Mike Pompeo and Paul Ryan

HUGH HEWITT: Morning glory, America. It's Hugh Hewitt on the 20th day of April, 2018. That music means that it's time for the Hillsdale Dialogue, our weekly conversation with either Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, or one of his colleagues, about matters of lasting imports. Big issues, big ideas that have driven the West for a lot of centuries, or which are pressing at the amazing moment that we live in, and that's the latter category today.

Doctor Arnn, Good Friday morning to you.

LARRY ARNN: How are you, Hugh?

HUGH HEWITT: I'm good. But I'm concerned. Let me set this up.

Your friend and mine, Mike Pompeo, has been a very good CIA director, has been nominated to be the secretary of state. Turns out he spent Easter in Pyongyang, which is a little bit like going to Hillsdale for Easter, in my view, if it's a little cold up there. But he went up there and he sat down with Kim Jong-un, and he began negotiation. I don't believe there's much chance of this working.

But I know that Senate Democrats are now facing a choice. Either they can believe they know with certainty how Kim Jong-un would react to a rebuke of Mike Pompeo, or they don't care. The first is absurd, the latter is reckless. What do you make of this moment we find ourselves in in politics?

LARRY ARNN: Well, I just want to begin with a clear point. Hillsdale, Michigan is nothing like Pyongyang. For example, people are allowed to read here.

HUGH HEWITT: That's true. I was talking about the weather.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, so that they would not confirm Mike Pompeo quickly is insane. Insane because the fact that these guys are willing to talk, asking for the talk, asking for a summit meeting, and saying in advance, in preparation, that they're prepared to talk about getting rid of their nuclear weapons, that's not a success. But that's nearer success, by light years, than we've ever been before.

And so, this is the reckless Donald Trump, who threatens them, talks bad about them, and provokes them. And he's going to be the cause, by the way, they say the worst and most wicked things about us. And he replies slightly in kind. And then, you know, it's been in The New York Times that if they attack San Francisco and blow it up, that will be Trump's fault, right?

HUGH HEWITT: Right.

LARRY ARNN: And so, sure enough, now they're talking, right? And Pompeo is a West Point graduate. He's a distinguished soldier. He has been a superb member of Congress. And he was an excellent CIA director. And we need a secretary of state right now.

HUGH HEWITT: You even left out the fact that he's a Harvard Law graduate.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, I try to forget that.

HUGH HEWITT: You tried to gloss that over, didn't you? And that he's a friend of Cotton.

No, Mark Thiessen wrote an excellent column in The Washington Post about this this morning, "There are no instances--" I'm quoting. "There are no instances of a secretary of state nominee ever receiving an unfavorable committee vote since such votes were publicly recorded in 1925. Before that, the committee voted in closed session.

Democrat John Kerry approved in a unanimous voice vote, including from Senator Rand Paul, who opposes Pompeo. Democrat Hillary Clinton was approved 15 to 1, despite concerns about foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation. Madeleine Albright was approved unanimously, with the strong support of my former boss, the committee's conservative then-chairman, Senator Jesse Helms, who called Albright, quote, 'a tough and courageous lady,' and voted for her despite saying she was 'sincerely wrong' in some of her foreign policy views. Other Democrats, including Warren Christopher and Cyrus Vance, were also approved unanimously in committee, as were Republicans Colin Powell, James Baker, and George Shultz.

Indeed, no secretary of state going all the way back to Henry Kissinger had ever received more than two negative votes in the Foreign Relations Committee until Donald Trump became president." Close quote.

Thiessen makes an overwhelming case that what the Democrats are doing here is not only unprecedented, it's just reckless.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah. You know, we had the Democrats and some Republicans, right? And we had Frank Luntz, who turns out to be an extremely entertaining guy, speak at a college conference last week. He's a pollster. And the point he makes-- one of the points he makes-- is that the Republicans are in trouble this fall, so far.

We don't know how it's going to come out. In part, because a lot of the people who are Republicans are mad at them because they're not helping the president, right? And at the heart of that problem, the single worst thing, is the failure to do anything about the filibuster. But having said that, the first step to win a war, or a political campaign, is get your friends on your side. And we haven't been very good at that. But this is a crazy place, for the simple reason that-- just look at the events in Syria, which I understand you've been talking about.

HUGH HEWITT: Yep.

LARRY ARNN: Even though Matt Spalding knows nothing. And look at the difference, right? The difference is, we go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we don't do anything. And what was Teddy Roosevelt's great dictum? Walk softly and carry a big stick. Well, you wouldn't say that Trump walks softly.

