The Unconstitutional Obstruction of Executive Power and the Rule of Law

HUGH HEWITT: Morning glory, America. That music means it is time here on The Hugh Hewitt Show for the Hillsdale Dialogue. Each week at this time, the last radio hour of the week, I go high when the rest of the world goes low with Dr. Larry Arnn and one of his colleagues from the Hillsdale College.

All things about Hillsdale are collected at hillsdale.edu. And all of our conversations dating back to 2013 are collected at hughforhillsdale.com. If you want to go bone up on your Homer, all the way through your Rousseau, all the way up to the present, we're working our way through the actual United States Constitution, such a concept. Dr. Arnn, good morning to you.

LARRY P. ARNN: How are you doing?

HUGH HEWITT: I'm great. You've got a couple of National Football League players that came out of Hillsdale that are running around the league. You got anyone on the board today, tomorrow? You got any prospects for the draft?

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. And I hope he doesn't get drafted. Danny Drummond was our outstanding senior man, whom I want to hire at the college. He's an offensive tackle. We seem to produce those.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes, you do.

LARRY P. ARNN: And Jared Veldheer is as well. And he's a big, wonderful young man. And he's got an idea about the NFL. So he's going to give it a shot.

HUGH HEWITT: Well, you should let him go to the Browns and help us.

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, this is terrible. And it's an Ohio joke. But you and I could almost play for the Browns.

HUGH HEWITT: That's a terrible thing to say. All right, now, look, we're in Article II, which is the presidential article. And we're going to come back to a couple of columns in the Wall Street Journal today about presidential power. But first, I have to play you something from Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, yesterday, and then bring up Article VI.

Here is Governor Cuomo.

GOVERNOR CUOMO: I'll also be executing an executive order that says ICE cannot enter a state facility or a state building without a valid judicial warrant, which would, I believe, address the situation you just mentioned.

HUGH HEWITT: Now, Article VI, Dr. Arnn, of the United States Constitution, which is-- the Constitution's not that long. And Article VI is the penultimate article. In its second section says, Article VI, Section 2, "This Constitution and the laws of the United States, which shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the Supreme Law of the Land. And the judges in every state shall be bound thereby anything in the Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary, notwithstanding."

How do you square that with Governor Cuomo yesterday?

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, you don't. This is one of a series of things. The country is in constitutional danger, generally speaking. And chiefly because the Congress doesn't make the laws anymore. A bunch of the executives, supposed executive branch agencies, make almost all the laws. But this interference, or this stripping of the President's powers, is increasing.

And it comes from a million sources. The Governor of New York is the recent example. So think of this, so we have a bunch of laws. It's supposed to be a nation of laws. The supreme law of the land is the Constitution. And the law is made pursuant to it. Then we have a unitary executive. And his job is to execute the law.

There's never been a time so clear about why that needs to be a unitary power and the need to act. They almost, for goodness sake, failed to confirm a Secretary of State with this North Korea and Iran stuff going on and serious stuff going on. And so, by the skin of his teeth, Pompeo gets in just in time to get on an airplane and go to Brussels and talk to the NATO foreign ministers.

We need to be there. And we almost didn't have anybody to go.

HUGH HEWITT: Right. And Angela Merkel is coming today. And we almost did not have an ambassador confirmed. They confirmed, after a year, Richard Grenell, yesterday, to be the ambassador to Germany. So that when the Chancellor of Germany comes to pay court with President Trump today, at least we will have an ambassador there to introduce her to.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. And see these things are not just photo ops, right? These are the alternatives to war. These are people talking. And the idea that you could just stop that-- and so you think about Cuomo again. You brought him up. If you had to pick a thing that the federal government should be in charge of, wouldn't it be immigration?

And the reason is, the borders of the land, if it is to be a land, a nation, unto itself, have to be protected on behalf of all of us. And so there's never been a dispute about that. And yet now, officers of the federal government are prevented from entering state buildings without going to a court and getting a warrant.

And police officers, of all kinds, go around and look at things. They patrol. So they can't do that there. It's just part of a theme.

HUGH HEWITT: He may have the-- I am not decided yet whether or not a state may deny access to its facilities to the federal government. But if the Congress passes a law on immigration and says, you will go and find them wherever you are, that will be the supreme law of the land.

