Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion “Trashing the Constitution,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Paul Erickson: Cinderella, Superman and Pinocchio were walking through the woods one day when they came upon a sign advertising a beauty contest. Cinderella smiled at her two companions and said, “I’ve got this.” She comes back an hour later with a trophy. They continue on their journey until they see another sign, this one advertising a competition for the world’s strongest man. Superman puffs out his chest, says, “I’ll be right back,” and about an hour later he comes back with a trophy. Finally, just before sunset, the trio spies a final sign calling for a contest to find the world’s greatest liar. Pinocchio scratches his nose and says, “No problem,” but an hour later he returns in tears with no trophy. He manages only to blurt out, “Who is Barack Obama?” When Pinocchio finally composes himself, his unbelieving companions ask how he possibly lost. Pinocchio said, “I was in first place and then Barack Obama said, ‘I’m a constitutional scholar.’”
And so we find ourselves in 2014, gathered to discuss the trashing of the American Constitution. My name is Paul Erickson. I’ve been a part of the vast right-wing conspiracy since 1980 when I cast my first vote for President and for Ronald Reagan, and then serving eventually in his first administration. Today’s topic has been one of the three animating issues of my avocation in politics since the days of my senior year at Yale when the Algonquin Round Table of my Yale political union party of the right stalwarts first formed the Federalist Society and I was privileged to take Nino Scalia’s final seminar at the University of Virginia School of Law before his elevation to the federal bench and his eventual donning of the black robes of justice. But with us today are some very special individuals whose expertise makes me happier than President Obama with an open border. I’ll introduce each of the experts in turn as they speak with plenty of time for your questions and a timely lunch.
Sean Noble is the founder of DC London, a one-stop shop for expert political messaging and campaign services. Most of us first met Sean during his tenure as Arizona Congressman John Shadegg’s chief of staff. His smiling, vicious campaign expertise has earned him the sobriquet “el sol diablo” from Arizona Democrats, many of whom speak English. Sean has five children and is a Los Angeles Dodgers fan, but unlike Clayton Kershaw, his children have never let him down in the World Series. His last thought of the day on his blog before he was swept up in the 2014 mid-term election analysis was a timeless quote by Margaret Thatcher. “You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.” I’m happy to have him charging the breach once again today. Sean Noble.
Sean Noble: Thank you, Paul. Well, it’s an honor to be here today and to be at this conference. This has been a wonderful experience. I was completely motivated by Dennis Prager last night. I thought he spoke real truth to power. We are at a very interesting point in American history, and it’s something that’s kind of evolved over the last few years as Barack Obama’s been in the White House, and that is that we have seen the absolute destruction of not only the hope of what the American dream is, but the actual expectation that people have about what America is and what Americans should believe in, and it’s one of those things that is why the First Amendment is so important, because we have to have a vigorous debate about what it means to be an American, what it means to believe in policy, to fight against policy, those kind of things, and yet in Barack Obama we have someone who is actually wanting to erase the First Amendment, and that is to squelch speech of anyone who wants to be critical of him. A few months ago my organization, American Encore, put together an ad that we ran nationally online, and whoever’s running the AV, if you could run that ad.
Ad Audio: Where would America be without free speech? We haven’t always agreed with what’s said, but until now we’ve always agreed on each other’s right to say it. The Obama administration recently proposed new rules at the IRS to control the speech of certain nonprofits, to legalize the IRS’s inappropriate targeting of conservative groups. Now the right to free speech is dependent upon who is speaking, and it’s up to the IRS to make that call. The Obama administration is proposing new tax rules, unfairly scrutinizing nonprofits, another line of attack against these groups. The American Civil Liberties Union says the proposed rule threatens to discourage or sterilize an enormous amount of political discourse in America. Tell President Obama don’t use the IRS to kill free speech.
Sean Noble: So what the IRS proposed was pretty egregious, and Cleta is actually going to talk a little bit more about that. I’m going to leave that to her, because she’s the actual expert on that front, but needless to say, the IRS is one of the most feared agencies of the federal government, obviously, and what’s particularly egregious about what they were doing is the fact that they were targeting not just organizations, which Cleta will talk about, but targeting individuals. Obama had a hit list of folks in the White House in which they were actually breaking the law and getting the individual tax returns of individual Americans and businesses and then leaking that kind of thing to the press. There were five nonprofit organizations that the IRS illegally provided confidential information to a supposed newspaper outfit. It’s really a leftist organization.