HUGH HEWITT: No, you would not say that.

LARRY ARNN: But you wouldn't say that of Teddy Roosevelt either, as a matter of fact.

HUGH HEWITT: That's true.

LARRY ARNN: But on the other hand, when you're getting ready-- if you decide you're going to whack somebody. I mean, the first one was even better than this one, because the first time Trump attacked Syria, it was in the course of a dinner with the president, lifetime now Poobah of China. And he left, bombed Syria, came back, and said, "how was the cake?"

HUGH HEWITT: How was the cake? Yeah, and that's the way, by the way, a president should act. Now, what underscores this, though, is-- I just taught yesterday procedural due process to my comm-law students. And the procedural due process protections you are owed by the United States Constitution are proportionate to the risk that you're undergoing. Thus people facing the death penalty get the most protections. They get repeated appeals, they get habeas corpus petitions, they get mandatory DNA samples, they get all sorts of things because they're facing the ultimate penalty.

Here we have the ultimate rogue state. The one with the nukes. Iran is number two. This is the one with the nukes-- we know at least a dozen to two dozen-- and lots of chemical weapons, and they're miles from our forces. And so they are the ultimate threat. And we have a little tiny opportunity, maybe-- I'm doubtful, but maybe-- to denuclearize, given the maximum pressure campaign and given what China has done, to denuclearize the Korean peninsula.

It would probably require that we flash the cash, we guarantee the regime survival, we agree not to invade it, all the kind of stuff we did with Cuba in '62. But that Democrats would put that in peril, Larry Arnn, is, I think, a new bridge being crossed.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah. But, you know, we're at domestic political civil war. And so think of this, too. Among the things that are probably going on in the Korean peninsula right now is an attempt to extend Chinese influence southwards toward South Korea.

HUGH HEWITT: Yeah.

LARRY ARNN: Because there's been this talk, not just of getting rid of the nuclear weapons, there's been this talk of reunification. And that could work out in a great variety of ways, but China is a deep thinker and very persistent, and aggressive in the way a good chess player is aggressive. So we need to think here, right? We need coherence.

And Pompeo, you can think what you want to about Donald Trump, whom I think is very effective in foreign policy, especially. But Pompeo is a serious guy. And we need to get him in there right now.

And some of this reminds me of Woodrow Wilson, a left-wing fool, in my little opinion, goes to the Versailles Peace Conference, tears the hell out of it, and gets one really good thing. Something Winston Churchill really wanted, which was a League of Nations. He thought that would help. And under the right circumstances, I still think the United Nations could be helpful. But not these circumstances, and it never really has been very helpful.

So anyway, he comes back and the Senate just whacks him. And we don't pass it, the thing is neutered from the start, and that means nothing really great, except preparation for the Second World War, came out of the peace conference that settled the First World War.

Well, a lot of people learned their lesson from that, including a great Michigan senator, about whom there's a new biography lately, Arthur Vandenberg. And what he did, was led the founding of a long era, since 1945-- '44, '45, in which the Senate and the president worked together to make long-term commitments possible in foreign policy. And Vandenberg was very cooperative.

And they laid down some rules-- and all those rules are being observed here now-- that if you're going to bring us a whacking big treaty, for example, then you need to announce in advance and you need to come talk to us before you do all that. And then it will be viewed sympathetically here. Well, you know, Pompeo, that's a very predictable guy. A very senior guy in the administration right now, a member of the House. So there's no reason not to confirm.

HUGH HEWITT: When we come back, we're going to talk about that advice and consent process and what is going on in the Senate these days. And what it reflects about American politics, because we haven't been here before. Even in '68 when we had domestic unrest, the Senate still did its job, especially on foreign affairs. Stay tuned, America.

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. The Hillsdale Dialogue is under way. All things Hillsdale College-related are found at Hillsdale.edu. All of my conversations with Dr. Larry Arnn and his colleagues from the college dating back to 2013 are found at hughforhillsdale.com.

We are in our series on the United States Constitution, and today we're looking at Article II, section 2. It reads in whole, "The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States. He may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices. And he shall have the power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

He should have the power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided 2/3 of the senators present concur. And he shall nominate and bind, with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges in the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States whose appointments are not here and otherwise provided for, which shall be established by law.

But the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers as they think proper, in the president alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of department. The president shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session."

So Doctor, on the appointment power, the pardon power, the recess appointment power, they're all laid out here. This is not hard to read.

