WEBVTT NOTE Who Killed the Constitution? 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.000 Nice to see you folks again. 2 00:00:02.000 --> 00:00:06.000 The last two times you've been here, each of those last two times, 3 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:11.000 I've delivered remarks loosely based on some book that I had out that year. 4 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:14.000 So two years ago, it was this one, 5 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:17.000 Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. 6 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:22.000 Then last year, it was 33 Questions about American History You're Not Supposed to Ask. 7 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:26.000 And then this year, it's Who Killed the Constitution? 8 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:29.000 Now, unfortunately, it's actually not available for sale in the bookstore. 9 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:36.000 I had some copies I was going to bring, but they're in my trunk, and the car is having a dent taken out of it, so I have no access to them. 10 00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:41.000 However, I have this uncorrected proof version, which is crummy paperback. 11 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:48.000 The real thing is a nice, handsome, thick hardcover that you'd just love to have on display in your home. 12 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:54.000 So I'm confident that although I can't sell you a copy, you'll all rush home and say, 13 00:00:54.000 --> 00:01:02.000 You know, my life is incomplete until I get a copy of Who Killed the Constitution at my bookstore or through Amazon or whatever. 14 00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:07.000 I mean, look at it. It's got the Constitution going through a shredder on the cover here. How could that not be intriguing? 15 00:01:07.000 --> 00:01:11.000 Who's doing that? So that's what we're up to in this book. 16 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:17.000 My co-author is a fellow named Kevin Gutzman who wrote a book that is available in the bookstore downstairs 17 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:21.000 called The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution, which is an excellent book. 18 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:41.000 Kevin has a PhD in history and he also has a law degree, so he comes at this from both angles and nobody dares to debate him because they know that the historians are afraid of him because he has the legal knowledge, the lawyers are afraid because he has a PhD in history, so everybody just leaves him alone, so he's kind of my security blanket in this book because by extension they leave me alone now. 19 00:01:41.000 --> 00:01:57.000 Well, I guess given the shortness of time, we started a few minutes earlier than the schedule indicates because I have an internet radio program, such as it is, that runs from 1 to 2 p.m. on Tuesdays and I didn't want to be cutting it too close. 20 00:01:57.000 --> 00:02:06.000 I broadcast it from up there and I got to race up there and get on because if I'm not up there in time, the show music starts and there's nobody there. 21 00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:36.000 The Constitution Spells Out Certain Limits, 22 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:40.800 and limitations on government. On the one hand, it spells out what the Federal Government can do, 23 00:02:40.800 --> 00:02:45.000 but by implication, it spells out what the Federal Government cannot do. 24 00:02:45.000 --> 00:02:51.500 That is to say, if you look at Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, it lists the powers of the Congress. 25 00:02:51.500 --> 00:02:55.500 And then, if you look at the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, 26 00:02:55.500 --> 00:02:58.800 you find sort of the complementary statement to that, 27 00:02:58.800 --> 00:03:05.000 which is that the Federal Government has only those powers that are listed in that Article 1, Section 8, 28 00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:11.000 and any power that has not been delegated to it by the states remains reserved to the states and the people. 