One of those groups was Americans for Responsible Leadership, which is an organization that I put together and had been targeted for some activity in a ballot proposition in California, so we had a situation where the IRS was targeting individuals and organizations and then we had a state agency in California at the behest of Jerry Brown, who was the governor at the time and wanting to expose what was going on with a donation that came from Americans for Responsible Leadership to a ballot initiative fighting a tax increase that Jerry Brown wanted, and in California there’s an agency called the Fair Political Practices Commission. Now it’s fair, they call it “Fair Political Practices,” as long as it’s liberal political practices. If it’s not then it’s clearly not fair, and what they did is they specifically targeted the chairman of the commission. It was a woman named Ann Ravel, and here you had a situation in which this organization decided they wanted to expose who was behind this contribution because they don’t believe in anonymous free speech, and they went to great lengths. They couldn’t under the law actually find that information out because it’s not allowed, so what they did is they made up a law in the sense that they said we’re going to audit a report.
Now, it’s kind of complicated, but under the California Statute if you give a big political donation in a ballot initiative and you’re an organization, then you’re required to, the next January, file a report that says we did this. Well, they wanted to audit a report that had not yet been filed, so that’s the authority they asserted, that they’re using their audit authority of a report that hadn’t been filed, and they took that all the way to the State Supreme Court, and on Sunday night before the election at 11:00 at night California time, the State Supreme Court voted unanimously 7 to 0 to allow the commission to force that disclosure from these organizations, which is just a complete overreach. Now, the reason we know it’s an overreach is because the next year they went to the legislature and they actually passed a statute to give them the authority that they had asserted the previous year.
Now, Ann Ravel was then, this last year, has been put on the FEC, the Federal Elections Commission by President Obama. That was the thank you to trying to expose these anonymous contributions and target those who would speak, and what was among the first things she did after she got to the FEC? She’s proposing a rule, and she’s starting hearings in which she says that if you are a blogger and you talk about politics or you talk about campaigns then you need to be regulated by the Federal Elections Commission. Think about the chilling effect that that would have on speech. Not only is it so anyone who does opinion writing on a web site, who has a blog, frankly, the next step would be their Facebook pages. Now we’re talking about individual Americans who would be targeted by a federal government agency and told what you can and cannot say, and when you can and cannot say it, and how much of it you can say.
That is the reason that we have to be stalwart in our defense of the First Amendment. Because ultimately the biggest challenge we have is that the enemies of ours on the First Amendment are the press and liberal Democrats and left. The press because their influence over the American people has been waning for years and years. Newspapers are not nearly as influential as they used to be, and now an organization can be involved in the process and have just as much influence or more than the local newspaper. They don’t like that. Their power has been taken away, and secondly, the unions. We hear all this stuff about “dark money.” The left has been involved in this stuff since the 1940s with labor unions, and it wasn’t until labor unions’ influence started to wane, along with the newspapers and the media influence started to wane, that the left woke up and said wait, we’re losing control of the message, of the narrative. We can’t have a level playing field because when conservatives have a level playing field with us, they’re going to win because our messages resonate with the American people, and so that’s why we’ve seen such an assault on the First Amendment, and in my mind it’s just so ironic that it’s the press that is leading the assault on the First Amendment, and they are protected, so you notice when Harry Reid put through the Senate a constitutional amendment to essentially regulate the First Amendment that – all the amendment language by Senator Udall from New Mexico is there – and at the very end of it, none of this amendment applies to the press, the way they define it. They would not define bloggers as the press, which is the problem, so that’s why they have the FEC targeting these things.
So I would ask that you stay totally up on this. Watch Ann Ravel at the FEC. She’s a very scary person and doing the bidding of the left, and our hope is that we can expose them for what they’re trying to do and make sure we continue to have a robust debate in America under the First Amendment. Thank you.
Paul Erickson: Thank you. Charles Johnson is a writer and a thinker, not always the same thing. You’ve recognized his words from coast to coast, from the Los Angeles Times to the Wall Street Journal. His thinking has been recognized as the recipient of both the Robert Bartley Fellowship and Eric Breindel Award at the Wall Street Journal as well as being named to the Publius Fellowship at the Claremont Institute. He earned his credentials in the vast right-wing conspiracy when he was named a junior prince of darkness at the Phillips Foundation. We know that as the Robert Novak Award. He’s most recently authored “Why Coolidge Matters,” and he’s here today to remind us why the Constitution still matters. Charles Johnson.