LARRY ARNN: No. No. And I think what they're thinking of doing in the Senate about this Pompeo thing, if they can't get enough votes to get the nomination discharged from the committee, then Senator McConnell would have to bring a motion to bring it to the Senate floor. And that, the Democrats are saying, would be subject to the filibuster.

And so McConnell would have to reform the filibuster, is what I always call for. That is to say, make it so that it actually encourages debate again, instead of stopping debate. But they've got a ploy now that will thwart the president from appointing a key officer, and by refusing to give their, not just consent-- advice. And so that's a breakdown. And if you ask, why is it a serious breakdown? This situation exactly exemplifies it. Because just think how clear this is, what you just read. Everything in the executive branch is to report to the president.

HUGH HEWITT: Everything.

LARRY ARNN: And that means everybody working there, works for him. The senior ones, he has to get approved by the Congress, but they can't fire them after that. And the custom has been that they do approve them, because the executive branch has got to work. It's always in business, because the world's always going on. Congress is not like that. And remember, the Congress, when it actually does what it's supposed to do, deals with prospective things, right? It lays down general rules about circumstances-- how circumstances will be treated that arise in the future, and they don't know who's going to be affected.

The executive branch is about the circumstances happening right now. And if you read the arguments in the Federalist-- and they're really great on this subject, many of them written by Hamilton, a man of great executive temper-- what they say is, this fella has got to be set up to do his job. And then if we give him that, it's also true that we will know who to blame.

HUGH HEWITT: That's it. And when they give him the pardon power, exercised this very week by Donald Trump, with regards to one Scooter Libby, a patriot. A great man who was wrongly convicted, and should have been pardoned, and I believe W regrets that he did not. But it's a complete power. It's an unlimited power, except in cases of impeachment. So that means it's unlimited everywhere else, right? It's just completely unlimited. Because, Larry-- one minute to the break-- the president has to act on information only the president has.

LARRY ARNN: That's right. And I think that, too, you see, an executive act-- and remember that "executive" is cognate with "execute"-- he can also not execute. And that's how the office is supposed to work. By the way, you're the lawyer here, you should tell people after the break, what the New York attorney general is doing about the pardon power.

HUGH HEWITT: I will. I will come back to that, and with Dr. Larry Arnn. Don't go anywhere, America, you're listening to the Hillsdale Dialogue. All things Hillsdale available at Hillsdale.edu. I'll be right back with Dr. Larry Arnn. Stay tuned.

33 minutes after the hour, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. Thank you for listening to The Hugh Hewitt Show. It is the Hillsdale Dialogue, www.Hillsdale.edu for all things concerning the little college in Michigan that is the lantern of the north. Also, all of our previous conversations are found at hughforhillsdale.com. That's hughforhillsdale.com. Dr. Larry Arnn is the president of Hillsdale College. He is, in fact, the lecturer of many of the online courses that you can receive absolutely for free, when you go to Hillsdale.edu.

And we're talking about Article II, section 2, today. The pardon power, the advice and consent power. We're in the Constitution, and Dr. Arnn brought to my attention a story of which I was not aware, and it's astonishing, actually. And so let me read it to you, from two days ago in The New York Times.

"Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, of New York state, is moving to change New York state law so that he and other local prosecutors would have the power to bring criminal charges against aides to President Trump who had been pardoned. According to a letter Mr. Schneiderman sent to the governor and state lawmakers on Wednesday, the move, if approved by Governor Andrew Cuomo and the legislature, would serve notice that the legal troubles of the president and his aides may continue without the efforts of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating. Under the plan, Mr. Schneiderman, a Democrat, seeks to exempt New York's double jeopardy law from cases involving presidential pardons, according to a letter."

This, Larry Arnn, is a recipe for chaos.

LARRY ARNN: So, I was telling you in the break, we were in my class today, this afternoon. We're going to read the farewell to the Senate by Jefferson Davis as he left the Senate to go become the president of the Confederacy. And he lays it all out as constitutional, and as being in favor of the rule of law. And then we're going to read the South Carolina secession message. And it is patterned after the Declaration of Independence. So in the name of the "rights of man," they're going to preserve a slave society.

So I'll tell you why that's apposite to this. It's the plainest thing in the world that the president has this power. You read the words, and it didn't take two minutes to read the whole thing, right?

HUGH HEWITT: The whole thing.

