Speaker 1: And we're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist and
your experienced Shirpa on today's Quest for Knowledge. As always,
you can email the show at radio at the Federalist
dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST, make
sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and of
course to the premium version of our website as well.
I'm delighted to be joined today by the original originalist
Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett. From prosecuting murders in
Chicago to arguing before the Supreme Court to authoring more
than a dozen books, Randy Burnett has played an integral
role in the rise of originalism, the movement to identify, restore,
and defend the original meaning of the Constitution. Thanks in
parts in part to his efforts, by twenty eighteen, a
majority of the sitting Supreme Court justice is self identified
as originalist. His new memoir, A Life for Liberty, The
Making of an American Originalist, is now available. It has
been a long journey to restore the lost Constitution, and
we are going to delve into Randy, thank you so
much for joining us on the Federalist Radio Hour today. Well,
thanks for having me, Matt.
Speaker 2: I have been on the show many times over the years,
especially when Ben was the host, and it's a pleasure
to make a return to the show.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, we're so glad to have you with us. We're
going to get into your memoir in just a bit,
but let's start with a few headlines. The first of course,
being President Joe's announcement this week that he'd like to
fiddle with something that's been in placed for a long time,
and that's his idea of term limits for the Supreme Court.
Wanted to get your first thoughts on that.
Speaker 2: Front, right Well, I testified in front of the Presidential
Commission on the Supreme Court the last year or maybe
two years ago, it's hard to remember. Time goes fast,
and I argued to them that the court packing or
court expansion scheme that was then being discussed, as well
as term limits, were unconstitutional. They were not only bad ideas,
they were unconstitutional and what the eventually what they actually
do is pose a fundamental threat to our form of government.
I think they may have unintentionally handed the Trump a
dvance campaign a gift because I do think that the
philosophy of the Democratic Party is a threat to our
constitutional republic. It has been demonstrated to be so in
the past, but it would be hard to sort of
make that issue salient in this cycle, except they just
did that. And now with Yale Law School graduate JD.
Vance on the ticket, I think he would be more
than capable of explaining how our form of government works
and how the Democrats want to eliminate any obstacle that
stands in their way of getting the exact progressive results
that they seek. Beat at the Supreme Court, be it
at the Electoral College, be that same day voting, that voting, voting, ID,
you name it. If it gets if they think it's
getting in their way, they're prepared to eliminate it. And
now they have made this matter of record in the
middle of a hundred day run up into the presidential campaign.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we certainly have seen that over and over again,
and it becomes more pressing now, obviously with the short
timetable up into the election. Let me read you what
President Biden had about this. Biden, in an op ed
published in The Washington Post, said he has quote great
respect for our institutions and separation of powers, But it's
always a butt. What is happening now is not normal,
and it undermines the public's confidence in the Court's decisions,
including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in the
breach like all Democrats, the Democrat Party, which of course
is going around telling everybody that it's Donald Trump, and
the Republicans threatening democracy as they go around trying to
throw their opponents off ballots into prisons. But that said,
such dramatic language, are we indeed in the breach? Are
these not normal times? As well?
Speaker 2: They are not normal times. We have the orchestrated a
law fair campaign against the former president of the United States,
who is the front runner, who's now the candidate of
one of the major two major parties, being prosecuted around
the country on extremely sketchy legal theories that almost everyone
will admit are extremely sketchy, with the exception possibly of
the document's case in Florida. But there he's being prosecuted
by a sketchy prosecutor who had a sketchy appointment. And
so it is absolutely unprecedented in this country, not in
other countries, but in this country for the party in
power to attempt to enlist the legal system against the
party out of power and put them behind bars, which
is really exactly what we've been witnessing through like several
years of the Biden administration. So I do think we're
actually at constitutional crossroads here. If that behavior is rewarded
at the election at the ballot box in November, we're
in big, big trouble. And President Biden should be very
grateful to the Supreme Court suggesting that he may have
some immunity attached to some of his exercise of official duties,
because if President Trump were elected, I could imagine him
deciding to go after President Biden for various reco violations.
