Kevin Gutzman – Gruber Voters And Bill Clinton’s Moral Order

November 24, 2014

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Of course, we would be in favor of a total embargo against the appointment of any new federal judges anyway. It’s not as though they need any more. It seems to me that they are constantly overworked as is. So maybe if just by attrition they start paring down the ranks of the federal judiciary, then some state courts and state legislatures may become acquainted with the idea that: I think we can actually handle some of these cases in our courts. What a novel idea, right? Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike: I’m wondering how come Congressman Boehner and company don’t seem to believe that they have any role to play if someone is stealing from or mis-administering said Treasury. Can you help me out on that, or am I in the parallel universe and reading the Constitution wrong?

Kevin Gutzman: Well, it seems that the Republicans in the House at least have made the calculation that doing anything to rein in the executive by using their power of the purse will be received negatively by, I guess, tens of millions of Gruber voters. I really love Gruber for giving us a name of that kind of Democrat, just like most Democrats who don’t know anything about the Constitution or the way economics work or foreign policy or where El Salvador is on a map, basically why what we’re constantly hearing out of the Democratic Party is a complete nonstarter. It does seem that the Republicans have decided it’s bad PR to attack this question frontally, so they’re going to try to find various oblique approaches.

Mike: Such as lawsuits now. Now we have a lawsuit.

Gutzman: Apparently lawsuits, although one does hope that they’ll follow up on what Senator Cruz said on television yesterday, which was what I’ve been telling people, and that is that the Republicans ought to tell the president: Until you cease with this new departure you’ve just announced, we are not going to confirm a single non-security-related appointment that you make. Anybody’s name you send up to us in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or in the Department of Commerce or any of the other boondoggle departments of the federal government, that name is just going to sit here until you leave office. Good for you. You’ve decided you can rule without the Congress. Well, we don’t agree and this is one of the approaches the Constitution gives us to take toward that question.

I hope they’ll put a full stop to all Obama appointments to federal courts. There can be two years without any new left-wing judges like Elena Kagan laughing at the idea that there are any limits on the power of Congress to tell us how often to eat broccoli. It seems to me that that would be a fabulous result of this. On one hand, they get to legalize umpteen million peasants from Latin America. On the other hand, no more Obama judicial appointments. Is that a worthwhile trade? I’m not quite sure, but it certainly sounds like a good answer to what the president has done, to me.

Mike: Of course, we would be in favor of a total embargo against the appointment of any new federal judges anyway. It’s not as though they need any more. It seems to me that they are constantly overworked as is. So maybe if just by attrition they start paring down the ranks of the federal judiciary, then some state courts and state legislatures may become acquainted with the idea that: I think we can actually handle some of these cases in our courts. What a novel idea, right?

Gutzman: Well, of course, that would be one result. People may not realize it, but while federal courts can only hear federal questions, that is lawsuits about federal issues, state courts can hear any case, including a case about federal legal questions. You’re right. If plaintiffs decide the federal courts are too busy or there are too few judges to take care of the backlog of cases that’ll develop in that instance, yes, they could go into state courts to have them decided instead. I think that would be a perfectly good result. In fact, at the time of the ratification convention, Madison promised that the federal government would be tried without having any inferior courts, and perhaps there never would be any.

Although I don’t always, or every often, agree with Senator Santorum, I saw him say on television yesterday — maybe on CNN’s Sunday afternoon political talk show — that: You know, Margaret Warner, there are far more federal laws that conservatives don’t like than there are that liberals don’t like, so if liberals are going to decide they don’t have to follow the immigration laws, there are a lot of federal laws that we dislike. My own feeling is that about 90 percent of what the federal government does is not only unconstitutional but counterproductive. It looks to me like a perfect opportunity to gum up the works. I think, too, if the Republicans in the Senate announced that they weren’t going to have any more Obama nominations to non-security-related positions go through, your typical Gruber voter wouldn’t even notice, right? Do those people know? If they don’t know that demand curves slope downward, they certainly don’t know how many open subcabinet positions there are in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Mike: Wait a minute, you said Gruber voter and then you followed it up with demand curve. What makes you think they know what a demand curve is?

Gutzman: That’s my point. If they don’t know a demand curve is sloped downward, they certainly don’t know how many unfilled positions there are in the Transportation Department, or even what a Transportation Department is. Again, I think this is a perfect opportunity for Republicans to say: All right, Mr. President, you have the power to behave lawlessly in contravention of the Constitution, but we actually have a constitutional power, perfectly constitutional power not to confirm your appointments, which we’re not going to do until you stop this. My prediction, of course, is that he won’t stop it. That will be a perfectly valid justification for no more confirmations of Obama non-security-related nominations. I do love the idea that this is a perfectly valid, perfectly legitimate reason for not having any more Obama judicial appointments.

Mike: This has the added benefit, too, that this is right in Congress’s wheelhouse. They are really adroit at doing nothing. They don’t have to do anything.

Gutzman: I know this has been Democratic Party trope now ever since the Republicans took control of the House, that Congress is doing nothing. You and I have talked about this question seriously before. When the two houses aren’t in agreement and they don’t produce laws, this is not dysfunction. That’s the way a bicameral legislative system is supposed to work. If the people have decided they want to give control of the one house to one party and the other house to another party and the two parties don’t agree, that’s what they voted for. I don’t think of this myself that way. I think this is one more way in which the Gruber voters have been led to a partisan conclusion by the intentionally manipulative media. Most people in the media, of course, are kneejerk left-wingers. I think most of them are Gruber voters, too, when it comes to economics and foreign policy and so on, easily manipulated.

