of food fight on the convention floor.
I just don't see a world in which...
I see a world in which Democrats could be throwing, flinging a lot of dirt at Gavin Newsom or even Kamala Harris or Gretchen Whitmer or Pritzker, a bunch of ambitious people who are going to hold no bar at taking down their fellow peers.
If it's Michelle Obama, there's a cut above that.
Suppose I'm right on that theory.
What do you think is the right mechanical path by which that outcome could actually play out?
Well, you're going to laugh, but it's the smoke-filled room.
And here's how that plays out.
It's right in the DNC rules.
Once they have a nominee...
If that nominee is for some reason unable to run, whether they resign or are incapacitated or die, the group of people that gets to select who the next nominee is would be the DNC chair, the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate, and the leadership committee of the Democratic Governors Association.
So that hands the power directly to the Democratic elite takes away mechanically any of the effects of the party primary process and it actually avoids that convention floor fight.
So how could this play out, right?
Maybe you go through a convention process where normal order of business, we ignore what we saw with our own eyes at the debate and Biden becomes the nominee because of the delegate votes on the floor of the convention.
Then, over the next couple of weeks, he resigns or has some kind of illness that prevents him from moving forward as the nominee.
That's when the smoke-filled room comes into play.
Or, what we've actually seen in the news over the last few days is that Democrats are looking to proceed with a plan they had put in place earlier to comply with Ohio's ballot access laws.
I think the possibility that actually goes all the way through the DNC Is more consistent with this idea of just push somebody over the finish line when they're still in the honeymoon phase.
And that actually avoids that intra-party fight.
And I do think that if Michelle Obama or Barack Obama or the combination of them stepped up and said, all right, in the wake of Biden suffering from illness.
Now, how could you anticipate illness?
In this case, it is obvious this man already suffers from that illness.
I say that not in a denigrating way.
I see it in a sad way, actually.
Dementia is a sad condition that affects millions of Americans.
Alzheimer's, Lewy body dementia, other forms of dementia, frontotemporal dementia.
We don't know which of any of those Joe Biden has, but this is no laughing matter.
If a man who already has that sickness, you already know that that actually is one of the two criteria, disability being one of them, for him to step aside after the convention.
The way you laid that out actually makes me think that might be the likeliest possibility of all.
I guess one of the questions from my vantage point, Paul, I'd be curious for your take on this is, what are the risks that, let's just say the people around Joe Biden, this is one of the things I worry about.
I'll put this on the table.
I'm worried about it.
But maybe you can channel some of our mutual friends on the left, how they might look at this risk is, Now, Biden in a desperate position, one of the things I worry about is anytime you put somebody in a corner, right, you force them to do things they otherwise would not have done.
I'm not saying it's Biden.
When I use the word Biden, I'm not referring to Joe Biden.
I'm referring to the Biden machine, which is the people who are around him and prop him up.
Thank you.
that even though they're a long shot, it's in their incentive to take that long shot that involve risk for the United States of America.
Maybe it's relating to foreign policy.
Maybe it's relating to one of those conflicts that would sideline the political salience of these partisan debates or intra-party debates that we're having and to say, no, no, no, something big, X, whatever X is, something big has happened.
And that provides an occasion for that president to read from a teleprompter, but just read the right thing that were written up for him.
And to create a sense of betrayal, certainly within the party, if you were doing anything other than supporting a president in that hour of need.
We've seen this happen in other countries.
I think we've seen it happen, I believe, in certain points in the United States in our own history.
I worry about the next few months when the man who has the incentive structure, and not again the man, but the machine around him has the incentive structure, to prop him up and you put them in such a corner to say, all right, we've limited their choices so much that even if the Democrat machine in the smoke-filled room that Steve talked about wants to do something different, are they actually going to go or could they go so far as to create The conditions for emergency that allow them to hold on to power with the last class that they have.
You know what I'm saying?
Oh, of course.
I mean, I think the idea of a pretext or an emergency powers is a long tried and true technique in a wide range of democracies and other autocratic countries.
I think it's an interesting question.
I think the question is, what are the incentives for Biden's handlers?