Charles Johnson: Hello. So I’m actually probably the most optimistic on this panel, probably because I’ve seen that Barack Obama can be beaten and even humiliated, and so what I kind of want to think about, and forgive me, I’ve been very busy over the last few months electing a lot of Republicans, and what we’ve been doing is kind of thinking a lot about why it is that President Obama was elected in the first place, and I want to tell just a quick story. In 2004 I went to the Democratic Convention in Boston, where I’m from. My parents got tickets. Our shop was closed down because it was right near where the convention was being held, and so I decided to go and have a look for myself, and what was remarkable there was how quickly people glommed onto this freshman senator who had no experience, and every time you’d ask them, “Why are you guys big fans of Barack Obama?” they would recite his story. They would say he’s black. They would make a big deal about this, and it occurred to me, when I worked with Andrew Breitbart and many others in the vast right-wing conspiracy, the not-so-vast right-wing conspiracy, that he really wasn’t vetted and what we did is we expected the press to really do the job for us, and it really didn’t happen, and so what I’ve kind of taken as my kind of life mission is hunting Democrats and RINOs for sport, and business is very, very good, especially after this last election, but I would caution you, just because we’ve elected a Republican Senate does not necessarily mean that we’ve elected a conservative Senate and that’s something very important to kind of keep in mind.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, I got my start with Andrew Breitbart, and he really had this idea about vetting the President, and really focusing on him, and so I’d find all sorts of things that were damaging to him and to the First Lady. I found some stuff surrounding Barack Obama’s life in Indonesia as well as in Hawaii as well as in Chicago, and really it’s become clear to me that what we need to do on kind of the conservative right is start to vet these candidates very seriously, and that’s what we did this last election cycle.
One of the projects I worked on most recently was with Michelle Nunn in Georgia. Now, Nunn is an extreme liberal Democrat, and she was kind of coasting on this moderate reputation. Well, what we did is we took apart her entire life story and we went through every single chapter of it and found out that she had been in favor of bringing lots of immigrant children into the United States. We took that piece of the puzzle and made sure that everyone saw it in sort of rural Georgia, and we also kind of looked into her past when she was hitting her opponent for outsourcing, and what we found is that her ancestors owned slaves. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Lots of people in Georgia owned slaves. What’s the big deal? But a lot of people in black talk radio really don’t like it that her family owned slaves, and so we made sure that they all saw that, so they weren’t enthusiastic to vote for her. And these are the kind of things that we need to be thinking much more strategically about.
It’s my contention that we can defeat the liberal media. We can actually replace it in many respects. I was one of the first journalists to publish the name of Nina Pham, who’s this woman who had Ebola. I had it 12 hours before NBC. The liberal media was basically stopping that from getting out to the public because they realized that if there was a face behind this Ebola stuff it would be bad for them politically. The media would sort of be forced to cover it, and I was talking to journalists in Texas and they were basically suppressing this information, and my attitude is what’s the worst that can happen? And I published her name on my site, got a million page views in under a day, and what ended up happening next was really remarkable. I had all these journalists criticizing me for providing information, and some of them even filed complaints about me violating HIPAA with Twitter, and so they kicked me off Twitter, and so I had to go to Twitter court to get reinstated.
But it’s my contention that right now we’re at a very, very good point. I’ve been part of the team that’s been publishing these Gruber videos. [Applause.] Thank you. If you had told me a week ago that Gruber would be trending on Twitter, this obscure policy analyst, I would have thought you were insane, and it’s kind of amazing that all this type of nerd research has paid off in quite amazing fashion, but there are people who are now publishing videos on Gruber that, when I started with Rich Weinstein in July, we had sort of a strategy of how to get this video out to the country, and I’ve been very excited to see kind of what’s happened there.
But I would say that the best thing we can do with Barack Obama is really realize that he is a lame duck, but he also has the executive orders, and so what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to shape events around him and run out the clock, and I think it can be done if only we start actually publishing material and really be aggressive towards every step of what he’s trying to achieve, and I think one of the kind of complaints that I had with a lot of conservatives is they spend a lot of time complaining about the liberal media, but I think that what we really need to start focusing on is replacing it and having it lose market share, and in particular, as we kind of start with Hillary Clinton, she has some of the highest negatives of anyone who’s ever run for President, and we should be exploiting this constantly and mercilessly, but we should also be strategic about it. The Washington Free Beacon has published a lot of material surrounding Hillary Clinton. I think it’s a mistake to release all of it right now, that we should basically have a strategy going, like with the Gruber tapes where we released the material in staggered stages, and I’m working on kind of the Hillary bomb right now that I think will be quite helpful.
