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The Electoral College: A Safeguard Against Tyranny with Michael C. Maibach · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Today I'm your host, roger Ream.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Today we welcome Michael C Maybach, the founder and director of the Center for the Electoral College.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: He is also the current Distinguished Fellow at Save Our States, an organization dedicated to defending the Electoral College.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Michael has held several positions in civic engagement and global business diplomacy, including a decade-long role as the president of the European American Business Council.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: He also serves on the board for multiple nonprofit organizations, including the Witherspoon Institute Institute of World Politics and the James Wilson Institute.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: Prior to this, michael spent 18 years at Intel, where he established their government affairs department and became their first vice president of global governmental affairs.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Michael is a supporter of TFAS and speaks frequently at our student programs.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Michael Maybach, welcome to the show.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Thank you, roger.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Delighted to be here.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: We scheduled this conversation, I think, in October, partly because I feared the worst with the upcoming November presidential election and that being a disputed outcome that would be dragging on into December, even January, before we know who won.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Well, that didn't come to pass, but as we record this podcast, it appears the victor of the Electoral College vote will also be the one who won the popular vote.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: But even today, some two weeks after the election, there are states like California that are still counting the vote.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: I assume if it were not for the Electoral College, the outcome of the election two weeks ago might still be in doubt.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: Is that correct?
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: Well, the states that are counting their votes have already called the winner for the presidential.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: It's the congressional and local races that are closer that are being counted, except in Pennsylvania, where they're recounting only the US Senate.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: So there's no doubt that any of these recounts would affect the presidency at all.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: But it really does speak volumes about the contrast between, let's say, florida, who has their results that night election night because they've had so many reforms since the debacle of 2000 presidential election, and those states that have chosen to, one might say, game their elections with so many artifacts drop boxes, ballot harvesting, voting without ID.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: We have at least 17 states voting without IDs, but the presidential was decided pretty much within 24 hours.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: And that's partly at least, thanks to the Electoral College.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: It is when I give my talks around the country, roger, I actually end.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: I say to my audiences I want to end with a positive note, the sinking of the Titanic.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: And then I show a picture of the Titanic in the four stages of its sinking.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: It took two and a half hours to sink and I asked the audiences remember in the movie when they hit the ice.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: And then the captain has his senior staff around the table life.
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: He lays out the design of the ship and you can see the compartments.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: And he said and of course I show this in my talk on the screen to save money, we did not close each and every compartment, we left them open at the top because the hull was so thick we never thought it'd be pierced.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: And so, gentlemen, in two and a half hours this ship will sink because the water will spill into one and another and another and cause it to break apart, which is exactly what happened in two and a half hours.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: Well, in 2000, when we had the Florida recount, we had 49 states stand back and watch the recount of Florida, because all 50 compartments were sealed.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: And one of the great things about the Electoral College, we have actually 50 Democratic elections and then we aggregate those, we don't have a national popular vote.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: So these recounts really don't impact on the presidential decision, no matter how many millions they could find in California, I guess.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a very good analogy.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: Why don't we start with you commenting on, kind of explaining to us what the origins of the Electoral College were?
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: Because I know it was a result of compromise, like much of what took place during the Constitutional Convention, and there were other things considered even beside the current Electoral College and a national popular vote.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: So if you would talk some about that, Michael, that might set a good foundation for our conversation.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: When I give my talks I begin with Socrates taking the hemlock and his student, plato, witnessed that trial and of course he wrote a book called the Apology, which is the story of the trial and death of Socrates.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: And this was a jury of over 300 citizens who voted by majority vote to kill the old man for asking questions of the youth.
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: Plato writes in the Republic, his most important book, in chapter 8, democracies always become tyrannies.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: And Aristotle, his student, his best student, deals with that and struggles with that, why democracies become tyrannies.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: And in his book, the Politics, he talks about the mixed regime and the Romans picked this up, the checks and balances.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: And in the Roman Republic it was Caesar, the Roman Senate and the assemblies they called them, and they had sort of a rough set of checks and balances.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: Polybius talks about this in his book, book six, as it turns out, and Montesquieu in Spirit of the Laws.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: My point is that the founders studied history and they knew that to be free you had to constantly check human nature, checks and balances, what we would consider triangles of liberty, which is the checks and balances.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: Now, the founders were also children of the age of science.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: Newton was the earlier generation and he had the law of triangles, the second law of triangles, and if you look at a bridge, it's a truss bridge.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: It has a triangle as well.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: It's the strongest geometric figure there is.