29 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:16.000 So Thomas Jefferson's way of interpreting the Constitution was very simple. 30 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:23.000 If something was proposed, Jefferson's first question before asking whether it's wise or stupid was, 31 00:03:23.000 --> 00:03:27.000 is it allowed? Does the Constitution provide for it? 32 00:03:27.000 --> 00:03:30.000 So he would look in Article 1, Section 8, and if he doesn't see it listed there, 33 00:03:30.000 --> 00:03:54.000 The Constitution was written to be understood by the average person, you don't need to be some demigod in a black robe to understand it and come out and announce to us what our Constitution means. 34 00:03:54.000 --> 00:04:01.500 The average person was understood to be able to determine this for himself, what the document meant. 35 00:04:01.500 --> 00:04:08.000 Now that tenth amendment of the Constitution, according to Thomas Jefferson, was the cornerstone of the whole document. 36 00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:13.000 Because in effect, if you look at the whole Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, 37 00:04:13.000 --> 00:04:17.000 they consist, the first eight of them consist of things the government can't do. 38 00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:22.500 You can't interfere with the freedom of speech, you can't take people's guns away, you can't quarter troops in people's homes, 39 00:04:22.500 --> 00:04:26.300 And it just goes down the list. You can't do this, you can't do this, you can't do this, you can't do this. 40 00:04:26.300 --> 00:04:29.700 And then as one of my friends puts it, the Tenth Amendment basically says, 41 00:04:29.700 --> 00:04:32.400 and if we forgot anything, you can't do that either. 42 00:04:32.400 --> 00:04:38.800 So it just makes very, very clear that the federal government is limited to only those very few powers. 43 00:04:38.800 --> 00:04:43.000 And this was how it was understood by the people who ratified the Constitution, 44 00:04:43.000 --> 00:04:46.700 particularly if you look at the ratification convention in Virginia. 45 00:04:46.700 --> 00:04:49.600 See, when the Constitution was written in 1787, 46 00:04:49.600 --> 00:04:53.280 It was then submitted to each state to decide, 47 00:04:53.280 --> 00:04:55.680 do you want to go along with this document or not? 48 00:04:55.680 --> 00:04:59.520 And when it got to Virginia, which is the home of so many illustrious 49 00:04:59.520 --> 00:05:02.800 figures in American history, I mean, although Jefferson 50 00:05:02.800 --> 00:05:06.320 was a broad, was not at the original constitutional convention, nevertheless, 51 00:05:06.320 --> 00:05:09.680 he's a Virginian, Patrick Henry, James Madison, 52 00:05:09.680 --> 00:05:14.160 John Marshall, George Mason, one figure after another of great importance was at 53 00:05:14.160 --> 00:05:16.880 Virginia. So the Virginia Ratification Convention 54 00:05:16.880 --> 00:05:23.880 is of particular importance, and there, it was told to them by defenders of the Constitution 55 00:05:23.880 --> 00:05:28.880 that the Federal Government will have only those powers that are expressly delegated to it. 56 00:05:28.880 --> 00:05:35.880 Those words were used, expressly delegated. So unless that power is listed in those very words in the Constitution, 57 00:05:35.880 --> 00:05:39.880 the Federal Government does not have it. People were reassured with this argument. 58 00:05:39.880 --> 00:05:45.880 And in Virginia, when it came time to decide that they would in fact approve the Constitution, 59 00:05:45.880 --> 00:05:54.680 They did so only after declaring that this constitution provides for a limited federal government, 60 00:05:54.680 --> 00:06:01.280 that the 13 states that would be entering into it would be entering into it as a league of states, 61 00:06:01.280 --> 00:06:07.180 and that if this government should do something not authorized under the Constitution, 62 00:06:07.180 --> 00:06:09.680 then Virginia would be exonerated from it. 63 00:06:09.680 --> 00:06:12.680 That is to say, Virginia would no longer be held liable to it. 64 00:06:12.680 --> 00:06:16.680 It could, in fact, even withdraw, was the understanding from the Union. 