LARRY ARNN: It's in there. There aren't many things in there. That's in there. And then add a second point, why would double jeopardy be not just an American, but an ancient protection of citizens against injury from the government? The reason is, you're not supposed to harass the person for the rest of his life. If you can't convict him, then you've got to let him go. And bringing new charges on the same set of facts is not none, you see.

So what they're saying is, if you want to work-- I mean, there's a book about how the left took over Colorado. And one of the ways they did it, they said, was they harassed anybody who got involved in politics on the side they don't like, and made their lives a misery. Because, the book says, they wanted everybody to understand that you just don't join this side, it'll wreck your life.

HUGH HEWITT: And that is so apposite. It's completely in keeping with what's going on right now with-- I always declare, Scott Pruitt is my friend. My son works at EPA, and so I might have a complex. But they're trying to drive him out with a thousand paper cuts. They're trying to drive Ryan Zinke out with a thousand paper cuts. They are trying to criminalize the conduct of every officer.

And they're actually bringing up-- and I found this astonishing. I talked about it with Paul Ryan. I want to play this for you, a couple of things with Paul Ryan yesterday. They're actually trying to bring up security measures. In an age where a man opens fire on a baseball field, they're trying to make complaints about how much you're spending on security, Larry Arnn.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, that's right. And that's those guys, so they threaten them, and then they threaten their security team, and I get a few negative letters a month. I get a lot. Thank you for writing me, all you people who do. It's hundreds every month. But almost all of the negative ones have Washington, DC zip codes on them.

HUGH HEWITT: Well, that's because their listening right now. Let me play it for you now. Your friend and mine, the Speaker was on yesterday. I want to play a few things for you.

First of all, is-- you knew Jack Kemp. And I asked him, how would Jack Kemp grade your speakership? Cut number 2.

You've always been very open, Mr. Speaker, that your mentor is the late great Jack Kemp. How would he, do you think, evaluate your time? Not just as Speaker, but as chairman of Ways and Means, chairman of the Budget Committee?

PAUL RYAN: Well, when I was a young staffer working for Jack, we worked on this idea called enterprise zones, to have zero capital gains taxes on investments in poor areas. That was a dream of Jack's his entire career. I've worked on it my entire career. It is now law of the land as part of tax reform. When I worked for Jack, it was after he had done tax reform in '81 and '86. But he pioneered the commission in the Bush administration to do tax reform. We've been trying to do it for a generation, and we got that done. And it's exactly the kind of tax reform that Jack believed in, that he and I talked about and worked on together. So there's so many things.

Jack was also a big defense hawk. Not a lot of people knew that about him, but he really understood the value of strong US foreign policy and an indisputably strong military. And we have finally-- and you know this issue cold-- when I became Speaker, I got very invested in our military. Why? Because I spend a great deal of my time with the military in our intelligence community. I get the weekly intelligence briefings that you get with your second in line in succession. And I became acutely alarmed and concerned about the hollowing out of our military and our readiness crisis.

That is done. We fixed that. It's now under way and being repaired. Those are the things that Jack really cared about. And he also cared about regulatory reform, capital markets, regulatory relief-- that's done as well.

HUGH HEWITT: What do you think of that assessment, Larry Arnn?

LARRY ARNN: Yeah well, I was appointed to a presidential commission by Jack Kemp on housing affordability when he was at HUD, and I got to know him pretty well. And it's really through him that I met Paul Ryan for the first time. And Paul Ryan just walks in the same shoes as Jack Kemp. He's always thought that, said that. And it seems true to me. And the things he said there are the reasons why. Jack Kemp was very soft-hearted about poor and about anybody oppressed. I mean, he was an NFL quarterback and a big baby. You know, big--

HUGH HEWITT: Softy.

LARRY ARNN: --pussycat, is what he was. And I had long talks with him about housing affordability. And we figured out that a lot of the cause of that was it's regulated to death. And he wanted to fix that. And he was especially fierce about that, because it was hurting ordinary people and poor people. So that's Paul Ryan. And then Jack Kemp was a famous supply-sider. He thought, you know, it's a very controversial thing to say and almost nobody believes it today, but wealth is created by producing things.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes.

LARRY ARNN: That's an extraordinary thing to say. And that is the entirety of supply-side economics. Make it easier and cheaper to produce stuff, instead of penalizing it. And he was all over that.

HUGH HEWITT: As for being a softy, this is a true view into Paul Ryan's soul. I asked him about his children and their playing of sports. Cut number 6.

So I want to know, as a bleacher dad, are you a screamer or are you a quiet dad?

