https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WA-A-xnDAtE
You’re an expert on the US Constitution from the legal perspective and and you have lots of practical political experience and so maybe you could just start by talking to us about how you see the How you understand the structure of the US federal government? Thanks for asking that question jordan. This is something I feel strongly about It’s something that I think can help lead us to a place where as a country we can heal where we can avoid some of the pitfalls that Have proven problematic for us at times The us government is based on a document written in 1787 by a group of individuals who I believe were Wise men raised up by god to that very purpose Whether you believe in god or not And regardless of what form of belief you might have when you look at the US Constitution you can’t help but See that it has been an essential part of a puzzle It’s sort of fostered the development of the greatest civilization that human history has ever known It’s done this And not because the document itself has any magical powers or the wards themselves do but because the document itself Recognizes that the sovereigns in our system are the people and the people Have a right to be Free and that’s something that’s embodied in our declaration of independence written 11 years before the constitution which we acknowledged uh part of as a probably as a product of the scottish enlightenment and And how that spread on both sides of the atlantic? That the power of government really derives from the people and that ultimately our sovereign is god on earth Sovereigns are citizens Government is an earthly institution that operates by necessity In order to prevent us from harming each other and being harmed by others in order to protect life liberty and property but ultimately we realize that government is something of a necessary evil government is Best understood I believe as the official collective use of force under the authority of a Rule of general applicability that we call law force Properly understood is something that like anything else that we deal with in the world that we find necessary like oxygen like water like fire for example Absolutely an essential part of life certainly an essential part of any thriving civilization But it’s dangerous just like each of those things and unless kept carefully in check It will become dangerous because it’s run by fallible mortal human beings That’s essential to our understanding of the constitution is the fact that human beings have infinite And eternal value They are flawed but they’re redeemable And we’ve got to make sure that power checks power because government is force. So within our system of government Sets up two really important structural protections to guarantee liberty. You see liberty and government power Exists somewhat in opposition to each other and yet at the same time they kind of hold each other in check Government power authority force if you will cannot expand except at the expense of individual liberty To a degree we need this to make sure that we don’t kill each other and hurt each other or take each other’s things But it’s also got to be kept in check At earlier times of human development in some parts of the world to this very day government has best been understood as it being Embodied the government authority is embodied in a single sovereign a monarch a caesar a king a queen In our system of government We recognize that immense danger exists in the concentration of power in the hands of the few And so we split up the sovereign authority to make sure that it really belonged ultimately to the people we split up government authority along two axes First on the vertical axis with something we call federalism It was embodied in the text of the original constitution and later emphasized in the 10th amendment Adopted a few years later But it says basically that most power in the united states of america will be exercised at the state and local level By the people now there’s a there’s a principle if I remember correctly and I really like this principle I believe it was developed in england in great britain, but maybe it’s part of the scottish enlightenment that An issue should be dealt with by the most local authority capable of dealing with it. And so that’s one way of deciding Of noting that authority has to be distributed across Multiple levels but also of determining who should be in charge Yes, yes, that’s exactly right jordan and in fact We learned this as americans as part of our experience with colonial britain we we were We were british subjects prior to our revolution and over a couple hundred years we we learned something that I think the The english crown discovered somewhat by accident which is that once you’ve established Once you’ve established a community in the in the case of what became the united states these 13 colonies If you allow them to govern themselves locally on local matters, it actually works pretty well And over the a couple hundred years leading up to our revolution We would go for these cycles or the crown would exercise either more or less influence attended to exercise more in the wake Of wars that it had to pay for it sent more tax collectors. Those tax collectors would impose more regulations And then after a while they would withdraw but we prospered as they sort of let go So that’s part of why we were instinctively drawn to what we today call federalism Or in other words where we say let’s govern ourselves at the most local level possible Just a few powers will exist at the national level the federal government is supposed to be in charge of National offense declaring war Regulating interstate and foreign trade bankruptcy laws immigration laws postal roads There are a few other powers, but you get the idea. That’s the basic gist of it. They’re distinctively national in character unavoidably national in their impact all other things aside from that default proposition Of where things are made federal are to be kept local Local people have the advantage of being on the ground and being able to see exactly what’s going on and and higher orders Officials, let’s say have the advantage of being able to aggregate large number of not large numbers of people to do the same thing At the same time, but there’s a tension between those two things and so and so you could think that there’s a level of responsibility for the individual and for the family and then for the local community and the state and the Federal government and then hypothetically international organizations as well, but you want the least amount of power possible moving up precisely