65 00:06:16.680 --> 00:06:21.680 And in fact, when in 1861, on the eve of the so-called Civil War, 66 00:06:21.680 --> 00:06:24.680 Virginians specifically reminded Americans, 67 00:06:24.680 --> 00:06:28.680 by the way, remember when we ratified the Constitution, we told you we could do this? 68 00:06:28.680 --> 00:06:29.680 Well, now we're doing it. 69 00:06:29.680 --> 00:06:35.680 So this was, again, the limited nature of the government was understood pretty much by everybody. 70 00:06:35.680 --> 00:06:38.680 Okay, well now you look at the federal government we have now, 71 00:06:38.680 --> 00:06:42.680 And then you compare it to this, and you may as well be looking at a government from Mars. 72 00:06:42.680 --> 00:06:45.680 I mean, it has no connection whatsoever to this. 73 00:06:45.680 --> 00:06:48.680 The idea that the federal government would be limited by anything? 74 00:06:48.680 --> 00:06:51.680 I mean, right now, look at what we're going through right now. 75 00:06:51.680 --> 00:06:57.680 We've got proposals on the table for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions, 76 00:06:57.680 --> 00:07:01.680 if not ultimately trillions of dollars in bailouts, 77 00:07:01.680 --> 00:07:06.680 when you have the former CEO of Goldman Sachs as the Treasury Secretary, 78 00:07:06.680 --> 00:07:11.680 helping to bail out Goldman Sachs, which he will probably later be the CEO of again. 79 00:07:11.680 --> 00:07:14.680 No one seems to notice that this is kind of a conflict of interest here. 80 00:07:14.680 --> 00:07:19.680 Does anyone even pause to wonder whether the Constitution authorizes any of this? 81 00:07:19.680 --> 00:07:23.680 One of the provisions of the legislation that's being proposed to Congress 82 00:07:23.680 --> 00:07:27.680 is that the Treasury Secretary will be authorized at any one time 83 00:07:27.680 --> 00:07:36.680 to take and burden the American taxpayer with up to $700 billion of bad debt 84 00:07:36.680 --> 00:07:41.680 that various firms have taken on whether it's mortgages or whatever 85 00:07:41.680 --> 00:07:44.680 and the taxpayers will have to assume these debts 86 00:07:44.680 --> 00:07:47.680 and if they go sour then the taxpayers will foot the bill 87 00:07:47.680 --> 00:07:56.680 and he is subject to no one, no court, no administrative review, his decisions are unreviewable. 88 00:07:56.680 --> 00:08:04.680 Now, there goes the country, as far as I can see, but where does the Constitution authorize this? 89 00:08:04.680 --> 00:08:09.680 If you were to even ask this question, again, they'd look at you in Washington like you had three heads. 90 00:08:09.680 --> 00:08:14.680 That would be considered to them to be the most irrelevant question you could have asked. 91 00:08:14.680 --> 00:08:18.680 Well, who cares? Well, I don't know. They would come up with some contrived explanation. 92 00:08:18.680 --> 00:08:23.680 But needless to say, there ain't nothing in the Constitution that authorizes that. 93 00:08:23.680 --> 00:08:27.680 and when you consider that in the first few decades of American history 94 00:08:27.680 --> 00:08:32.680 you had a number of presidents who wanted to build roads with federal government money 95 00:08:32.680 --> 00:08:36.680 and they thought even road building wasn't authorized in the Constitution. 96 00:08:36.680 --> 00:08:39.680 So I don't think they would say, well we can't build roads 97 00:08:39.680 --> 00:08:42.680 but we can authorize the Treasury Secretary 98 00:08:42.680 --> 00:08:45.680 to take over hundreds of billions of dollars in rotten debt 99 00:08:45.680 --> 00:08:48.680 that we're going to be responsible for. Seems unlikely to me. 100 00:08:48.680 --> 00:08:51.680 So something has happened and so in Who Killed the Constitution 101 00:08:51.680 --> 00:09:13.680 I won't burden you with those episodes, but just give you a few minor examples of things that have happened in the 20th century that have, each one of which has been a major nail in the coffin, and one of them is a Supreme Court decision from the late 1930s, the Caroleen Products decision. 102 00:09:13.680 --> 00:09:18.680 Nobody's ever heard of this decision. I never heard of it until relatively recently. Nobody's ever taught this. 103 00:09:18.680 --> 00:09:34.680 But in this Caroline Products decision, the Supreme Court, in effect, says the exact opposite of what everybody's been taught, which was up to this point, the Federal Government has just a few powers and the burden of proof is on the Federal Government to prove that it has the power to do what it's doing. 