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: So the founders had in their mind if we want to be free, we have to write a constitution, just like the Ten Commandments were written.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: They took their cue from the writing of the Ten Commandments.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: We have a written constitution that had built in sort of scientific checks and balances.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: So they had in mind we want a parliament or a Congress, like the British had, and we have to have courts, because there were trade wars between the states and no courts to adjudicate things.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: So the courts, originally federal courts, were there to settle disputes between the states.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: But do we have the Congress elect the president or do we have an independent executive?
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: And Washington never said anything in the floor of the Constitutional Convention, but in the meals, because they met for 116 days on and off in Philadelphia that summer, he would say to them have you ever been on a ship in a storm without a captain?
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: Because for seven years I led the revolution against the British and I had 13 captains under the Articles I didn't have a commander-in-chief and that was a major problem.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: In a major crisis situation, you need to have a captain, we need to have an independent executive, but also to serve with a veto, to check and balance and to appoint the court with the consent.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: So, as we were very familiar today, but this was whole cloth they were designing this thing.
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: So we have the triangles of our federalism the executive, the legislative and the judicial.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: To keep people free.
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: The Bill of Rights doesn't keep us free, it's the checks and balances that do so.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: They asked themselves how are we going to elect that independent president?
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: Is it a vote of all the states?
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: Well then, it would always be a Bostonian, somebody from New York or Philadelphia or maybe Virginia.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: That was the population centers.
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: Most states didn't have a lot of people.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: So you had four highly populated states and nine small ones Not going to have a popular vote.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: If we have the Congress elect the president, like the prime minister is elected in Great Britain, they have a king and we don't, and therefore they have another executive, but we don't and we also don't want the president to be a toady or a servant of the legislature, because then we'll have legislative tyranny.
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: They feared tyranny from all points of the triangle.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: Let's have an independent president?
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: Ah, let's have him elected by states, and therefore we have 13,.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: By states, and therefore we have 13,.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: Now, today, 50 popular elections and we aggregate those into a presidential election.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: And so it's ingenious.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: It really makes sense when you think of what they were trying to do, but it's not easy for citizens to understand, because the electors go away.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: They get elected by their parties.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: They go to the state capitol and they go away.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: You mentioned the concern their parties.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: They go to the state capitol and they go away.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: You mentioned the concern about rural versus urban, that you have these urban centers, you know, and today it's still kind of the East Coast.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: The West Coast and Chicago I guess that have all the population are a good part of it.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: What about the issue of slavery?
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: Was that part of the discussion as well, where you had at the time you had slave states and states that had abolished slavery or were free states?
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: In my talk that I give, I actually, early on, show pictures of rulers around the world.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: There's no democratically elected.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: We had George III, louis XVI, philip in Spain, catherine the Great, the emperors of China and Japan, etc.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: I also show pictures of slave markets around the world because I have to remind my audiences that slavery was in every country in the world, either in the slave trade or having slaves themselves.
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: This goes back to the Old Testament, to earliest times, to Thucydides in the histories, and so by Herodotus, and so we have to understand that they inherited slavery.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: They didn't want it.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: Matter of fact, when Jefferson wrote the Declaration, one of the complaints he wrote about the English, which was cut off in the final version of the Declaration of Independence, was that the British allowed slavery to be brought to North America.
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: So in 1787, they not only were writing the Constitution, but they passed the Northwest Ordinance which outlawed slavery in the new territories, and so they were thinking about we don't want this thing to spread.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: Also, every state was a slave state.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: Every state in 1787 had slaves.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: New York had more than Georgia at the time and therefore slavery was not just a Southern thing.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: Slavery is not mentioned in the Constitution, other than slave trade was outlawed in 20 years and when Jefferson was president he actually signed the law from Congress to outlaw the slave trade.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: So they were trying to stop it from spreading outlawing the slave trade a number of years and the only delegates early on that voted against the Electoral College when it came up were Southern delegates.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: The Constitution is not about slavery.