PAUL RYAN: No, I'm a pretty quiet dad. I don't scream. I cheer. I don't scream. For basketball-- my boys play basketball. I run the scoreboard. So you can't do anything.

HUGH HEWITT: Why am I not surprised?

PAUL RYAN: So I keep the scoreboard, so I just keep my mouth shut.

HUGH HEWITT: Are you not surprised, Larry Arnn, not surprised that he runs the scoreboard?

LARRY ARNN: Yeah. He's like a scoreboard guy, isn't he? One of our senior professors, Tom Connor, a very beloved history professor, keeps the scoreboard at the basketball games at ours, and I'm always trying to get him to cheat. But he won't.

HUGH HEWITT: All right, now I've got to play for you the thing he said. He said something about Donald Trump that was good, and something was bad. Here's Paul Ryan on good Donald Trump.

Now, you've gotten to work with one of the most unusual figures in American politics. I view him as the wrecking ball president. He came through, he's clearing out a lot of stuff. What's the best and worst of working with a transitional, transformative figure who has changed everything?

PAUL RYAN: What I keep telling people is, he has so shuffled the deck, that it has unlocked so much potential for us to do. What people I don't think realize, is just how much regulatory sanity he has restored to the country. I mean, just look at the energy sector itself. And talk about good foreign policy, good job policy, good economic policy. When you go to the gas pump or you pay your utility bill, you're sending that money to America, instead of the Middle East. Instead of financing terrorism and the rest.

Because of Donald Trump's election, we now are going to be the dominant player in energy markets. Why? ANWR is open. We no longer have a ban on the export of crude oil. Fracking regulations are made sane at the state level.

So I was in Midland, Texas, not too long ago, the Permian Basin, just this part of Texas. Just that one oil field is as large as the Saudi Arabian oil field. So we have a Saudi Arabia of oil, we've now discovered, that we can use in just this part of Texas. That's before we opened up ANWR in Alaska, which we've been trying to do for 37 years. That's before you look at North Dakota, or Pennsylvania, or the rest of Texas. It's incredible.

And that's just one sector of this economy. Millions of dollars going back into the American economy, jobs, you name it. Why? Because this president shook the system up. This president reshuffled the deck. Tax reform is something I've been working on for 20 years as a member of Congress. Could not get it until we got Donald Trump elected president.

HUGH HEWITT: And then I asked, I didn't let him go. Bad Trump. Here's what he said. Cut number 8.

So what's the worst? What's the downside?

PAUL RYAN: Well, there's some unpredictability and it keeps people guessing. I could do with a few less tweets, is what I would say. He and I talk about this all the time, but I could do with a few less tweets.

HUGH HEWITT: Larry Arnn, your assessment of good Trump, bad Trump from Speaker Ryan.

LARRY ARNN: That's pretty accurate. And I'll just add a third point, and that is those two sides of Trump are connected.

HUGH HEWITT: Yeah, they are.

LARRY ARNN: You know, part of his art. And I do think there's an artfulness about Donald Trump. I mean, personally I'm shocked to say it, because I never would have predicted all of this until you made me watch one of his speeches in August of 2015, which, because we're going to talk about the speech he's about to give in Phoenix on the radio. And I just hated the idea of it. And I stayed up and watched it. And I turned my wife and I said, this guy's going to win.

To be clear in America, you have to be bold and unafraid. Because everything you say is going to be picked apart a thousand ways by people who are hostile before they even hear what you say. And the media is going to amplify that, if you happen to be on the right. And that's very unfair, and very distorted and biased, and that's the situation of the country today. And so this 140-character thing, if that's how many it is in a tweet, that is just very useful to him. He can talk to us directly.

HUGH HEWITT: That's why I call him-- and it's not derogatory-- the wrecking ball president, because if something is dysfunctional and broken, the first thing you do, Larry Arnn, is clear it all away.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah. One of my students, who works in a high place in the government, said, you know, it's a little demoralizing, all these changes. You know, because if he doesn't like what you're doing, he just fires you. We know these people, we work here, right? And I said, OK, I get that. I personally don't do that. I said, but make yourself a list of who got fired, and whether the person who replaced them--

HUGH HEWITT: Was better.

LARRY ARNN: --are better.

HUGH HEWITT: I'll be right back with Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College.

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. This is the Hillsdale Dialogue, our weekly conversation about the things that matter a lot. The big things, the important things, with Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College or one of his colleagues. They are all collected back to 2013, beginning with Homer, at hughforhillsdale.com, and all of the wonderful online courses are available at Hillsdale.edu, as is the opportunity to sign up for absolutely free, Imprimis, the monthly speech digest of the college. You ought to go and get that. Hillsdale.edu.