104 00:09:34.680 --> 00:09:44.680 Well, in the late 30s, the Supreme Court said, well, from now on, let's say that whatever the Federal Government does, we'll just assume, is constitutional from now on. 105 00:09:44.680 --> 00:09:48.680 Everything the federal government does is presumed to be constitutional. 106 00:09:48.680 --> 00:09:54.680 And yeah, okay, maybe it's possible the federal government might violate the Constitution. 107 00:09:54.680 --> 00:09:59.680 But if you're going to prove that, here are the hoops you have to jump through to prove that it's violating the Constitution. 108 00:09:59.680 --> 00:10:04.680 So going from the federal government has to prove itself, has to prove it has these powers, 109 00:10:04.680 --> 00:10:09.680 we instead say, well, no, you have to prove it doesn't. Well, good luck with that. 110 00:10:09.680 --> 00:10:13.680 Where would you even start the complaint process? 111 00:10:13.680 --> 00:10:19.680 We have the fact that in the 1990s, Bill Clinton's Solicitor General was asked, 112 00:10:19.680 --> 00:10:25.680 can you name us one thing, one area of American life that in your opinion, 113 00:10:25.680 --> 00:10:30.680 the federal government under the Constitution would have no authority to interfere with? 114 00:10:30.680 --> 00:10:34.680 And the guy just stood there like, you're not allowed to ask me that. I didn't know that. 115 00:10:34.680 --> 00:10:39.680 That wasn't in the prepared questions. He had no idea what to say. 116 00:10:39.680 --> 00:10:46.680 There was no area he could think of that under the Constitution the Federal Government would just be off limits. 117 00:10:46.680 --> 00:10:54.680 Pretty amazing, right? Again, exactly the opposite of what people were told the Constitution would be when they ratified it. 118 00:10:54.680 --> 00:11:02.680 And then finally, Jefferson's cornerstone, the Tenth Amendment, which restricts the Federal Government to just these limited powers. 119 00:11:02.680 --> 00:11:05.680 And you can't take one step beyond these. 120 00:11:05.680 --> 00:11:08.680 Because the Tenth Amendment makes that clear. 121 00:11:08.680 --> 00:11:13.680 That anything beyond those powers is reserved to the states and the people. 122 00:11:13.680 --> 00:11:18.680 Well, it so happens that my co-author, who, as I said, has a law degree, 123 00:11:18.680 --> 00:11:22.680 he tells me that when you're preparing for your bar exam 124 00:11:22.680 --> 00:11:27.680 and you go to one of these cram courses where they cram all the information at the last minute 125 00:11:27.680 --> 00:11:33.680 so that you can pass the bar, when they give you test-taking tips for the multiple choice section, 126 00:11:33.680 --> 00:11:47.680 They tell you that if you're answering a multiple choice test, a multiple choice question on the bar exam and one of the multiple choices you're given, one of the potential answers is the 10th Amendment, you can just cross that right off. 127 00:11:47.680 --> 00:11:54.680 The 10th Amendment is never the right answer to a question on the bar exam, never. It's always wrong. 128 00:11:54.680 --> 00:11:58.680 Now, Jefferson said it's the cornerstone of the whole Constitution. 129 00:11:58.680 --> 00:12:05.680 The American legal profession says it's totally irrelevant and the only time we ever use it is to try to trick you on the bar exam. 130 00:12:05.680 --> 00:12:07.680 That's how irrelevant it is. 131 00:12:07.680 --> 00:12:10.680 So again, exactly the opposite of what Americans were told. 132 00:12:10.680 --> 00:12:15.680 And it's not just that we've had crazy Supreme Court justices who come up with crazy theories. 133 00:12:15.680 --> 00:12:20.680 It's all three branches. It's the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch. 134 00:12:20.680 --> 00:12:24.680 The executive branch has been responsible for countless atrocities against the Constitution. 135 00:12:24.680 --> 00:12:27.680 The major ones we cover in Who Killed the Constitution. 