He's committed to thwart public confidence and whatever whatever theory
you might want to come up with, I predict such
theories would be more sound than the ones that are
being used to pursue Donald Trump. But the Supreme Court
is somewhat cut that short in their Immunity's decision, in
which they basically try to end this downward spiral that's
been initiated by the Democrats in criminalizing their political opponents.
Speaker 1: Well, is that why it's so abundantly important, not that
it isn't always important for the power hungry to hang
on to power. But why they need this election victory
by hook or crook, because if not, they could face
quite reckoning. Although as you noted, the Supreme Court has
done Joe Biden an invaluable.
Speaker 2: Favor well, the Republicans have no track record in subjecting
the Democrats to a reckoning, So that would require even
for the Trump administer a different kind of Trump administration
than we saw during his first time. And we can
only speculate about how resolute they would be to do
to the Democrats what the Democrats have been attempting to
do them. But what I would really rather see, and
is where we started this show, is a restoration of
the American Constitutional Order, which would include all the missing
parts of the Constitution and then to follow those parts
under the originalist doctrine that the meaning of the Constitution
should remain the same until it's properly changed by amendment.
That is what I've been fighting for, really ever since
the nineteen nineties, when I transition from being a contracts
professor after having been a criminal prosecutor in Chicago, I
transitioned to being a contracts professor and then sort of gradually,
despite my better judgment, got dragged into constitutional law in
a process that I described in the book A Life
for Liberty.
Speaker 1: Speaking of where you started and law and order, what
say you of the city around which you grew up?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I was a very proud Cook County
States Attorney when I went to law school. I went
to law school to become a criminal trial lawyer, be
it a defense lawyer or a prosecutor, but I wanted
to be a state court trial lawyer, prosecuting murder cases
or defending against murder cases. By the time I was
half way through law school, I had decided I preferred
to be on the prosecution side, in part because at
that time Chicago had a very straight and that is
not corrupt prosecution office that was run under a Republican
administration really by Bernard Carey, the Democrats. The Public Defender's
Office was actually very politicized. It wasn't corrupt, but it
was very politicized. So you'd only got a head in
that office if you had political cloud. I had no
political cloud in the State's Attorney's office. You could get
ahead on merit and so that, plus the fact that
the prosecutor's ethical duty is to do justice, whereas the
defense attorney's ethical duty is to zealously defend the interest
of their client, which is absolutely essential to the proper
functioning of our criminal justice system. I felt more comfortable
on the side of having my portfolio be achieving justice,
whether that meant convicting or acquitting or letting go somebody
who was accused with inadequate evidence. So okay, So we
were very proud of our office, and we were very
proud of our ability to put the bad guys who
are convicted, who are proven bad to be behind bars.
We would not have lost the OJ case if that
had happened in Cook County when I was there and
my supervib I would not have been able. I would
not have been the one trying that case, but my
supervisors would. The supervisors that prosecuted John Wayne Gacy, for example,
if they had prosecuted OJ, OJ would have been convicted.
That's how we were really good. And it is just
a tragic shame what has happened to the Cook County
State's Attorney's office under the direction of the current state's
attorney and some of her top assistants have left the
office vocally stating that they're leaving the office because of
the way it's being run and to the detriment of
the people of the City of Chicago and the County
of Cook in which the City of Chicago resides.
Speaker 1: Chicago, Cook County not alone in that, of course, We're
seeing this across the country. We're seeing this change in prosecution,
in the mission, the state admission and infusing politics into
local prosecutions. One need look no further than Manhattan and
Alvin Bragg, who campaigned his campaign was on going after
former President Donald Trump. At the same time he has
released criminals been involved in all kinds of leftist reforms.
But again, Manhattan, Chicago not alone. This is happening all
over the country. How do we check this and move
back to sound prosecution and originalist ideas well.
Speaker 2: There's no easy answer to this question. I luckily our
Constitution has preserved federalism as one of the features of
our constitutional order, and that means that if you don't
like the policies that are happening in your jurisdiction, you
can vote with your feet and leave that jurisdiction. I
was a resident of the District of Columbia. Ever since
I joined the Georgetown faculty in two thousand and six,
I proudly lived within the city. Some of my colleagues
lived in the suburbs. They lived in Maryland or Virginia.