Have you noticed that Bill Cosby now, because of his reprobate behavior, has become persona non grata with all decent people? Have you tallied the number of people who’ve made accusations against him? Is it yet greater than the number of people who made such accusations against Bill Clinton? I’m not certain about that.

Mike: I was just thinking that.

Gutzman: How is it that Bill Cosby has immediately reaped the legitimate consequences of his dastardly behavior over these last it seems 45 years, and yet Bill Clinton continues to be some kind of hero with the Gruber faction? I don’t really quiet understand how self-respecting media people square this circle. It seems to me that essentially Bill Cosby has been accused of acting like Clinton.

Mike: I started penning a piece Friday about Cosby and about one of the writers at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates I believe is his name, on pitching that hissy fit that you just mentioned about the behavior of Bill Cosby. I think the number is 13 now, actually, 13 women that are accusing him of, as you called, this reprobate behavior.

Gutzman: That puts him right in the Clinton ballpark.

Mike: I saw an interview with one of the women that was alleging this behavior, and she didn’t really say anything other than that she fell asleep with him in her company and when she awakened her pajamas were not properly installed, or she wasn’t wearing them the same way she was when she went to sleep. That was the extent of the accusation. I’m going: Have you read what some of these women alleged that Clinton did? I did. I read Kathleen Willey’s book. This came out back in 2002, 2003 or so. As I was reading it, I’m thinking to myself: My goodness, not only was he doing it, he had to schedule it around his other official business.

Gutzman: You may recall that he didn’t actually schedule it around his official business. In fact, there was one infamous case in which he was getting the Lewinsky treatment while he had a House Committee chairman on the phone. He was talking to the guy on the phone while this woman, whose name he did not yet know because — people may not remember this, but he only learned Monica Lewinsky’s name the sixth time. The two of them were engaged in their habitual activity in the oval office, and he had a House Democratic Committee chairman on the phone with him and was talking to the guy.

Mike: Heroic.

Gutzman: The bottom line is, all the media, PBS, all the mainstream television networks, make Bill Clinton into a gigantic hero. This guy is just fabulous.

Mike: Just one more point on our vaunted, as you say Gruber voter media. Maybe it’s now just the Gruber media. We don’t need to call them voters. This is the same media that also threw major conniption fits, ostracized and assisted in the removal of Brendan Eich as the CEO of the company that he helped found, Mozilla. What was Mr. Eich’s offense? He didn’t chase any interns around a library at Mozilla or anything of that sort. He gave $2,800 to a PAC that assisted in getting Proposition 8 passed in California, defining marriage as being between one man and one woman. But Brendan Eich was a pariah. This was the most untoward moral person in the history of earth. Of course he deserved to be thrown out at Mozilla. Why? For what reason?

Gutzman: You and I have actually talked on previous occasions about the really, I thought, disturbing idea that highly-educated people in the Democratic Party, like Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin and so on, believed in the complete and utter economic quackery that comes out of the Democratic Party. I said to you: I suppose it’s possible that all these people believe in this, again, the idea, for example, that raising minimum wage doesn’t cause more unemployment, or another way of putting it is demand curves don’t slope downward, which is, of course, the second lesson you learn in your Intro to Economics class. It turns out, thanks to Mr. Gruber, we now know that these people aren’t that stupid. They’re just a gigantic pack of liars, all of them. All of them know that the things they say about economics are not true, and they intentionally manipulate the uninformed among us.

For example, you can look at my state of Connecticut, which is one of the deepest blue states in the country. Every time we have a statewide election, the results are the same, that is the Democratic Party wins almost unanimously in the most economically-disadvantaged, educationally-backward precincts in the state, and that overwhelms the rational voting pattern of the rest of us. In other words, this is Gruber’s kingdom I live in. Unfortunately, it seems that the Gruber impulse is a very powerful impulse in our country. The really unfortunate thing about it is that people like Gruber and Clinton and open, notorious, wanton liars are perfectly accepted by the media and by the avatars or elite opinion.

The fact that they are manipulating people, it gets back to that Eich guy you were talking about earlier. In 1986, as soon as Bowers v. Hardwick was decided, legal academia responded very negatively, in other words, that was the case in which the court said: We don’t necessarily like it, but Texas has a right to have an anti-sodomy statute if it wants to. Legal academia came out against it. Next thing you know, people were saying, in legal academia and in the Democratic Party, that you have a right to sodomy. Of course, this was completely unfounded in any history of any legal provision in Anglo-American law, including, of course, everything in our Constitution. It was totally inconsistent with that. But the Gruber voters apparently were persuaded: You actually have a right to this and it’s been a right that you’ve had for hundreds of years, blah, blah, blah.

The bottom line is, as we hope — because the alternative was that they’re all a bunch of morons — really the people who run the Democratic Party are just liars and know that there’s a certain large segment of the population that will buy anything they say. And almost any noxious policy nostrum of the Democratic Party is inconsistent with history, inconsistent with the most basic economic facts, and yet bought by these ignorant people who are Professor Gruber’s target audience.

Mike: I would just put a coda on the end of that. There is also a significant constituency of Republican Gruber voters that are also prone to believing the most ridiculous, ahistorical things when it comes to foreign policy.

End Mike Church Show Transcript