But I want to say just very briefly, I think we can actually win the narrative, and one of the things I’ve learned from Andrew Breitbart is that if you frame news in the right context, in a pro-America, pro-citizen context, you can really change the debate. We shifted the debate from talking about all these children who were sent here to dealing with the national health concerns of all these people coming with Ebola and really we’re winning the arguments among the American people, and I think there’s all this question about how can the Republican Party reach out to Hispanics, reach out to immigrants, but if you really think about last Tuesday’s election returns the Democrats have a serious problem with America. They lost something like 22 percent of the white vote. This is not a majority coalition thing, so I think, going back to thinking about the 2004 when Barack Obama came, really the dream, or the nightmare, that was Barack Obama is coming to an end, and in fact he is the exception to the rule, and I think it’s only a matter of time before we can kind of defeat him, and I think it’s much more important right now to defeat Obama-ism than to defeat Obama, because we need to stop them from kind of doing this kind of strategy in the future with other candidates and so we need to be proactive about neutralizing those kind of candidates now. So with that, I’ll hear some of your questions.
Paul Erickson: Andrew McCarthy graduated from New York Law School and taught at both his alma mater and at Fordham University Law School. He’s a contributing editor at National Review. He’s the author of both “Willful Blindness, a Memoir of Jihad” and “The Grand Jihad, How Islam and the Left Sabotaged America,” detailed accounts of the campaign the Middle East Quarterly describes as an attempt to insinuate Islamic Sharia law into the fabric of American society. The books are almost prosecutorial in tone, which would be appropriate since Andrew was the chief assistant U.S. attorney in New York who led the successful prosecution against Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheikh who’s behind bars because of Andrew. What have you done in the war against terrorism today? What many people do not know is that his investigations of President Obama led to discovery that Michelle Obama is a virgin. Much like his war on terror, every night President Obama sits on the edge of Michelle’s bed and describes in vivid detail everything he’s about to do, and then nothing happens. To tell us what we should be doing, Andrew McCarthy.
Andrew McCarthy: And here I thought we spent all weekend talking about executive action. Well, so you’ve heard from the most optimistic person on the panel, so I guess I’d be the most pessimistic person on the panel, but that probably comes with the territory of writing a book about executive lawlessness in the Obama administration. The day my book, which is called “Faithless Execution: Building a Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment,” the day that the book came out there was an announcement that Obama had released five Taliban commanders in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl, who turns out to be a deserter, and what dawned on me at that point was the problem for a writer writing a book about executive lawlessness in the Obama administration is that at a certain point in time the writer has to stop writing so they can bind the book and get it to the stores and sell it. The Obama administration goes merrily along, so I guess it was only natural that by the time the book came out I was four or five impeachable offenses behind, and that unfortunately is a pattern that has only picked up pace over time.
Now, what I get all the time about this is look, it’s politically impossible to impeach Obama, so why even talk about it? And there’s a few answers to that, but I think the most important one is Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism really, famously said that the power of bad men is no indifferent thing, and Edmund Burke obviously didn’t know Barack Obama, but I think he had Barack Obama in mind, and I know the framers had Barack Obama in mind because one of the things that they spent the most time about in their deliberations was how to rein in the dangerous potentials of the presidency that they were creating, which was quite intentionally created as an awesome source of power because it’s in the presidency that we basically have most of the national security responsibility of the United States. The problem of course is if you’re going to create an office that is that powerful, anything that powerful has the potential to be very destructive, so they wanted to make sure that they could rein in the power of the presidency if it ever fell into the hands of somebody who was not only corrupt but potentially incompetent or who at the very least had a different idea of what the government should look like than the constitutional framework that the framers gave us.
So here’s the thing. They came up with dispositive powerful checks on the presidency, and there’s primarily two of them in the hands of Congress. I mean, they hope that the best check on the presidency would be the ballot box. Right? They assumed that if somebody was, or had demonstrated himself during his candidacy to be corrupt, incompetent or power hungry that the public wouldn’t elect such a person, and certainly wouldn’t reelect such a person, so I guess maybe they had higher hopes for what the American people would end up to be than has proven to be the case, but they did come up with two checks for Congress. One of them, and the one that they expected was going to be used the most, was the power of the purse. To the extent that the President needs resources to carry out schemes that contravene the Constitution, that funds, those resources have to come from Congress, so the thought was that Congress would be able to check the President by basically pulling back the purse strings. The problem with that is, and we’re seeing this with immigration, for example. We’ve heard any number of times all weekend long people talk about the President’s lawless executive amnesty plan. Well, it’s lawless all right, but there are vast components of it that the President can actually implement without violating the law. For example, the President can pardon every crime committed against federal law in the United States. He could pardon tomorrow every crime committed by an illegal alien in the United States, and even classes of people outside the United States who violated federal law, and talk about resources. You know he talks about he has his pen and his phone? He doesn’t even need his phone for that. He just needs the stroke of a pen.