136 00:12:27.680 --> 00:12:32.800 Constitution, but a small one I just mentioned. In the early 1940s, President Franklin Roosevelt 137 00:12:32.800 --> 00:12:38.960 declared without consulting Congress, he just declared that from now on the top income tax 138 00:12:38.960 --> 00:12:45.960 rate in the United States will be 100%. That if you earn more than $25,000 a year, anything 139 00:12:47.320 --> 00:12:54.320 above $25,000, just send it in. Because the tax is 100%. And you think to yourself, well 140 00:12:54.320 --> 00:13:24.320 to yourself. Well, wait a minute. Can he do that? Well, it doesn't matter. Can he do that? He did it. That's what matters. He actually did that. And finally, Congress intervened and said, now just hold on a minute. You know, we're trying to wage World War II here. That's not going to help us do that if you're taking everybody's money. So that was pretty much the argument. We won't be encouraged to carry out sufficient war production if people feel like all their money is going to be taken from them. So that was the rationale for repealing that. But that was what we call an executive order whereby the president, acting 141 00:13:24.320 --> 00:13:29.320 without having to consult anybody else, not the Congress, not anybody else, 142 00:13:29.320 --> 00:13:32.320 can implement policy in this way. 143 00:13:32.320 --> 00:13:35.320 And it's not just this one example by any means. 144 00:13:35.320 --> 00:13:40.320 There have been thousands, tens of thousands of examples of this over the years. 145 00:13:40.320 --> 00:13:44.320 Congress, well, in the case of Congress, we just simply have a situation 146 00:13:44.320 --> 00:13:51.320 in which any subject matter under the sun is considered to be under the purview of Congress. 147 00:13:51.320 --> 00:13:55.820 It doesn't even occur to them that there could be a constitutional limitation on what they're doing. 148 00:13:55.820 --> 00:13:57.220 It does not even occur to them. 149 00:13:57.220 --> 00:14:01.820 I mean, there are very few congressmen, I think there's only one congressman, 150 00:14:01.820 --> 00:14:04.120 who would actually stay up at night worrying about, 151 00:14:04.120 --> 00:14:07.720 oh my gosh, is there constitutional authorization for what I'm proposing? 152 00:14:07.720 --> 00:14:12.720 I mean, again, you would be laughed out of the room if you so much as raised this question. 153 00:14:12.720 --> 00:14:15.920 Although, if you really did try to press them to answer 154 00:14:15.920 --> 00:14:18.820 where in the Constitution are you authorized to do this, 155 00:14:18.820 --> 00:14:21.820 It would be amusing to see, because once in a while 156 00:14:21.820 --> 00:14:25.820 a forbidden question like this is asked of some lower-level bureaucrat. 157 00:14:25.820 --> 00:14:29.820 And it is the unaskable question, because the poor guy standing up there 158 00:14:29.820 --> 00:14:34.820 has no idea what on God's green earth to say to that question. 159 00:14:34.820 --> 00:14:38.820 And so they just flounder around for some phrase in the Constitution 160 00:14:38.820 --> 00:14:42.820 that they remember from fifth grade, you know, that maybe could justify what they're doing. 161 00:14:42.820 --> 00:14:50.820 But, whoever asked that question, of course, never is allowed within 50 square miles of the White House ever again. 162 00:14:50.820 --> 00:14:54.820 No other press conference will ever permit his attendance. 163 00:14:54.820 --> 00:15:02.820 But, of course, then there is the judicial branch as well, which has been responsible for a great many atrocities. 164 00:15:02.820 --> 00:15:09.820 I sometimes mention Wickard v. Filburn, which is this funny case, not so funny for the poor fellows involved, 165 00:15:09.820 --> 00:15:16.820 in the early 1940s involving a farmer who had grown some wheat on his property to consume 166 00:15:17.660 --> 00:15:20.920 and he was being harassed by the government because the government was telling him he 167 00:15:20.920 --> 00:15:26.180 was growing too much. He's growing too much on his own property and his view is that the 168 00:15:26.180 --> 00:15:29.900 Federal Government under the Constitution has no authority to tell me how much I can 169 00:15:29.900 --> 00:15:33.980 produce on my own property. You know, what is this, the Soviet Union? Come on. Well, 170 00:15:33.980 --> 00:15:37.980 sure enough, he winds up in court and he argues the Federal Government has no authority to 171 00:15:37.980 --> 00:15:40.980 I'm not going to interfere with this, but the answer that he's given is, 172 00:15:40.980 --> 00:15:44.980 oh yes, it can. It can tell you how much to grow, 173 00:15:44.980 --> 00:15:50.980 because the Federal Constitution authorizes the regulation of interstate commerce. 