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: They maneuvered around slavery as a difficulty.
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: They wanted hopefully, the Industrial Revolution to overtake.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: I imagine you're often asked about the fact that you know, particularly in the last 25 years.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: We've had two elections now, I think, where the candidate that won the most votes did not win the electoral college, and so that leads some to say it's anti-democratic which it certainly is in terms of being anti-majoritarian or winner-take-all but how do you respond to those criticisms that the candidate most Americans want to see as president doesn't become the president?
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: This is the central argument of those that want a national popular vote, which is gee, we're a democracy and of course we're not.
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: We're a republic.
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: On three occasions in the 19th century this happened 1824, 1876, 1888.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: And we can talk about those if you want, but those, for different reasons, had different backgrounds to them.
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: 1824, it was Andrew Jackson had the most votes, but he didn't win the majority of votes because there were four people running and he didn't win the Electoral College.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: It was thrown into the House of Representatives, where each state has one vote, and that's how we settled that.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: In 1876, there were federal troops in three southern states, part of Reconstruction, and no one knows who won the election.
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: This is Hayes-Tilsen that election, because those troops were dealing with riots, because whites in the South did not want blacks to vote in their precincts, and a great deal of contested precinct results because of this.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: So finally, the US Congress had a commission to appoint a president, because they didn't know who won the electoral vote or even the popular vote, and so the commission chose.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: It included a Supreme Court justice, chose Hayes to be the Republican president, but he had a promise the Democrats.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: The first thing he would do as commander in chief is remove troops from those three southern states, which he did in.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: That ended Reconstruction and that set the stage, unfortunately, for Jim Crow.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: Because of what happened there In 1888, it was 100,000, 200,000 vote difference Very close, very close election.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: It didn't happen at all in the 20th century.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: We had every president also had the popular vote Jack Kennedy and Nixon.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: It was very close and, depending on what really happened in Chicago, we'll never probably know that, but in the 21st century, the 2000 election, bush had about 250,000 fewer votes, less than 1% of the vote.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: So it was almost a tie in terms of the millions of people that voted and that was decided by the Electoral College.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: I would say parenthetically that Bush won 30 states and Gore won 20.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: So that tells you something about a nation of states.
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: Then it happened again in 2016.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: This is Hillary Clinton versus Trump and in that case she won two and a half million more votes than Trump did.
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: And this really came from California.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: If you remove all the votes Democrat and Republican from California, trump would have won the national popular vote, but California is such a one party state that that really brings on many millions of extra votes, I guess you would say for one party and that's the way it is.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: That said, trump won 30 states and Hillary Clinton won 20 states.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: So if you visit more states and you pay attention to more states, you do get those kind of results.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: This time we had a different result, where Trump won both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote.
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: No one expected him to win the popular vote, but he did, and that showed how deeply people wanted change show how deeply people want to change.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: Would it be fair to speculate that, absent the electoral college, candidates would spend a lot more of their time in just the heavily populated areas and unlikely to visit some of these states that now they do visit?
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: Absolutely 50% of the American people live in nine states.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: To put it another way, los Angeles County has more people than 41 states.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: New York City has more people than 39 states.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: The island of Long Island.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: There is two counties.
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: One is called Nassau County.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: Nassau County, which is half of Long Island, has more people than 10 of our states and it's not part of New York City.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: We would have people running for president just in the population centers and that would be it.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: Now people seem to think that support the national popular vote, that our two-party system would be sustained.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: I think this is folly, true folly.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: We would have a dozen parties.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: We would have billionaires with their own jets running their own campaigns, totally untethered from political parties that we have right now, flying from population to population center running their own PR campaigns, and we would have many parties.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: The average European Union.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: There's 27 countries in the European Union.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: The average EU country has nine parties.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: Nine parties and then they have coalitions that elect their head of government.
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: If America had nine or 12 parties, we'd have a new Speaker of the House every month.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: We've only had one Speaker thrown out of office this past year in our history.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: The stability of our two-party system.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: For a 300 million person republic is highly, highly valuable that we just have two parties and not 20, and just to be able to legislate.
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: There are so many fruits of the electoral college system, but one is the two-party system.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: Now Maine and Nebraska do things a little bit differently.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: Could you explain that and give me your thoughts on that?