D.r Arnn, I want to play for you one more cut from my conversation yesterday with Speaker Ryan, about the public discourse. Cut number 9.

All right, let me ask my last question. And you can say this, because you're not vested in it. I'm concerned about the safety of our members, not since the baseball field incident, but always. Because politics in America is crazy. And the 1% on both ends are crazy. What's your message to the public about the safety of your members, and how we ought to take that more seriously?

PAUL RYAN: We addressed a lot of those issues after Steve got shot, after that shooting. And there are lots of threats on our members. And so that's something. We have our own police force here in the Capitol. As Speaker of the House, I oversee that entire operation, and so we've addressed quite a bit of those threats.

Here's the point I guess I would make, is that people are spirited, people have strong opinions. Keep it civil. Because when you escalate your own rhetoric, you can turn someone else in a different direction. And some people may not have as much self-control as you do. So be careful what you say, because you can set someone else off. And that's what you have to worry about.

You have a lot of-- I'd say 21st century technology, the digital age, has brought out great things in this country, but it's also brought out some dark things in this country. And that has brought a level of threat and violence to public officials that we haven't seen in, probably ever.

HUGH HEWITT: I agree.

PAUL RYAN: So we take that stuff real seriously.

HUGH HEWITT: Doctor Arnn, what do you make of that?

LARRY ARNN: Yeah. It's a sign of a crisis, right?

HUGH HEWITT: It could be.

LARRY ARNN: Talking dirty to each other. It's not technology. I mean, you should just read. I mean, lead up to the Civil War, lead up and during the American Revolution, it was common for people to threaten, to get a posse together and go down the street and get a guy and hang him.

HUGH HEWITT: Well a senator was beaten on the floor of the Senate, was he not?

LARRY ARNN: Beaten nearly to death. Charles Sumner, from Massachusetts. And that was by an honorable Southern gentleman, who took exception-- and you know, Charles Sumner was an incredibly difficult human being. He was the bane of Ulysses Grant as president. And he was in another sense a great man, and nobody needs to get beaten half to death on the Senate floor with a stick. And that's what happened to him.

And so these things are-- I read American history, and teach it, and then I look at the news. And I can see that we are-- just think how far we are from the days when Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Democrat isolationist, and a great Michigan figure-- the guy who's written a biography of him, by the way, is Hank Meijer, who runs the retail store chain here in Michigan. He's very beloved. My wife loves Meijers.

And anyway, he just took time out from his work and he wrote this book. And Vandenberg made a deal with Franklin Roosevelt and then Harry Truman after him. And he went into the Eisenhower years, even. And he just said, we're going to work this out together, because across seas, we should speak with one voice. And they did that in the early days when George Washington was president.

So we've had long periods where politics weren't like this, although they've always been controversial. Certainly true. But it's really in the times when the biggest things are pending, that we get violent of speech with each other.

HUGH HEWITT: And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. There's a moment here for a Chris Coons, or a Dianne Feinstein, and maybe Heidi Heitkamp is it, to step up and be Vandenberg again, and say, we will oppose him every step of the way. We don't like the president. We want to beat the president. But when it comes to North Korea and Mike Pompeo, I'm going to vote for him. Rand Paul could say the same thing, by the way. I mean, you are you're closer to the senator from Kentucky than I am. I oppose him in most instances, and you get along with him. But I would think for the good of the country, he would vote Pompeo out of committee.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, and surely-- first of all, I admire Rand Paul. He is a stubborn little cuss, isn't he? And he, speaking of getting beaten, he got beaten up by his neighbor.

HUGH HEWITT: Yeah. Yeah.

LARRY ARNN: Anyway, he will surely see that this is the thing to close ranks on. And one of the reasons he might think that, is the Trump foreign policy is more restrained. And he doesn't like all these wars, and all this spending money on foreign things, right? He doesn't like spending money in the government anyway. Me too, right? And Trump is setting out to be more restrained about that. And so, this thing with North Korea, if you get peace with North Korea, if you get assurance that you're not going to get San Francisco wiped out, that's such a gain. And Pompeo is affiliated with that foreign policy.

HUGH HEWITT: And that is why you would hope that the Senate would act judiciously and quickly. Dr. Larry Arnn at Hillsdale College, thank you. All things Hillsdale at Hillsdale.edu.