What are the incentives for people like Jill Biden, for Hunter Biden, for his family, for his closest advisors, Ron Klain, people like that?
I guess I'm a little bit more optimistic, I think, than you in that I think that their best case scenario is following the Obama path of being, you know, an executive producer on Netflix or something along those lines.
And I think anything that damages that possibility of a graceful exit, I think, will be risky for them.
I also think on some level...
You know, the people around him know exactly what state he's in, right?
And I think that's the real tell from this last week, is they knew what they were doing when they put him up on that stage.
I think on some level, the best path forward is replacing him.
And I think having him cling to power as sort of this mad king, this sort of King Lear figure, I think is not actually in their best interests either.
So I'm more optimistic.
I mean, you never know.
I think it's something where, of course, if people are put in a corner...
That presents risks.
Of course, people with impaired cognitive abilities are easier to manipulate.
But I think that I have more confidence that, you know, it's like you talk about the deep state.
I think the deep state is running the show right now, but I think the deep state itself is unwilling to play that particular card.
But maybe I'm too naive in that.
Yeah, no, I think it's a good point.
I mean, the incentive structure of the individuals.
I mean, the deep state is a more complicated animal, but the people who are closest to his circle, the members of that managerial class, Maybe they want to go sign Showtime and Netflix deals, and I think the public may look very unkindly upon them if they're in a moment where they were seen to do the wrong thing, and the media has made very clear what now the wrong thing actually is.
So just out of raw self-interest, that's an interesting angle.
Let's actually just talk about the deep state and administrative state a little bit more.
I just think it's so important in its salience, but the importance of that has become far more apparent In recent months, where I think if ordinary Americans ask themselves just a basic question, not in some sort of gotcha way, not in some sort of partisan way, just like in a practical sense, who's actually running the country right now?
Who is actually signing off on the executive orders?
Who's actually deciding what executive orders are or aren't taken?
Who's deciding the way the meetings of cabinet members are run on a weekly basis?
Are they having those meetings on a weekly basis?
Who's deciding what instruction is given about what's to be going on at the southern border or what types of cases the DOJ is supposed to prioritize in prosecuting or what type of national tenor we're supposed to set at a NATO summit that's taking place next week in Washington, D.C. Just very practical things.
Who's actually doing it?
I'm not saying this in some sort of cynical, histrionic way.
It's obviously not Joe Biden.
Is it Jill Biden?
Is it one person?
Is it the Obamas?
Is it Susan Rice?
Is it a machine?
I think it's actually a machine underneath that.
Comprised by people who, let's be frank about it, who believe that they are serving this country behind the scenes and in a way that protects democracy from itself.
I think that's effectively what's going on in the country.
Now, that's what we call the deep state, the administrative state, whatever you want to call it.
This was a particularly interesting week where if that's the machine running the show, it also happens to be a week Where the Supreme Court rapidly reined in the ability of that administrative state to carry out those quote unquote noble, I don't believe they're noble, but quote unquote noble responsibilities.
And Steve, maybe you want to summarize two of those cases, but particularly the overturning of the Chevron Doctrine.
And I just think it's such a wild week where this happened in the very week where it was exposed that these are the people who are effectively running the country.
Within days, you have a US Supreme Court that comes down with one of the probably most important decisions in the last 50 years that goes to the heart of those bureaucrats' ability to actually exercise lawmaking or what they call rulemaking power of their own.
I just thought it was a pretty interesting non-coincidence of history.
And maybe you want to share some of your perspective on the importance of what the Supreme Court did in overturning Chevron and explaining exactly what that was all about.
Sure, sure.
So, you know, looking at the federal bureaucracy, the deep state, 90% plus are left-leaning liberals who are eager to regulate the American public.
Create crimes that the American public cannot possibly know exist.
Criminalize everyday behavior.
So I can tell you that numerous industries, trade associations are looking at these regulations that they've been dealing with for their companies and members for years and years that are Crippling their ability to do business, crippling the freedoms of Americans, and saying, all right, now's the time to challenge.
Now's the time to, frankly, end the tyranny of the bureaucracy that we're dealing with in our industry.