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: So Maine and Nebraska disaggregate their electors by congressional districts, and that's quite constitutional.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: The Constitution says the legislature in each state decides how the electors are chosen.
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: All 50 states have popular votes, but in Maine and Nebraska they chose to disaggregate.
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: Why is that?
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: Maine, historically, had been a one-party state and so had Nebraska, and so today, for example, nebraska is a Republican state largely and Maine a Democrat state.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: And yet Trump won one elector from Maine, he won the third congressional district, and Mrs Harris won Omaha, which is a heavily Democratic city.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: And the reason these two states have done this, it seems, is to make sure presidential candidates pay attention to them and not take them for granted.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: Now, every state could do this.
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: They could disaggregate all their electors by county congressional district, by state senate district.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: They can even do it proportionally.
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: You know it's 30% of the vote, you get 30% of our electors.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: If, in 2012, all the states had done what Nebraska and Maine do, romney would have defeated Obama.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: He won many more congressional districts.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: And this is the case in almost every case with the Republicans, because they win so many of the rural counties.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: Trump just won 2,500 counties and Mrs Harris won 500 counties.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: The population centers really are much highly, more one party than the others, it turns out.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: So I guess if you disaggregate and give them out by congressional district, you're tying your electoral votes to the gerrymandering that takes place in these legislatures.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: You know there's nothing perfect, including the Constitution.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: If we would do it that way, then the complaint would be my gosh.
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: We'll have to have courts or some independent commission choose the lines.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: But you know, the congressional districts and legislative districts are left to state legislatures, and so if you want to save democracy, you don't want to remove the power of districting, and they're always going to be political.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: Everything in politics is political by its nature, right?
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there is an effort underway by, I guess mostly driven by forces who are opposed to our electoral college, to form some sort of national compact that would award a state's electoral votes based on the national popular vote.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: What do you think about that?
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: So there were some people in California unhappy that Gore was not elected and they asked a couple of professors to come up with a plan.
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: They did, called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: It was launched in 2006.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: And the idea is, if state legislators pass this compact, they reach 270 electors.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: In the compact it goes into effect the night of a presidential election.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: Talk about organized chaos.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: There you would have it.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: 17 state legislatures have now passed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: They have 209 electors.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: They need 61 more to have 270.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: All 17 of those states and the District of Columbia are all led by one party, with the House, the Senate and the governor.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: It has never passed without the House, the Senate and the governor.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: All being the same party Happens to be a Democratic party.
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: My job is not to be partisan, but this is the fact.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: This is a product of the Democratic party is to try to go around the electoral college system.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: Now it's unconstitutional to have such a compact.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: We have the Compact Clause of the Constitution because the small states in Philadelphia in 1787 wanted to make sure the large states didn't coalesce against them and therefore you have to go to the Congress to get such a compact approved, but they will never bring this to the Congress because the US Senate, you know, two senators per state they're not going to go along with this.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: The whole idea of having two senators per state is to balance the majority with minority voices across the population of our country.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: So the National Popular Vote Compact sits there with 209 electors.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: They're running out of all blue states.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: Michigan was ready to pass it.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: It seemed right after the election if Mr Trump had lost the popular vote, but they killed their legislation NPV legislation because he won the popular vote, including he won in Michigan, and that was a message to the legislature we're voting for Mr Trump, don't mess with this result.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: Are there any changes or tinkering that you would do in terms of the way we elect presidents or the electoral college, or is it pretty sound?
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: Do you think the way it is?
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: Whenever somebody complains to me, they usually have two complaints.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: One is the national popular vote they would like to have, but also the winner-take-all system.
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: We have 48 states who use winner-take-all and what they say is gee, all those Republicans in California, their vote doesn't count because California has many more Democrats, and in Texas, all those Democrats, their votes don't count because the Republicans in Texas.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: And so what I say to them is if you really want to parse that out, go to Sacramento or to Austin and ask the legislature and the governor to reallocate your electors by congressional districts, like they do in Nebraska and Maine, and then you'll have all kinds of disaggregation of electors.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: You know, in 2016, when Mr Trump lost to Mrs Clinton in Illinois I'm a native of Illinois, we have 102 counties in Illinois Mrs Clinton won 12 counties.