174 00:15:50.980 --> 00:15:53.980 And this farmer said, but wait a minute, I'm not engaged in interstate commerce. 175 00:15:53.980 --> 00:15:56.980 Everything that's going on is originating in this one state. 176 00:15:56.980 --> 00:15:59.980 In fact, it's all originating in this one plot of land. 177 00:15:59.980 --> 00:16:01.980 I grow the wheat, I consume it, that's the end. 178 00:16:01.980 --> 00:16:03.980 I mean, what part of this are you people not getting? 179 00:16:03.980 --> 00:16:06.980 That's nothing to do with buying and selling between other states. 180 00:16:06.980 --> 00:16:12.980 And he was told that, but you see, if you hadn't grown that wheat on your property, 181 00:16:12.980 --> 00:16:16.980 there's a chance you might have purchased the wheat from another state. 182 00:16:16.980 --> 00:16:20.980 But because you grew it yourself, you abstained from interstate commerce 183 00:16:20.980 --> 00:16:24.980 and thereby indirectly affected it, so therefore we can regulate you. 184 00:16:24.980 --> 00:16:29.980 I mean, I can't follow that. If you see a logic to that, you know, more power to you. 185 00:16:29.980 --> 00:16:33.980 But that is pretty typical of what we've seen. 186 00:16:33.980 --> 00:16:38.480 so that whatever the phrase is in the Constitution that they remotely think 187 00:16:38.480 --> 00:16:42.480 might allow them to cover this particular activity, it will be stretched 188 00:16:42.480 --> 00:16:48.780 to accommodate that. Now sometimes we're told that the key objection and I'll 189 00:16:48.780 --> 00:16:50.300 close with this, the key objection 190 00:16:50.300 --> 00:16:53.700 to the sort of argument that I'm making is that, you know, the Constitution is 191 00:16:53.700 --> 00:16:57.140 supposed to be a living, breathing document. It changes with the times. 192 00:16:57.140 --> 00:17:01.060 This is an old document, man. You know, get with the times. This is 2008. 193 00:17:01.060 --> 00:17:07.560 You know, I don't care what James Madison said in 1787, you know, he was just some bozo from 1787. 194 00:17:07.560 --> 00:17:10.060 We need something, you know, blah, blah, blah. We hear this all the time. 195 00:17:10.060 --> 00:17:16.060 You get this in school all the time. In fact, sometimes you're even told that this is one of the virtues of the Constitution, 196 00:17:16.060 --> 00:17:20.060 that it changes with the times, that, you know, sure, we weren't allowed to do this before, 197 00:17:20.060 --> 00:17:24.560 but now the judges are allowing our government to do this today. And isn't this wonderful? 198 00:17:24.560 --> 00:17:28.060 How flexible it is, how it conforms to changes in society. 199 00:17:28.060 --> 00:17:31.660 Well, it's true that in a certain sense the Constitution is flexible. 200 00:17:31.660 --> 00:17:34.660 If you want to change it, then you can amend the Constitution. 201 00:17:34.660 --> 00:17:38.860 But that's not what these, we have a living Constitution people have in mind. 202 00:17:38.860 --> 00:17:43.460 What they mean is, let's let judges decide today what they think it means, 203 00:17:43.460 --> 00:17:47.660 even if that's the opposite of what we were told it meant yesterday. 204 00:17:47.660 --> 00:17:52.860 Well, that happens to be the exact system the American colonists rose up in rebellion against. 205 00:17:52.860 --> 00:17:56.060 The British government had exactly that type of Constitution, 206 00:17:56.060 --> 00:18:00.760 that it was an unwritten constitution, and from one day to the next nobody knew what it meant. 207 00:18:00.760 --> 00:18:04.060 They had to be told by the British government, it means this today. 208 00:18:04.060 --> 00:18:08.460 And when Americans would say, but wait a minute, you're violating our rights, that's unconstitutional. 209 00:18:08.460 --> 00:18:13.160 Well, no it isn't, because the British government has declared that today this is constitutional. 210 00:18:13.160 --> 00:18:16.360 So it's an extremely Orwellian system. 