Yeah, and I think it's worth people understanding just the weight of that case.
We talk about the regulatory state, the deep state.
Effectively, we've had 50 years in this country.
This isn't a particularly partisan point.
People forget that Scalia, long-time viewed as one of the most conservative justices, was actually one of the justices that came down on the side of codifying the Chevron doctrine.
I think it's one of the most regrettable decisions that Scalia himself was a part of.
But what it effectively said is the administrative state, the three-letter agencies, FTC, FDA, SEC, you name it, EPA, That these agencies, they're staffed by bureaucrats, not elected officials, but hired civil servants who have the ability to write these rules that never went through the constitutionally ordained lawmaking process.
So you can't vote them out of office.
If you don't like a congressman or the laws they pass, vote them out.
That's what our founding fathers envisioned in three branches of government.
That's the legislative branch.
And then there's the executive branch and the judicial branch, which enforce and interpret those rules.
It's the creation of this fourth branch where actually the people who are writing the rules, they're not even rules, they're really edents.
You can't vote them out.
And what happened in the Chevron doctrine case that implemented the Chevron doctrine was that it said that federal courts have to defer to those agencies' interpretations of the law if that agency jumps through certain hoops, right?
Those hoops include things like asking the public For commentary on the rules that you're considering.
Well, agencies don't really listen to that public commentary.
And the fact that you just ask the public for commentary doesn't really give you the backstop of democratic accountability.
It gives you the illusion of caring about democracy or what democratic citizens in a republic actually believe while giving undue power to that agency.
And that's what's resulted in this metastasis and proliferation and this cancerous overgrowth Of rules that never went through Congress, but are ruining the lives of everyone from fishermen who are at issue in that case, to coal miners, to people who are working in everyday small businesses across this country.
And what the Supreme Court said last week was, no, once and for all, we don't defer at all.
We don't give any presumption of deference to those agencies' interpretations of those laws.
And in fact, if you combine it with West Virginia versus EPA, which came down a couple of years ago, If those rules have such a big impact on people's lives, they're null and void.
You actually have to go through the congressional rulemaking process.
And by the way, certain administrative agencies, in this case the SEC, that has administrative law judges, where you have not just the rule makers, but judges that interpret those laws sitting within the same agency, and effectively the equivalent of prosecutors, enforcement agents sitting within that same agency, those administrative law judges, those courts within the agencies, I think that makes immense sense because our founding fathers always believed that you should always separate the judge, jury, executioner, lawmaker, and enforcer.
And so I think that's such a big deal because it goes to the heart of the people who are really running the show in this sort of puppet Biden regime.
But what fascinates me is that, and saddens me a little bit, I have to admit, is that We live in a moment in our history where this is now bizarrely a right wing issue.
If you're railing against the overgrowth of the administrative state or the regulatory state, that's undoubtedly a view that's affiliated with the American right.
When in fact, I think this could actually be probably the unifying issue of our age to say that I don't care if you're a Republican or Democrat.
You have historical institutions like the FBI that have gone after the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. or others who they have opposed in ways that were completely unaccountable, often illegal, without backstops of Democratic accountability, that this idea of shutting down the regulatory state and pairing it, I think, ought to be a unifying issue.
And yet one that I think the left is making a bad mistake of not actually joining that movement to make sure that they're able to leave their own imprint in how we shut down the administrative state as well, which I think in retrospect will be a missed opportunity for Democrats, but will also be worse off for the country because it will then forever become a partisan issue.
And Paul, I'm curious for your take on that.
Even just from a philosophical standpoint and looking back to even pre-American old world England, this is a deeply conservative view that people could not be trusted to govern themselves and so you need this bureaucratic managerial intermediary class.
How did we get to a point where that is now actually itself a conservative view to say that you actually want to dismantle that?
And the so-called liberal view is that you actually need to preserve that elite, undemocratic aristocracy in the administrative state.
I think that's exactly right.
I think fundamentally when we think about what the American Revolution was about, it was about this desire to have some self-control, have some ability to determine our own fates for good or for ill.