The point is, there’s certain things that a President can do because the office is so powerful that even the power of the purse is not a check for. The only other check that the system provides is impeachment. Now, we hear impeachment and we think, oh, well, it’s inconceivable, and certainly the Republican establishment has taken the position since the Clinton days that, oh, that impeachment thing was a debacle and we never want to talk about it again. The “i-word” is not to be mentioned on Capitol Hill. We had the crazy specter about a year go where they had a hearing in the House about executive lawlessness, and you had a bunch of liberal law professors explaining to members of Congress that one of the major checks on lawlessness in the Constitution is impeachment. Professor John Turley, who is a self-described left-winger called Obama’s manner of governance the most profound constitutional crisis that had arisen in his lifetime, and he lived through Nixon. Right? So you had these law professors saying impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, and you had these congressmen kind of ducking under their desks at the very mention of the word, saying to these professors, look, that’s a word we don’t say up here.
It’s a word that the framers not only said in the Constitution but that Madison described as indispensable. He thought that without impeachment it would be impossible to rein in what they called the maladministration of the executive branch, whether it was corruption, incompetence or what have you, and they put impeachment in very intentionally as the ultimate decisive check on that kind of behavior, and the reason it’s important to talk about it is because it’s the only check if you decide that you’re not going to impeach the President and you decide that we are going to take this off the table and never even discuss it, that’s fine. That’s a political choice that you can make, but when you make it – and this is the reason I wrote the book. I want people to have their eyes open about this. If you make that choice, you must make it mindful of the fact that there are certain abuses of presidential power that only impeachment can check, and if you deprive yourself of your only arsenal for combatting those abuses of power, you are going to get those abuses of power.
Now, why is this so important? And I’ll leave it with this. There have been checks on President Obama’s abuses of power over the last six years because there have been elections to worry about, his own elections as well as congressional elections, and don’t think public pressure doesn’t work. Don’t think political pressure doesn’t work. Remember when Obama just came to the presidency and the Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House. What was one of the first things they wanted to do? They wanted to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan civilian court, the place where I used to work. They weren’t able to do it, and the reason they weren’t able to do it is even in blue, blue New York the people rose up and protested against it, and that lit a fire under Congress, and Congress lit a fire under the White House, and the White House had to pull back and withdraw from the plan, so they are responsive to political pressure. It’s not easy to do, and it’s certainly not easy to keep up the pressure, but they do respond to it. But look, up until now, President Obama has had mid-terms to worry about twice and his own reelection to worry about once. Now there’s nothing else, so you have somebody who has this vast power, who no longer has the political check of an election coming around the corner, and who has a lot of mischief that he can make over the last two years, and I think we’ve gotten every indication in just the last week that’s exactly the way things are going to go.
So yes, right now there’s no political will to remove President Obama from power, but I think we’re in for a very bad time unless we change that climate, and that doesn’t mean impeaching the President necessarily, but what you have to do, because of the way our system is designed, is go back to a time when impeachment was a credible threat that would bring the President to heel, or at least back him up before he would engage in corrupt or unlawful schemes. If we don’t have that, I’m sorry to say I think we’re in for a very, very bad time the next two years. And on that happy note …
Paul Erickson: Anticipating Andrew’s cheery comments, Matt Drudge this morning on the Drudge report put up a banner headline that said “Impeachment Insurance” under the smiling face of Joe Biden.
Cleta Mitchell is one of the truly indispensable players in the American conservative movement. Last night you heard a list of her many accomplishments. Today I would add only two. I’ve had the high honor of serving with Cleta on the Board of American Conservative Union and watched her expert chairmanship of the American Conservative Union Foundation during a crucial time in that organization’s history. In presidential campaigns and critical causes I have had to evaluate and hire some of the finest election law attorneys in the land. Cleta is simply the finest election law lawyer in America, period. She has been my lawyer. The consigliore of the vast right-wing conspiracy and Freedom Center Annie Taylor Award winner, Cleta Mitchell.