I lived in the district itself, but during COVID, left
the district and became a resident of the state of Florida,
in part because I couldn't stand the atmosphere during COVID
that was in the district as compared to Central Virginia,
where I spend part of my year, and the Gulf
Coast of Florida, where I spend the other part of
my year. And in part because now because of the
rising crime, the carjackings that are endemic in the District
of Columbia, so I have to go in to teach.
I have to go into the district and in my
car and park in my parking lot and then teach
my course. But the salad days of d C, where
I could feel comfortable walking at all hours of the
night through most of northwest d C. Those days are over,
and the best way to I could help myself was
to absent myself from the jurisdiction. I have no say
over what the postile polace, the criminal justice policies are
in DC or New York or San Francisco, those voters
are the ones that are going to have to decide.
And you know, you know, this is like what hl
Mankin said. You know, democracy is giving it to the voters,
good and hard what they want. So they have decided
what they wanted, and until they wise up, that's what
they're going to get good and hard.
Speaker 3: Can people really not afford McDonald's the washed Out on
Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day, Chris helps
unpack the connection between politics and the economy and how
it affects your wallet. McDonald says they're missing revenue as
they have to lower their prices even more. Why the
consumers are pulling back if things are so good? Why
are credit card delinquencies hitting a twelve year high. Whether
it's happening in DC or down on Wall Street, it's
affecting you financially.
Speaker 2: Be informed.
Speaker 3: Check out the Watchdot on Wall Street podcast with Chris
Markowski on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Well and very well stated, of course, and that's where
the times in which we live. So with that, let's
talk about your new memoir. I think it's fascinating, you know,
because not only do you talk about what is affecting
America right now, it's how we got here, and you
talk about a long journey to restore the lost Constitution.
You've been involved in some remarkable cases in that mission
along the way, But let's begin with how it all
started for you and how you got to this point.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 2: Thanks. I have had the privilege of being deeply enmeshed
in two different intellectual movements. One is the libertarian political movement,
which I became aware of but then enmeshed in when
I was a law student, and the other is the
conservative legal movement, of which I'm a part, which ultimately
took originalism as one of its key principles or precepts.
Of the conservative legal movement, I've sort of been there
for from the whole during the whole time, developing the
intellectual case for these views, but not just the case
for it, just trying to figure out what actually are
the positions. These positions don't define themselves, they need intellectual framework.
People have to do that work, and as in a
division of labor, that has been my job as an academic.
But how I got there. How I started my path
was essentially under the influence of my father, who was
a political conservative, a Jewish political conservative, growing up in
Catholic a Jewish kid in Catholic calume At City, Catholic
and somewhat Protestant calumat City, and my graduating class of
four hundred there were four Jews at the same time.
I was also the conservative kid in my synagogue in
ham in Indiana, where the progressive Jews, the liberal Jews
from Munster and Hammond went. So I was kind of
not quite right for calumme At City, but also not
quite right for the Jewish community as well. And I
was a happy kid. I had a happy childhood. I
think if you've read the book, know that I'm not complaining.
If anything, I was benefited from the fact that never
being one hundred percent a part of the group I
was in allowed me to be a little more detached
about the nature of the group. And that is a
skill that really comes in handy if you want to
be an academic. If you want to be an intellectual,
you don't have to be an academic, but if you
want to be intellectual and opine about what's going on,
it's sort of important to be a little detached from
what's going on so you can see it more clearly.
And I've had that benefit starting with my dad, who
was a political conservative and a contrarian by nature. At
the age of twelve, I debated on behalf of very
Goldwater in front of my entire junior high school and
grade school student body, several hundred students in the school gym.
I still remember, and in writing this book, I have
actually slept around from basement debasement boxes and boxes of
papers and memorabilia all these years, with no real idea
of what I would ever use them for. But for example,
I was able to produce my debate notes from when
I was twelve years old, and I was able to
quote how I my summation of that debate because I
actually had a copy of it still in my record.