I will note, of course, that King George III, the monarch at the time of the American Revolution, also a king who had mental illness that had to be hidden from the public.
I think that this is a case where the civil liberties Well, eventually, at the end of his life, there was a regency under his son who became George IV. So, I mean, he was somebody who had serious mental illness.
I mean, and this is common, too.
I mean, you think about multiple Byzantine emperors had dementia.
Theodora ended up ruling on behalf of Justinian.
Justin I was known to have dementia.
In a system where we elect rulers, it's a little uncommon to have somebody so old and so frail in a position of authority, but it's not uncommon at all in a system of hereditary monarchy where people get older and dementia is something, unfortunately, that most people do experience if they live long enough.
I was actually just thinking back the other day, if you think about stories of rulers with dementia, you even see it in the Bible.
You see it in the story of King David in the beginning of 1 Kings where he has hypothermia, he can't stay warm, he's unable to remember who he's promised the throne to.
Bathsheba convinces him it's his son Solomon.
This is not a new phenomenon, but generally, throughout history, we've tried to hide this fact.
We've tried to hide the reality of cognitive impairment of our rulers because we understand that that erodes public confidence in the regime and it also leads to our enemies taking advantage of it.
And again, it's something where Edith Wilson basically ran the White House during the final year of Woodrow Wilson's presidency.
That fact didn't really emerge until after he'd already left the White House.
Of course, he wasn't running for another term.
That's another key distinction.
I think that from the standpoint of what does it mean that one of our parties has become so aligned with Let's just call it security services, intelligence agencies.
It's worrisome.
I think somebody like me who thought of themselves as a Democrat in the early 2000s and had more civil libertarian instincts on things like the Patriot Act, It's disconcerting to see the party that I felt like I belonged in turn its back on those principles and become so enthusiastic about using state power to, you know, surveil the citizenry, enforce certain rules of what can and cannot be said.
I mean, again, the free speech movements in this country have often come from the left.
So I think that this is an area where maybe there will be a realignment.
Maybe just, you know, as sad as this last week was, I think that their worldview and their image of how our system of government operates is faulty.
It needs to be corrected.
And maybe the form in which that correction takes is one where they become a little more skeptical.
Joe Biden was photographed with like note cards from a reporter from the LA Times, I don't know if you remember this, with like the question that he was going to receive.
And everyone sort of dismissed this and everyone sort of said, you know, this is just hyped up Republican propaganda.
I think it's just hard to take that seriously anymore now that we've seen with our own eyes the current state of the presidency.
And I think then the question you said of, you know, who is running the show?
What is the role of these government agencies in forming decisions that impact my life?
You know, if it's not this one guy who we elect, if it's actually something bigger than that, do we like that?
Are we okay with that?
Are we okay basically living in a system where there's a degree of noblesse oblige from these, you know, officials who dictate what we are allowed to do and not do?
I mean, you know, you can make the argument that that's better off.
You can make the argument that, and again, as you said, that's kind of been the norm throughout your ministry is that we defer all these decisions to higher-ups and we don't have much agency over our lives.
Like, that's the default mode of Governance throughout history.
Maybe we're okay with that.
Maybe we've come to accept it so much that it doesn't bother us as long as economic indices are reasonable, as long as there's a basic level of stability, we can put up with a certain amount of infantilization.
But I don't know.
I'm curious to see whether or not this leads to some individuals, at least in the media, beginning to ask questions that probably should have been asked 20 years ago, but are now becoming more and more salient.
Yeah, I do think this realignment's interesting.
As I was listening to your talk, I actually think where it took place when you were describing yourself, right, in the 2000s, somebody who thought of yourself as belonging, the Democratic Party certainly, with civil libertarian instincts, which, by the way, even back when we were in college, I shared as well.
Yeah, we agreed on those issues, absolutely.
I agreed on those issues.
You know, one of the people who Who provided voice to that, at least when he ran for president, was actually Barack Obama.
He was far more skeptical of the Iraq War than anybody else in the Republican Party.