Cleta Mitchell: Well, good morning. Yes, on that cheery note … but I want to talk about three things, but I’ll probably meander and talk about more than that, but I want to focus on three. I want to talk about the IRS, I want to talk about campaign finance and how it works together, and then I want to talk about some of the scariest things that are going on in America today. Those two things, but I’ve been working, I think I said last night, five years ago is when I first started realizing something had changed in the IRS. I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that I think we have not looked at and I really hope that Congress will do, because I think that one of the most frightening things to me is something that Congress has yet to investigate, but I have to believe, and I just know what I know what I know. I used to tell my daughter when she was growing up, particularly when she was a teenager, “I may not know today, I may not know tomorrow, but I will find out,” and interestingly, when I would find out things, she would just go, “Mom, how did you find out?” I say, “I may not know today, I may not know tomorrow, but I will find out,” and I think we will find out, because I absolutely believe that this IRS looks at publicly available campaign finance reports, looks at contributions that people make, and decides who it’s going to subject to IRS personal and business audits based on their political contributions. I think that’s a pretty frightening thing, but I absolutely believe it has happened, and I think that we have to get to the bottom of that.
I absolutely believe the IRS looks at organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, does not have to disclose its donors publicly but guess who it does disclose its donors of $5000.00 or more to? You have to disclose those to the IRS. The IRS uses that information, I believe, to target people for audits and further government inquiry, and I think that there are so many things. Sean made reference to the IRS leaking confidential taxpayer information. I know they’ve done it. They’ve done it to my clients. They’ve done it to other conservative groups. Again, he made reference to the release of confidential tax information of Koch Industries. That’s a criminal offense. There have been no prosecutions, and in fact that’s a 6103 violation. You should really do something with your life when you can start quoting sections of the tax code by number. A 6103 violation is one in which the IRS is prohibited by law for any agency or IRS employee to release confidential taxpayer information, but guess what happens if you believe your confidential taxpayer information has been violated and you ask for information about that? The IRS has turned that on its head and said we can’t tell you that information because whoever did it, whoever did that to you, the perpetrator, is protected by Section 6103 from having their information disclosed to you. Now that is so unbelievably bizarre, but these are things Congress needs at look at and fix. The IRS has failed to answer multiple subpoenas from the House committees. They’ve just disregarded them. They’ve said, subpoena from Congress? So, your point is? And I think that Congress has got to reassert its legislative prerogative.
Let’s not forget, contrary to what Joe Biden said in the vice presidential debate in 2008, Article 1 of the Constitution is the legislative branch. That’s what the founders started with. They started with the people’s representatives. The executive branch is in Article 1, but we’ve let that get completely out of whack, and I think Congress needs to undertake what I call the great unwinding. The great unwinding of a federal government, an administrative regulatory state that was built over a century by people who fundamentally disagree with us, and I think with our founding principles, and that’s what I think we as conservatives need to be talking about. We don’t need new programs. We need to get rid of what’s there, the great unwinding. We have multiple situations where members of the Obama administration have gone before Congress and perjured themselves. Let’s start with the IRS commissioner in March of 2012, who went before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and when asked is there targeting of conservative organizations going on today, and he said no. Well, the last time I checked, lying to Congress is a federal crime. Perjuring yourself before Congress under oath is a federal crime. Just ask Roger Clemens. And I want to know from the new attorney general nominee, and I’m going through and preparing and getting this to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the number of administration officials who have gone before the Congress in the last six years and lied under oath. And they need to be prosecuted. They are criminals.
Sean mentioned the FEC and its proposal to regulate Internet activity. Everybody in this room write this down. FEC.gov. Comments are due by January 15. There is no reason why everybody in this room should not write a paragraph, go online, submit comments. Have ten of your neighbors do it. The last time the FEC started talking about regulating Internet political speech they were inundated with so many thousands of comments they said uncle. We have to do that again. We have to get everybody we can think of, your organizations, your individuals, write FEC.gov. Comments close January 15. Tell them you want to come testify. That’ll scare them to death. If they think they’re gonna have thousands of people wanting to testify, they’ll collapse. January 15. No reason not to do it. Do it. We have to get those comments. We did that with the proposed IRS regulations, the one that Sean talked about, the IRS C4 regulations. More than 160,000 comments we were able to generate saying don’t do this. I mean, there might have been ten that said they were for it. Of course, they were all submitted by people who are close to the New York Times, but they finally withdrew those proposed regulations, but guess what? They’re working on reissuing them next year, so be vigilant.