So that's how it got started. But my course to
being a lawyer started with a television show that came
on when I was ten years old. Came on when
I was nine. By the time I was ten years old,
I had decided that this is what I wanted to do,
and it was a show called The Defenders, which I
was about a father Son Criminal Defense Team in New York,
very gritty, very realistic, filmed on location in New York,
which was somewhat unusual for a dramatic series in those days,
starring E. G. Marshall as the father and Robert Reid
as the son. And unlike Perry Mason, which we watched
every Sunday and which was about solving murders and didn't
mean anything to me, this was a story about being
a lawyer. And it was when I saw that television
show I thought, well, that's what I want to be.
I want to be a lawyer. And to me what
that meant was I wanted to be a criminal trial lawyer,
which is ultimately what I decided to do. But in
between that and becoming criminal lawyer, I discovered philosophy when
I was in college. I didn't even know there was
such a thing when I was in high school and
discovering philosophy and political theory, I realized there's a whole
discipline there which I could talk about justice and the
rule of law and liberty as part of that being
an academic. And it was my mentor in college, Henry Veach,
who was my philosophy professor, that sort of planted the
seed in my mind that I might want to be
a professor. And I also my recollection was that I
just made that decision sometime during law school. But in
the course of writing the book, I found my law
school applications and I saw that when I was applying
to Harvard and other schools, I said, I think I
want to be a law professor teach jurisprudence about the
philosophy of law someday. So I already had that idea
in mind. I didn't know how hard it was going
to be to transition from being criminal prosecutor in Cook County,
Illinois to being a law professor. It's not actually the
source of many academics and intellectuals being a county prosecutor
like I was, But I managed to do it. And
one thing I would say about the book for your
listeners is that it was a book that is written
to try to help young people see how you can
make a life for yourself with in the realm of
ideas and pursuing justice your vision of justice, and overcome
the obstacles that are in your way, and obstacles sometimes
of your own creation, just because of your background and
your upbringing and just not knowing how it's done. I
had to overcome a lot and including my own mistakes,
which I'm very candid about in this book in the
hopes that it will encourage younger people to chart their
own path the way I did, because they can see
that if you play your cards right, and sometimes even
if you don't play your cards right, you could actually
end up winning a jackpot and having a fantastic life
in which you help make the world a better place.
Speaker 1: Well, any kid who stands up for very Goldwater on
a seat at the table of the bold, that's for
sure that you didn't quote from.
Speaker 2: Buying my twelve year old In my twelve year old heart,
I knew he was right.
Speaker 1: Yes you did. You knew he was right as the
f goats. You didn't quote from Bob Dylan's version of
the Barry Goldwater song.
Speaker 2: I would assume I, actually, I don't know that. What
is that?
Speaker 1: The line I believe is if you think I'm gonna
let you date my daughter something about Barry Goldwater, now,
I'm gonna google that.
Speaker 2: When we're off the air.
Speaker 1: I will send that to you because I think it's
it may even be talking World War three Blues.
Speaker 2: But for the times I was never about Dylan fan.
I mean in college. I describe in the book the
culture clash between me and the progress of the liberals
kids that I lived in who actually I was at Northwestern,
but they were from Scarsdale in Westchester County, and they
sort of got it in their head that I was
the other and the bad guy because I like television
and I was conservative and whatever. But one of the schisms,
or one of the fissures that I detected back in
those days between the cool kids and other kids is
that the cool kids all like singers that couldn't sing. Yes,
that was the So that's why Bob Dylan was great,
and Van Morrison was great, and who else who can't sing?
There was a whole bunch of them that can't sing,
and they were the cool ones. And if you actually
like the Moody Blues, or if you like Elo, or
if you like one of those what I now call
prog rock bands, that was not cool at all. So anyway,
Bob Dylan was on the other side of this divide,
of this cultural divide.
Speaker 1: Indeed, it's like coffee and radio personalities acquired taste. To
say the leadst. Yes, we are having a conversation and
enjoying it immensely about where we stand in this country
in terms of the battle over the Constitution, what it
means to us, and what it means to be an originalist.
And we are talking to the original originalist. Georgetown Univerity
law professor Randy Barnett. His excellent new book, A Life
for Liberty The Making of an American Originalist available now.