It sounded a lot like Donald Trump in 2016 for his skepticism to the Iraq War, was skeptical of the bailouts to the big banks that came in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
And so in many ways, a lot of what you see in America First conservatism, in some ways, if you had to choose between John McCain and Barack Obama, found itself probably more closely in the voice of Barack Obama, certainly in the areas of financial policy and crony capitalism, than it did in the Republican nominee's voice at that time.
But I think something happened in those years, right?
It's almost as though, I don't think Obama ever had the vehemence of going and shutting down the deep state, but there were sort of things he said that had a vague civil libertarian vibe to them.
It was more of a vibe than a commitment.
But I think that, you know, I think you see some of that with RFK today, too.
It's more of a vibe than an actual commitment.
But nonetheless, when he went in there, I think it sort of showed the deep state took over.
Whoever was actually running the show said, no, no, no, you got it the other way.
You say you want to close Guantanamo?
No, no, no, that ain't going to happen.
Not on my watch.
You say you want to be non-interventionist in foreign policy?
You want to get your troops out?
No, no, no, no.
We're going to do things a little different way.
And they controlled him.
He was lucid.
He was new.
He was different than Joe Biden.
But they controlled him in a very different way than I think they're controlling Biden now.
And so I think that alignment, or that realignment, I think in some ways took place where even if you had the Democratic Party's version of somebody who was skeptical of the administrative state, the noblesse oblige, that effectively then becomes part of it.
Those are the years in which I think that realignment took place.
But it's easy for me to sit here and criticize Democrats.
I also say in the Republican Party, I actually think that there's a quiet reluctance to really go after this superstructure of the so-called administrative state as well.
I am somewhat concerned by...
And I'm actually going to give a speech in the next week or so where I lay this out.
I didn't even focus on this in my public commentary so far.
It is going to be important to me going forward.
On what I see is...
Two strains of potential America First nationalism in the future.
And I use nationalism in a good way.
I think positive nationalism granted on our ideals isn't a bad word.
But there's two strains of America First nationalism and of the Republican Party more broadly.
One which wants to replace that left-wing noblesse oblige with the right-wing version of a noblesse oblige.
A left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state, a left-wing administrative and bureaucratic state with a right-wing version of the same.
Industrial policy, greater regulations from the Department of Transportation to the CFPB to otherwise to say, no, no, no, we need to do this in a way that helps American workers and manufacturers.
Goals which I favor, but means which I don't.
And then what I view as more of a national libertarian alternative, which says that I don't care if you're left-wing, right-wing, any-wing, shut it down.
In terms of the actual apparatus, America, for better or worse, we're not a country that's okay with saying that as long as the economic indices are in a good place, we're going to shut up, sit down, and do as we're told by a bunch of bureaucrats that we can't elect out of office.
I don't care if you're on the left or the right, I'm against it, I want to shut it down.
I think that is not a toxic rift, not a vitriolic rift, but an earnest intellectual rift between thoughtful people in the Republican Party as well.
So it's not just a Democrat versus Republican issue, but I think it's probably more of An intra-party divide in both political parties in terms of do you want to use the reins of administration, right, of bureaucracy to effectuate policy goals you see as worthy, equity in the Democratic Party's version of it.
Prosperity for American workers and manufacturers in the America First version of it or some other objective, national security objective and surveillance state objective in the Dick Cheney wing of the Republican Party version of it.
Or are you in the, what I've used myself certainly is in more of a national libertarian camp to say that, yes, we care about the national security and sovereignty and identity of the United States foremost.
But within that constraint, we don't want some sort of bureaucratic apparatus At all.
Whether or not we could wield it in the short run for our own objectives, the thing we actually want is just to get in there and shut it down.
And I do think that we haven't yet had that conversation thoroughly on the right, and I think it is just a matter of time.
Before we do.
And I think when we do, I think it'll be good for not only the Republican Party, but good for the country.
Steve, I want to get your perspective on some of that.
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
I mean, I think liberals are under, you know, most liberals, modern liberals, are under this misconception that they can regulate their way to utopia.
By and large, conservatives don't see the world the same way.
Now, I agree with you that there's some who believe that, well, a different strain of regulation will actually get us there.