Campaign finance. I want to talk about that for just a minute. Understand when they say campaign finance reform, here’s what they mean. They say campaign finance reform. They mean shut up conservatives. That’s what that means. Never be misled by what they mean. Here’s what that bill that Sean referred to, the Harry Reid thing. Let me reiterate what he said to you. It was a proposed constitutional amendment to amend the First Amendment. Think about that. This great thing that the left supposedly reveres, crucifixes in urine, protect all that, etc. etc. But they wanted to amend the First Amendment to allow elected politicians to decide what you a can and can’t say. How’s that been working out for conservatives so far? And guess what? Every Democrat in the Senate voted for it. Every one of them, and would you like to know what the political headline said the day after it was defeated, because it didn’t get the necessary two thirds? All the Republicans voted against it. “GOP Kills Campaign Finance Reform”
So that brings me to my third point. Everybody’s got to buy this book. Everybody’s got to read this book. You gotta give it to everybody for Christmas, and you gotta talk about it: “Stonewalled.” It’s just out by Sharyl Attkisson. It’s everything we know, but documented. The lies, the deception, the chilling activity to which she was subjected, to which others have been subjected about the extent to which this government is going to spend our money to lie to us and to keep us under surveillance. I’m going to read you one paragraph because this is a panel about the Constitution. I’m going to sit down. The big chill is on. Now, mind you, her computer was hacked, classified documents were planted on her computer, deep in her computer. Her phones were tapped, etc., etc.
Many sources, she writes, including congressmen, become wary of communicating the ordinary way. One evening I’m talking with a member of Congress on my regular mobile phone about a somewhat sensitive news matter. He’s avoiding giving straight answers. I keep pressing. Finally, sounding exasperated, he blurts out, “Sharyl, your phone’s bugged.” I can’t argue the point. We decide to meet in person and work out alternative ways to communicate. It’s the new reality in a society where journalists and politicians suspect their government is listening in.
Now, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, people, but I am telling you, this is a lawless administration. There are not enough hours in today’s program to go through all the ways that this government, under this administration, is violating the statutes and the Constitution, and we have to do everything we can do to keep them from continuing and being successful, and that’s what we’re about to do. Thank you.
Q&A
Audience Member: This is for Andrew. You say that without any further election and without the power to impeach that we have basically disarmed and can’t do anything about President Obama’s lawlessness. What about his doing further damage to the Democratic Party? Does he care? Do the Democrats care? I mean, he’s already hollowed the party out. Couldn’t he do even more damage in the next two years by his lawlessness, and would that be a deterrent?
Andrew McCarthy: Look, in a vacuum, if that was the only consideration, sure it would be a deterrent, but let’s take a step back. I was watching the news the day after the election results, or I guess the day after Obama spoke about the election results and indicated that he was actually doubling down on the executive amnesty, and the commentators presenting the news seemed baffled by it, and they just said this guy just doesn’t get it. The electorate just spoke and he seems to have a tin ear. He just doesn’t get it, and I sat there and I’m thinking about the commentators. No, no, you don’t get it. I mean, after six years you don’t get who this guy is. He is trying to advance an ideological agenda, and his Alinsky-ite tactics are such that he has a long-range ambition but he has a very disciplined approach about going about it, which is you never go further than you think the political climate of the moment will allow you to go, but you always keep your eye on the ball, and you compute your activities in terms of what you think your political environment is, and that’s why it’s more dangerous now because he doesn’t have any elections to worry about, and will that hurt the Democrats in the short term, just like Obamacare did? Sure, but they still got Obamacare, which was what they wanted.
If Obama’s successful in what he’s doing now, two things to bear in mind. Cleta just listed them. We could go through a thousand things, but the amnesty could result in as close to permanent as anything you get in politics, a permanent electoral majority for Democrats, no matter how unpopular some of their policies seem to be at the moment. That’s why they’re pushing so hard to get it, and the second thing is, if you think you’re rid of Barack Obama in January of 2017, I got news for you. By then he’s going to have put about 400 like-minded progressive activist lawyers on the federal bench who will be serving for 30 to 40 years and advancing the same agenda, so his work continues after he’s gone on the basis of the laying of the pavement that he’s doing now, so I don’t think he’s worried about the short-term interests of the Democratic Party. I think he’s worried about, and moving toward, the long-term objectives of progressive ideology.
Sean Noble: I’ll just add one thing. It’s obvious he doesn’t care about the interests of the Democrat Party because a few weeks before the election he was, in prepared remarks – this is what’s astounding. In prepared remarks, he said, “I’m not on the ballot this year, but you can be sure that my policies are, every single one of them.” Now that was him trying to assert his role. That was a gift for us. We used that quote in commercials against members of Congress, against Senators, against a Secretary of State candidate in Arizona, a governor’s candidate, because we realized that while he was trying to assert himself in prepared remarks, it was a disaster for him to be saying that because we could use that against the Democrats that we were running against, so he doesn’t care about them because he’s such a narcissist.
Georgette Gelbard: Georgette Gelbard from California. This is mainly for Andy. What would it take to limit executive orders for all Presidents going forward, and do you think that that’s a good idea for the future?