It's a memoir. You really do get into how events
your life defined where you are today. You talk about
the battles for younger folks who want to be involved
in a legal career. Some of those battles, of course,
are coming from the individuals in the groups that are
overseeing them on college campuses across the country. Of course,
the legal organizations that are supposed to be the experts.
And what did we learn during the COVID era about
the experts? They very often can be wrong, and willfully so.
How difficult is that now for younger attorneys, younger individuals
entering the law profession.
Speaker 2: Well, I think if you read the book, you'll see
that it's always been that way, at least was that
way when I was in law school. Which is in
the nineteen seventies, I was being taught by sometimes hard
left people. At the very minimum they were liberals, and
then they were to the left of liberals. I had
Morton Horowitz, who founded the Critical Legal Studies movement, in
Roberto Hungar who followed. They founded the Critical Legal Studies movement.
I had some really good professors, and I learned from
these guys. But it was like that then, and I
went into resistance mode as a law student. And I
caution i give an orientation talk at Georgetown Law. I'm
giving one I think it's next week to incoming one
else called law School for Conservatives and Libertarians, in which
I read a letter I wrote home to my parents
and grandparents saying how much I was going to resist
the indoctrination that was happening here. And I went into
resistance mode. And I tell the students at Georgetown, don't
do that. Don't do what I did, because even if
you sit there and you can figure out where your
professor has gone wrong, that doesn't mean you know the
subject matter that the professor knows. And that's really what
your goal is. To figure out what you know, to
get inside their head and figure out and know as
much about what the subject is as they know, and
suspend your disbelief. So I think that the challenge has
always been there. I think that every student is capable,
who has principles, is capable of rising to that challenge,
and they should just get inside the professor's head and
deal with it. And in fact, they will get more
out of their education than the students that agree with
the professors, because the students that agree with the professors
will not have their ideas challenge, just as the professors
themselves will not have their ideas challenge. Normally, you if
you go to a law school or you go to
college and you're being challenged by your left wing professors,
you're having your ideas challenge. Your ideas are going to
survive that challenge better and stronger than they were and
more knowledgeable than they were when you started. So you
actually can get more out of your education if you
go into one of these adversarial systems. Then the students
who are just already lockstep with the powers that be.
Speaker 1: But that's that's a great point. It's good to have
ideas challenge. That's what we used to have in this country.
A university system that was about challenging ideas, all kinds
of ideas. We don't have that anymore. Well, I shouldn't
say that's a that's a wide ranging statement, but we
have lost a lot of that in our college campuses.
And now if you bring in a different point of
view than what is accepted on campus, you're labeled an
extremist and you're you're not really welcome. So how do
you deal with that?
Speaker 2: Well, it really is going to depend on the circumstances,
and as you as you already suggested, it's not going
to be the same everywhere at all times. I've always
been actually very well treated by my colleagues, recognizing who
I am as being quite different than them. On the
other hand, I am somewhat I would say, I'm somewhat
of a token and a value to be as a token,
and they don't want too many more like me, but
a few of them are good and to have a
few of them around. So it really depends on the
circumstances that you find yourself in. Is how you deal
with this. I mean, the one thing I would I say,
which and I tried to explain this in the book,
is I didn't think it was my responsibility to challenge
all my colleagues and tell them why they were wrong.
Just because someone happens to have an office next to you,
that doesn't create any moral duty on your part to
correct all their bad thinking. I just wanted to mind
my own business, and I spoke through my articles, and
I spoke through eventually my books and everything I did
outside the law school, most of which my colleagues didn't
know about because they were in there. They were in
their world and I was in my world, and my
world didn't penetrate their world. Now it's a little harder
now because our worlds interpenetrate with social media, et cetera.
It's easier for them to know what they do. But frankly,
I think my colleagues at Georgetown don't know a fraction
of what I do and what I say because they
just don't follow me on Twitter or whatever. I hope
they don't anyway, and so they don't really know what
I'm up to. And that's good because I just do
my job and they do their jobs, and I can
get along quite well. So I would also encourage people
to consider academia, notwithstanding the current state of academia as
a career, because I still think first of all, you
can get a job if you play your cards right
even now, and secondly, the job is worth getting. The
problem I think students have in projecting themselves forward to
being an academic is they think it's going to be
like it is with their fellow students. It's the students
that are really picking on the other students more than
the faculty are doing sometimes with the encouragement of the faculty,
but mostly it's something they're doing themselves. Whereas faculty members
they pretty much treat each other decently once you're in
their club, once you have been hired, once you've gotten
over the discrimination that I describe in my book that
I was subjected to at every stage of my career.