But what you see more often, I think, is when you have conservative members of Congress who are adding riders to appropriation bills that do things like restrict the use of funds by agencies to regulate in certain contexts that they shouldn't be touching.
For instance, preventing the SEC, Securities Exchange Commission, from using any of their appropriated funds to regulate campaign finance.
That's the job of the Federal Election Commission.
The SEC shouldn't touch it because what they will want to try to do is restrict anyone from giving contributions either by an outright ban or over-disclosure in a way that is restrictive to their businesses.
So to that end, I would say that it's just a difference in worldview.
Yeah, I do think that that worldview, I think we're seeing a fascinating realignment.
What it's called a realignment presumes that it's going in a certain direction, but certainly a reorientation on the right, where you do see people I respect, by the way, US senators even amongst the Republican Party proposing greater funding for things like the Department of Transportation's safety regulations.
or greater funding for the CFPB, or a vision of whether Lena Kahn is doing a good job or not, in terms of greater antitrust enforcement, or a range of other pro-regulatory actions,
pro-regulatory steps to say that if this is going to pro-regulatory steps to say that if this is going to help American manufacturers and workers, then that we're going to re-entrust that regulatory state with something we otherwise would not have entrusted it with if it was a different political party in charge.
I think it's a dangerous game to play.
I do agree with you that historically it has been generally the province of the right to sort of put greater constraints on that, especially when you have a Democrat who's in power in the White House.
But I do think that there is something of a brewing rift between what I think of as the national protectionist wing or the national industrialist wing of the America First movement and maybe more of a national libertarian wing.
And I think there's a lot of overlap too.
I think that both would say that they're skeptical of the deep state, but the question is, how high is that on your hierarchy of priorities to go in there and actually take down?
And if you look at anywhere from the lawfare against Trump to the fact that you have a government that's been as systematically dishonest as it has on matters of public importance, all the way up to and including even Joe Biden's health or the president they propped up as their puppet,
I just don't come down on the side of saying that, okay, but in certain cases, I'm going to support some kind of legislation that still expands the authority of some agency or other just because we tell ourselves a myth that it's going to be good for American workers, when in fact, I think one of the great impediments to American workers is the existence of that regulatory state in the first place.
And I do think that we are approaching a fork in the road in our own movement for where our commitments are.
Is shutting down the regulatory state one amongst a menu of priorities that we rank order against other priorities we want to achieve?
Or is it the priority above all of the others that is the means to achieving a more prosperous nation?
And I think that that's where the rubber hits the road and we'll separate In some ways, the boys and the men on how willing we are to take the steps needed to actually shut it down.
And I think that we are going to have to...
Acknowledge some short-run trade-offs if that's what we're actually going in there to do.
And that certainly was a core hallmark of what I advanced last year during the presidential campaign.
Probably could have done a better job of even articulating that and making it clear exactly how we were going to do it.
But nonetheless, I think that that is an interesting, intellectually unexplored terrain that I do think is going to percolate and find its way to the surface of Debates around the future direction of the Republican Party.
Paul, I'll give you the final word to wrap up in terms of thinking about the last seismic week that we had, right?
Supreme Court holdings reigning in this discussion of the administrative state, where we are with an administration that now has multiple flanks within it, those that are trying to hang Biden out to dry and those who are trying to protect him and insulate him all the way through the election.
What do you believe next year holds in store for the country?
And, you know, you and I share something in common is we both became parents in recent years.
And, you know, what do you think of just as a parent when you think about Isaac, your son, or Karthik, my son, you know, rolling themselves forward if they're dorm mates 18 years from now in Matthews or wherever else they might be going to school?
What do you think the country is going to look like then?
And what do you think what happens in the next four months is going to have to do with it?
And I love your perspective on it, not necessarily coming from the Republican right, but just coming at this as an independent-minded American father.
Yeah, I mean, I guess what I'd say is, you know, it's funny, both of us, same age, we grew up in the same sort of era of, I would say, a certain American culture that was pretty omnipresent and pretty optimistic about the future, sort of the post-Cold War era.
'90s era of our childhood was one where I think the expectation is technology would be making our lives better.