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: Trump won 90 counties in Illinois and she got all of their electors 100% because she won the Chicago and the Collier counties up there in Chicago.
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: But if we had done the Maine and Nebraska system in Illinois, trump would have won a handful of electors from downstate Illinois and the same with Democrats in Texas.
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: So there is a way to solve that complaint and that is to do what Maine and Nebraska do, and it's quite constitutional.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: Michael, what motivated you to get engaged in this, to found your organization and to work to preserve this institution, that electoral college?
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: Well, my first semester of college I had a professor named Herbert Storing from the University of Chicago and I took his class because somebody recommended I would take his class and somebody in the dorm.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: I'd never been to college before.
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: Of course I didn't know anything about Herbert Storing or Leo Strauss.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: He was a student of Leo Strauss.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: But our first paper we had to write was for or against the Electoral College.
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: And all 12 of us told him we were going to write our paper against the Electoral College and he set aside the readings in the library.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: In those days there were no internet.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: So the readings were set aside and I sat there for a few days and I read all these for and against arguments for the Electoral College and I said, oh my God, I've got to change my mind.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: You know Walter Burns and Hamilton, all the rest.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: For the first time in my life I was 18 years old I read something that had me fundamentally changed how I understood the Constitution and our country and the Electoral College.
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: So I wrote my paper for the Electoral College, the only one that did.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: Young people don't like the Electoral College because they're for democracy until they understand that democracy is problematic.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: So since then I've published 14 essays, so it's been sort of a hobby of mine throughout my 40-year business career.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: And then when I got out of business I found out about the National Popular Vote Compact and I decided that I needed to dedicate some of my time and effort to defending the electoral college system.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, wonderful, and I appreciate the reference to Professor Walter Burns, the late Professor Walter Burns.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: He was on our faculty for the program we started in Prague in 1993 for the first four or five years and what a brilliant man and a great defender of the Electoral College and so knowledgeable about the Federalist Papers.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: And I know you came to Prague as well, I think, and lectured back then.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: I wish you were still here today.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: Came to Prague as well, I think, and lectured back then.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: I wish you were still here today.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: Now are you finding lots of opportunities to go out and talk about it and finding a receptiveness?
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: from the audiences you are with.
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: Well, I ask people do you believe in free speech?
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: And they say yes, I said good, because I have a free speech for you and I've spoken at about 140 places the last two years in 22 states universities, high schools, rotary clubs, civic groups, political groups, Republican clubs, for example.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: The challenge I have is I'm not famous.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: Ok, famous people are former US senators.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: People want to speak because of them.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: So when people are invited to my speeches, they come for the topic, not for me.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: That's really.
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: People are invited to my speeches, they come for the topic, not for me.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: That's really.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: And the way I get referrals is people in my audience will then tell their friends or tell other groups they belong to, and I meet people like you and others that I offer speeches to, so they can send me a note on LinkedIn or wherever they want and we can arrange a speech.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, or get in touch with us at TFAS and I'll put them in touch with you, and hopefully this conversation today will generate some more interest in speaking engagements.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: Tell me a little more, too, about you've been very involved with the James Wilson Institute, an organization that's dedicated to teaching law based on James Wilson and the founding fathers, and I think Wilson had a key role in the decision to have an electoral college, if my history serves me right.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: But what does the Institute do to keep his legacy alive?
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: So James Wilson Institute was started by Professor Hadley Arcus, teacher of politics, political philosophy.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: As he looked upon the landscape of our jurisprudence judges, lawyers, appellate courts, decisions, etc.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: He saw that our law schools in America these days seem to only teach two views of our law.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: And of course our law is very important to us in America.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: We're a nation of laws and what we found is there was originalism being taught, or textualism things.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: Just read the words of the constitution, read the words of laws, what we call originalism.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: The other thing being taught was progressive idea.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: Carl Llewellyn and others written about this, called the living constitution, which is the constitution is 238 years old.
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: A bunch of slaveholders wrote it.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: There's nothing to be learned.
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: And then you know, today we're very different, we're better, and let's make up law, if you will, rather than follow the law.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: But there's a third aspect to law and that is that we had our rights before we had our Constitution and the people that wrote our Constitution already had in view what law was and what legal obligations were about.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: We call that natural law.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: Locke wrote about it and Jefferson wrote about it, which is we're endowed by our Creator with our rights, the reason we have on our currency in God we trust.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: The rest of the sentence is and not the king.