Andrew McCarthy: I think it’s been unfortunate that the concept of the executive order has been kind of tainted in this whole escapade about not just immigration but other things as well. There’s nothing in principle wrong with an executive order. The executive branch is very extensive. The President is the head of the executive branch, and as long as the President is just directing the proper activities of the executive branch, executive orders are a good thing. They’re a little transparency for the executive branch. The problem is when the President uses his executive directing power as camouflage for when he’s actually usurping the power of Congress and the courts either to write the law or to interpret the law, and this President has used executive orders for that purpose. That’s the problem, and it’s not the number of executive orders, it’s what he does with them.
Audience Member: Hi, this question’s for Charles. Which conservative candidate are you researching for 2016 and why?
Charles Johnson: So I’ve researched almost all the conservative candidates, and the guy for me is clearly Cruz. I know he’s controversial, but I’ve known Ted Cruz before he was an exclamation point on the right and an expletive to the Republican establishment and the Democrats. What’s interesting, last year he told me his strategy for the shut-down. He said look, people aren’t going to remember what the shut-down was about. They’re going to remember that we stood up for them, and it’s interesting that in nearly every Senate race, except one, which was Scott Brown in New Hampshire which he lost, they were asking for Ted Cruz. He was filling rooms in Alaska, and I’m a chess player. It’s my hobby, and Ted Cruz is a chess player. He’s advancing the ball, and I know there’s this silly notion right now that we need an executive or we need a governor, but the reason it’s silly is we need somebody with an executive temperament, and I’ve gone through a lot of the candidates on the right, and if you’re a governor you have a staff, and your staff can cause you a lot of trouble. We’ve certainly seen that with Governor Christie and with some others, so I think for the moment I would go with him. There’s a lot of stuff on Hillary. I was talking with the FBI agent who investigated her for Whitewater, who’s actually a gay Democrat, believe it or not, one of the main ones, and there’s so much material there that the Republican Congress did not use because they were afraid of how hot it would be, and I think basically the problem right now is we’re going to have a GOP civil war, which is going to play out over the next two years, and it’s very intensive. You talk to staffers, and there’s a serious fight for the soul of the right that’s about to take place, and right now we’re at the bleeding Kansas moment, but it’s going to get ugly.
Audience Member: Will there be any problems with Ted Cruz and the fact that he’s born in Canada?
Charles Johnson: No. This is a debate that a lot of people have. The answer’s no. John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. George Romney was born in Mexico. The question of natural born is at birth are you a citizen, and his mother is from Delaware. It’s still in the continental United States. It’s still a state, I believe, even though Joe Biden’s from there. No, a lot of people are trying to use this to disqualify him, which is kind of craven but no, he’s clearly eligible.
Andrew McCarthy: I thought he was born in Kenya.
Cleta Mitchell: Here’s one of the things I think is important and it goes to Charles and all. This book makes pretty clear the extent to which the Obama administration has gone out of its way to attack journalists, to spin the stories, one after another, from fast and furious, Benghazi, the healthcare.gov, the IRS, all of it. But guess what’s interesting about that? No matter how much of our money they spend, no matter how hard they have tried and how well they have succeeded with what I call what is the state-owned media, NBC, CBS, ABC. As I’ve said, we might as well be in Venezuela for all the independence they show for the government, but notwithstanding all of that, guess what, the people still know. They have a low opinion of this president and contrary to Mr. Gruber, we’re not stupid, and we tell each other, and because we have these other outlets and ways to get information everywhere from Charles Johnson to Fox News and Andrew McCarthy, and all, we get the information. We share it with each other, which is why, circle back to why is the FEC doing what it’s doing? Why has the IRS been doing what it’s doing? Because they’re trying to shut down those channels of communication, but we will not let them. We’re not gonna let them, but you can buy the book, but you’ll have to look for it.
Paul Johnson: The last question before lunch, the gentleman in blue.
Audience Member: Yes, I think that despite what was on Drudge this morning about our very loving vice president, my understanding is Harry Reid and other Senate Democrats are not enthralled at the present time with Barack Obama. Do you not think there’s an opportunity for them to think Joe Biden is a better hope for them in 2016 than Barack Obama?
Paul Erickson: Sean?
Sean Noble: Well, I think that everyone on the left, well, not everyone, the Democrat establishment is all in for Hillary, and that’s going to be Biden’s demise because they –
Audience Member: I’m not talking about the presidency. I’m talking about –
Sean Noble: Well, I think that it’s going to be very difficult for the Democrats to win a presidency if their previous president gets impeached, so they will do everything they can to prevent any type of impeachment proceedings.
Paul Erickson: Please thank our panel.
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