We would continue to make progress on inclusion.
We thought that this would be like sort of the American century to come instead of the American century that had ended.
And I think the truth is the last 20 years have been pretty rough for American optimism.
They've been pretty rough for internal divisions within this country between political parties and between individuals within families.
And I guess I'm a little nervous about the coming election cycle.
I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.
But I am in the long run an optimist.
I think that Americans actually do agree on a lot of basic principles.
And I think a lot of the division that we've seen over the last 20 years is the product of a lot of media efforts in which, you know, it is lucrative to stir up animosity between citizens.
If the American public is a little more skeptical of the narrative that they're being fed by the media, if they're a little more willing to just talk to their neighbors and hear their perspectives, I actually think we're not that far apart.
I think there's this sort of narrative that we are on the verge of a civil war.
Look, I think there are definitely elements in both wings of both parties that have a certain hatred of the other that is unproductive and toxic.
But I also think if you just talk to most people, like you and I, right?
Like we don't agree on every political issue, but we're friends and we're able to have a nice dinner together and we don't need to have this sort of insane high octave approach to politics.
I think in some ways, I'm optimistic.
I think that we need to get past this next period.
But I think if we can unite around a vision of America that's commonsensical, not extreme, you know, maybe not what I mean by extreme is not necessarily that we need to stay on the current course.
Maybe we do need some extreme changes, but not extreme in the way that we view our fellow citizens.
I think that that is the way that we can Ensure that the world that both Karthik and my son Isaac grew up in is one where they are excited about the future.
It's a world where they think that things are going to get better than they are.
I don't know.
It may sound very Pollyannish to say that right now in the midst of what we're going through, but I do actually look around the world and I look at the other countries out there and There are much worse problems to have than the problems America has.
If you look at the issues facing European countries, the issues facing China, the issues facing many of our adversaries, they would be lucky to be in a position that we are to have such a dynamic private sector, to have such a patriotic citizenry.
And to some extent, we have a problem of governance that needs to change.
But if it continues on the current path, I think it has to change.
And that's an optimistic note to end on, I think.
I mean, I... I do think that there's a lot of truth.
People, when you open the doors, for better or worse, people aren't leaving.
They're coming.
But I think that that also belies a reality that the United States is not just one country among many.
It has been the Since the 80s, right?
Borrow Reagan on this shining city on a hill that provides hope to the rest of that world.
And so what it means when the United States itself is even in the conversation of being put on the plane, where that at least is the place where we would take solace to say that, ah, we've still got it better than most other countries.
I think that that on one hand is true.
On the other hand, I think is still concerning both for the future of the United States and for the future of the world as we know it.
And I don't think that we are Automatically going to get to the light on the other side of the tunnel.
I believe we can, but I think it's going to be guided by the choices that we make.
And I worry a little bit that we, probably our generation, fell into the trap of believing that it was automatically destiny, that it was just ours to inherit.
And I think that it's gonna be up to us to create or recreate, and that will involve, I don't know what form it's gonna take, but some measure of sacrifice.
And I think that we might live in one of those moments where we haven't really been asked to make I agree with you.
Maybe averse to American politics might describe one or two of them as extreme.
The idea that high school seniors should have to pass civics tests before they become full voting citizens, or that all Americans, frankly, should possibly be in a similar category, or that we should shut down the fourth branch of government with 75% headcount reductions in DC. Those could be extreme policies measured by the status quo.
I don't think they're extreme measured against most of US history.
But that's separate from the nature of how we view one another as citizens.
And I think that's a good distinction to draw on and to end on, to say that you might adopt iconoclastic policy positions, but be charitable and even measured in your estimation of your fellow citizens.
And I think that that's a distinction we probably don't draw enough.
And I think this could be five months ahead that will test this country to see if we have it in us to actually Draw that distinction in a way that matters.
So anyway, appreciated the conversation with you guys.
Good hanging out.
And Steve, we'll surely talk to you soon.
And Paul, it'll be good to see you next time we're in the same city, man.
Talk to you.
Absolutely.
Looking forward to it.
Thanks, guys.
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