But once you get over that, and then you get
in the door and you get the job at Georgetown,
Let's say at that point they've already voted for you,
they've already said we want you. And once they want
you in the door, then they treat you as one
of the group as long as you are not an
unpleasant person to them. You know, you need, I think
first and foremost, you need to be a decent person
to the people you work with as well as all
other people, especially to people who work for you, and
being a decent person goes a very long way in academia,
as it does in most walks of life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there is a lot to be said about collegiality.
I just remember a dear friend of mine passed away
a few years ago, worked in academia for many, many years,
Professor John McAdams at Marquette University, and he was a
happy warrior on the conservative front, there's no doubt about it.
But he went through hell, absolute hell is a reputation
was dragged through the mud. They were trying to end
his tenure and his career after a very long and
distinguished career. Someone who literally wrote the book on the
Kennedy assassination, political science professor with some very pointed views,
who pointed out the many wards on the Jesuit Catholic
Marquette campus, of course, and the leftist leanings more than leanings,
but what was going on in that campus. But you're right,
I mean it is going to absolutely vary, not just
from campus to campus, but from institution to institution, and
that's what we are seeing across America today. But what
say you of the people who are in charge of
licensing that have a bent to them. How challenging has
that become? Now, well, we've talked about higher education. Now
I'm sorry, I should be clear that the American Our Association.
Speaker 2: Oh, well, you know, you've got to take a bar
exam and then if you're halfway decent, you can pass
your bar exam. So I don't really think that's much
of a challenge. I mean, they are trying to do
a few things around the margin so far, not all
that successfully, to use the bar as a way of
importing wokeness or whatever you want to call it into
the practice of law. I mean, I think that when
if you're just focusing on higher AD, we need a
multi prong strategy for how we take back control of
higher AD or how liberal arts comes back again genuine
liberal arts where different ideas are at play. I think
at the most elite institutions, I think those are more
or less lost. Faculties reproduce themselves. If you know how
faculty hiring works, you know that they're not going to
let in more than a few tokens, which I believe
it's valuable they do so because I can be a
resource for my conservative libertarian students that my colleagues cannot be,
and I'm happy to do that. I think that's my
first responsibilities, not arguing with my colleagues. It's serving my
students and being a resource for them, especially if they
should get into trouble, to take their side. So I
think that's even the tokenism at the highest level is important.
I don't think we can we can we stand much
chance of taking those institutions back. On the other hand,
I've been empowered by having a Center for the Constitution
at Georgetown, which gives me a bigger footprint at Georgetown
than I would have as a professor, and those centers
are starting to proliferate at the highest end. There's a
professor at Chicago that has one, professor at Stanford that
has one. That's one strategy. The other strategy is for
red state legislatures and red state governors to start taking
control of what the taxpayer is providing by way of
higher education in those states. And I think in this case,
Governor DeSantis in Florida is the model for how that
can be done. By appointing a president and trustees of
the various universities and try to develop liberal arts and
particularly developing centers within each of these flagship universities. There's
the Hamilton Center in Florida. There's the Cibota Center at Texas.
There's the Skettle Center at ASU, there's one at Tennessee.
There's one that's just opened. The Chase Centers just opened
in Ohio state. And as these things proliferate, you can
send your kid to a state school that maybe the
best state school in your state, and they can get
a liberal arts education there, even if there's nonsense going
on in other departments. They don't have to take that nonsense.
And in fact, most students don't want to, and the
enrollment of those departments are going down, and in fact
that can justify their closure on the grounds that they
don't have any enrollment. So that's the second prong. And
the third prong is to support independent new or new institutions.