211 00:18:16.360 --> 00:18:19.860 And so to have a so-called living breathing constitution 212 00:18:19.860 --> 00:18:23.260 that simply changes to suit whatever the government wants it to say 213 00:18:23.260 --> 00:18:26.060 means, in effect, you have a dead constitution, 214 00:18:26.160 --> 00:18:30.560 because a constitution like that is just what any government would love to have, 215 00:18:30.660 --> 00:18:34.260 because any time you are pretty sure it's violated the constitution, 216 00:18:34.360 --> 00:18:37.760 it can just come out and tell you, oh, no, no, no, folks, you've misunderstood. 217 00:18:37.860 --> 00:18:41.260 The constitution has been breathing lately, been breathing a lot. 218 00:18:41.360 --> 00:18:44.760 It's been sucking in a lot of this sort of bailout air, you know, 219 00:18:44.860 --> 00:18:50.560 and that permits us today to make these, to carry out these initiatives. 220 00:18:50.560 --> 00:18:53.560 And Lew Rockwell was telling me just not long ago 221 00:18:53.560 --> 00:18:55.560 that he was watching something on television 222 00:18:55.560 --> 00:19:00.560 and almost mid-broadcast, the word bailout stopped being used 223 00:19:00.560 --> 00:19:04.560 because bailout, people aren't really responding very well to that. 224 00:19:04.560 --> 00:19:09.560 A recent Rasmussen poll finds 7% of Americans in support of this bailout. 225 00:19:09.560 --> 00:19:11.560 So now they're using the word rescue. 226 00:19:11.560 --> 00:19:13.560 Because how can you be against a rescue? 227 00:19:13.560 --> 00:19:16.560 You imagine somebody drowning, we're just throwing him a raft. 228 00:19:16.560 --> 00:19:18.560 I mean, who's against that? 229 00:19:18.560 --> 00:19:21.560 What is our living, breathing constitution at work? 230 00:19:21.560 --> 00:19:27.560 Well, my friends, I don't necessarily want to leave you with the idea that, you know, 231 00:19:27.560 --> 00:19:32.560 if only we could just get back to the Constitution, then everything would be fixed, 232 00:19:32.560 --> 00:19:34.560 because I'm not so sure it's that easy. 233 00:19:34.560 --> 00:19:39.560 I mean, for one thing, this living and breathing constitution idea is just not going anywhere. 234 00:19:39.560 --> 00:19:41.560 It's being taught in all the law schools and everything. 235 00:19:41.560 --> 00:19:47.560 And my usual response is, well, how would you like to have living, breathing rules for basketball 236 00:19:47.560 --> 00:19:51.560 So that in the middle of the game, all of a sudden, you're pretty sure that was goaltending. 237 00:19:51.560 --> 00:19:56.560 But you get told by the referee, no, I'm sorry, the rules have breathed today. 238 00:19:56.560 --> 00:20:01.560 Or you're playing poker and all of a sudden you're told that a pair of deuces beats a full house. 239 00:20:01.560 --> 00:20:04.560 Well, sorry, the rules of poker have been living and breathing today. 240 00:20:04.560 --> 00:20:08.560 I mean, no one would accept this in any other aspect of life, right? 241 00:20:08.560 --> 00:20:10.560 Never accept something as insane as this. 242 00:20:10.560 --> 00:20:15.560 But this is what the kiddies get taught in law school and they have no grounds for objecting to it. 243 00:20:15.560 --> 00:20:18.380 for objecting to it all they all they know is what they're being told by their 244 00:20:18.380 --> 00:20:23.560 law professors but ultimately here we have this document that was ratified by 245 00:20:23.560 --> 00:20:27.320 the people under the most auspicious circumstances with some of the great 246 00:20:27.320 --> 00:20:31.760 statesmen and political philosophers of the day behind it and yet it has morphed 247 00:20:31.760 --> 00:20:37.560 into this. Lysander Spooner was a 19th century thinker who said that it could 248 00:20:37.560 --> 00:20:42.640 well be that the huge government we see around us is in fact the result of 249 00:20:42.640 --> 00:20:45.640 for people not obeying the Constitution. 250 00:20:45.640 --> 00:20:47.640 But we have only two choices here. 251 00:20:47.640 --> 00:20:52.640 Either the system we have now is in fact authorized by the Constitution, 252 00:20:52.640 --> 00:20:57.640 or the Constitution we have has been helpless to prevent it. 253 00:20:57.640 --> 00:21:01.640 Either way, we're going to need something other than just the Constitution 254 00:21:01.640 --> 00:21:03.640 to protect our liberty. 255 00:21:03.640 --> 00:21:05.640 So, thank you all.