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: In God we trust, and not the king.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: We have to understand that the government doesn't give us our rights.
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: When people say that America is exceptional, remember when Mr Obama was asked well, what do you think about American exceptionalism?
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: And Mr Obama said well, gee, I think every country thinks they're exceptional.
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: This really missed, respectfully everything, because I've been to 68 countries.
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: I have never been to a country whose people and government believe that they're endowed by their creator with the rights Everybody else says.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: They're endowed by their parliament, their king, their tyrant if you're in China, mr Xi, or whoever it is.
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: So what we try to do is offer seminars for judges and lawyers and law students and judicial clerks, seminars on natural law, of how to think about judicial decisions and the logic and arguing of them from a natural law perspective.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: A few months ago, my guest on the Liberty and Leadership podcast was Randy Barnett, who you probably know very well.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: But Randy has said in his lectures to our law students something that stuck with me, which is that our Constitution is the document that governs those who govern us.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: It doesn't govern us, the citizens, it governs those who govern us.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: In fact, he adds, the only people that take an oath to uphold the Constitution are officers of the government.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: People, when they join the military, take that oath.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: Senators, congressmen, supreme Court justices, the president.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: They take an oath to uphold the Constitution and it governs them.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: And I think that's the point you know you were making so well in our conversation about the fact that our freedom comes from God, and it's the checks and balances, the triangles of the Constitution that try to prevent that encroachment from government that you see in every virtually all countries of the world, including our own.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: The anti-federalists, which included George Mason from Virginia and others, patrick Henry.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: Their complaint in the main was two things.
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: One, they didn't want to have a king.
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: They were worried about president becoming a king.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: But they also said there's no Bill of Rights to which Hamilton writes in Federalist 84, in all capital letters, the only time he ever did that.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: The entire Constitution is a Bill of Rights.
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: He was saying exactly what you just said.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: The Constitution was meant to restrict, restrict the power of government, to keep people free.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: That's what we try to do in James Wilson is to talk about exactly this natural law and how it informs the writers of the Constitution.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: Well, the last thing I'll ask if you have thoughts on it, michael, would be.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: You know, it seems like one of the bigger problems we have, especially with the structure of our system, and particularly in recent years, is that we're, in a sense, seems to be creating an imperial presidency that Congress all too often defers to the president.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: As long as it's someone in their party who's in the White House, they'll let the president do whatever he wants, and then it flips and no Congress seems to want to take back the power it has under our Constitution.
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, article 1 is the Congress right, and yet so much of what they've allowed to have happen allowed to have happen is the administrative agencies make the tough decisions and they ran for re-election.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: And it's unfortunately turned the Congress into a bit of a debating society rather than a lawmaking society.
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: And good news is we had the recent Supreme Court decision on Chevron deference if some of your listeners know what I'm talking about wherein there's much less leeway for administrative agencies like EPA but others to make laws, and even laws that are punishable by imprisonment and fines.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: My gosh, nobody should be convicted of something that the Congress didn't pass as a law.
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: So we have to have the first Article 1 body, the Congress, take back their powers and there's things they ought to do about it.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: They probably ought to have a special committee of the Congress, maybe a joint committee.
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: They have a joint committee on the budget and taxation, a joint committee on regulatory oversight, which says every new regulation by any agency comes to our committee and if we don't vote it out, it isn't a regulation and let's just bring that back to the Congress in some way.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for joining me today.
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: I think the work you're doing on the Electoral College and even broader than that, michael is so vital.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: There really weren't many voices educating people about the importance that the Electoral College serves in our system and how it not only protects us from, you know, tyranny, but it creates an election system that seems to work so much better and come up with a winner after an election, in most cases very quickly, and adjudicate that whole process.
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: So I applaud you for the work you're doing.
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: Appreciate all you do at Fund for American Studies.
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: I'm a supporter of Funds for American Studies financially and I recommend that to all of my friends.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: Thank you, michael.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: It's a pleasure.
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership podcast.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfasorg, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, roger Ream, and until next time show courage in things, large and small.