Have donor money shift from sending money to Harvard, Yale
and Columbia send it to places like University of Austin,
Texas or other new institutions that are just wholly owned
that they're brand new liberal arts colleges that would actually
instill the American the American story if you want to
send your kids to those places. So I think there
are different strategies that can be adopted. But we are
in a culture war, and I think that culture war
needs to be fought at the level of culture and
this is just some of the ways in which that
can be done.
Speaker 1: Final question for you. You've been very generous to the time.
I very much appreciate it. The book is engaging on
all of these fronts, but we talked about it before.
There is a steeped battle that is going on. I
think for the soul of this country, the soul of
the Constitution. Do you see this constitutional republic as we've
known it, as we think we know it now surviving?
Speaker 2: I do, and maybe it would help to read my
book to see how far we've come. When I was
a law student in Larry Tribe's on law class in
Harvard Law School, and this is not his fault, I
was simply reading Supreme Court opinions that every time I
got to one of the good parts of the Constitution,
I would turn the page of the casebook and see
the Supreme Court and said, well, that doesn't count, and
that one doesn't mean what you think it means, or
that we can't do anything about that one, et cetera,
et cetera. And by the time I was done with
constitutional law class, I was done with the Constitution itself.
That's why I when I had was a criminal prosecutor,
and then when I became a law professor, I avoided
constitutional law, became a contracts professor, where the law and
writings still matter, and I got dragged into the Constitution
constitutional law, even though I would have said when I
was a law student, we were never going to I
don't know how we were ever going to bring things back,
get the Supreme Court back? Are you kidding me? How's
that going to happen? How's that going to work? And
yet look at us forty years later. We now have
a majority of justices who identify as originalists. Now that
doesn't always mean they do what I think they should
do as originalists, but nevertheless, that's huge progress. We've had
some enormous victories in court as well to restore portions
of the Original Constitution. Still way way more to go,
and there is deficiencies on the conservative side as well,
and over reliance on starry decisives or precedent et cetera.
Et cetera. But on the other hand, we are so
much farther along and to close the circle of where
we began this conversation. That's exactly the why the Democrats
wanted to destroy the Supreme Court. Right now, they want
to destroy the Supreme Court because of the success we've
had at molding the opinion of what a court should do,
and what a Supreme Court should do, and how they
should approach the Constitution. We've been so successful both politically
and legally that they want to destroy the institution that
they formally believed in and worshiped. And so that's a
real indicator that progress is not only possible, but we've
already made it. When they stopped talking about destroying the
Supreme Court, then we'll know that we maybe have vacclated
and we're not making the same kind of progress that
we've been making that I've been a part of making.
And I tell the story of how we did it
over the last forty years.
Speaker 1: Very very good point to put a bow on what
we were talking about before. Here's your line for you. Now,
I'm liberal, but to a degree, I want everybody to
be free. But if you think that, I'll let bury Goldwater,
move in next door and marry my daughter. You must
think I'm crazy. I wouldn't let him do it for
all the farms in Cuba, And I was incorrect. Let
me correct myself. That's Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Free
number ten. Just in case you're scoring along at home,
that was the line that I was looking or thanks
for that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I will have to say that I think Dylan
came along in his later years and not only made
better music, but he actually wised up in many many
ways and became a mini capitalist himself.
Speaker 1: Oh, he certainly did. Take a look at what he's
acquired over his lifetime and how he's tried to preserve
that he is the ultimate capitalist, no doubt about it. Well, sir,
it has been an absolute pleasure, and I hope that
this is one of many conversations that we have in
the coming years. The book is fascinating, as you would expect,
and I think you will find a great deal of
value in it. Thanks to my guest today, Georgetown University
law professor Randy Barnett, And once again the name of
Randy's memoir is A Life for Liberty. The making of
an American originalist it's available now. I would presume everywhere
where can folks find it.
Speaker 2: Well, Amazon is the obvious one to get a nice,
healthy thirty three percent discount if you buy it from there.
I don't know about other booksellers. And you got the
prime stuff and all of that sort of thing which
always helps. Again, thank you, sir, I appreciate your time.
You have been listening to another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, senior correspondent at the Federalist.
We'll be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers
of freedom and anxious for the fray dood