It's just the way it's been. Andrew Jackson actually began making that very clear, as a Southerner, to the southern states. And Abraham Lincoln made it very clear as soon as he took office. There is a law. It is the supreme law that comes out of the Constitution.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. So I'm teaching the Constitution this term. And we're near the end of the term. And everybody's exhausted. But it's turned spring here. So we're all happy. And we just finished the Civil War crisis.

And first of all, a lot of the things that are going on right now were features of that crisis. The Nullification Crisis in 1832, involving John Calhoun and Andy Jackson, was an early outbreak of the sentiments and controversies that led to the Civil War.

And James Madison was still alive. And he wrote about this Supremacy Clause. He said, if there is to be one country, then there has to be a supreme set of laws for the country. And if there is such a supreme set of laws, there must be a place, a single place, where decisions can be made about what those laws are and whether they're constitutional. And so otherwise, it's just obviously chaos.

And see, our listeners today should think, we're not talking about whether or not Donald Trump obstructed justice, whether or not the ICE law is a good law, whether or not the immigration laws are good laws. If you agree that we should have laws, and they should be executed uniformly, which is necessary to the rule of law, then these things have to be set up in the way they're set up. And if that breaks down, we're not going to have the rule of law.

HUGH HEWITT: Now, when we come back from break, I'm going to give people a chance to go and read Kimberly Strassel's column. But it discusses how a president defeats obstruction. And she has some recommendations for him, as I'm sure you do and that I do. And he ends up making up his own mind, as he obviously did yesterday when he called Fox and Friends.

But I was amazed yesterday. I listened to him and was saying, he's back in his element, freewheeling, swinging for the fences, swinging from the hips, hitting long balls. And the left melted down, because he said, oh, yeah. Cohen's handled a few things for me, including the Stormy Daniels thing. And they thought he made an admission against interests.

What amazes me, Larry, is that everybody knows that Michael Cohen represented Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels matter. And yet, they're trying to make it a news story. It's not news. What's news is Mike Pompeo.

What's news is that North and South Korea are meeting in the DMZ right now. I think it's over. It's been an 8 and 1/2-hour summit between Kim Jong-un and President Moon of South Korea. And their declaration that the 65-year-old armistice will soon be put aside in favor of a peace treaty.

That's news. That's not the Michael Cohen thing.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. And historic, right? It's a big deal. Just remember, in the end, these issues are not about Donald Trump. These are about the method of governing the United States of America. And these issues won't go away when Donald Trump eventually does, which, of course, he must and will.

And so the people who hate Trump, they say that the most reckless thing. In January, there was a spate of articles about how this man has fallen below the level of the presidency of the United States, because he had said, back to Kim Jong-un, who's now acting more human, just lately, that in response to a threat, we're going to blow up a bunch of your cities.

Trump responded I got a bigger nuclear button than you do.

HUGH HEWITT: Yeah.

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, first of all, it's not clear to me that that's unpresidential. Teddy Roosevelt, walk softly and carry a big stick.

HUGH HEWITT: Eisenhower said, if you use nuclear weapons, surely-- Korea will be destroyed as surely as night follows day. And people speak bluntly like that.

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, because if you are threatened in that way-- and that's such a big threat, right? Then all he did was respond to it. And the point is, now they're talking, right? And so, good.

HUGH HEWITT: Good. And when we come back, we'll talk about other ways that this most unusual president-- and that's how I just refer to him, a most unusual president-- deals with obstruction. Use this time to go and read Kim Strassel's piece in the Wall Street Journal.

I'll go and reread it. And you should do it as well. I'll be right back with Dr. Larry Arnn on the Hillsdale Dialogue. All things Hillsdale @hillsdale.edu.

HUGH HEWITT: Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt with Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, where leaders are made. Hillsdale.edu, for all of you folks looking for a place where your young son or daughter may repair to actually be educated, hillsdale.edu is for you.

All of our conversations dating back to Homer in 2013 are collected at hughforhillsdale.com. Dr. Arnn, during the break, people wonder what we talk about during the break. It's not just sports. It sometimes is high-minded stuff.

We're talking about federalism and the tension between state authority. And you were about to tell a story about Andrew Jackson and John Calhoun.

LARRY P. ARNN: So in the same Nullification Crisis in which James Madison was alive and intervened, Calhoun was Jackson's vice president. And Calhoun was a unionist and a pro-slavery guy. And he died before the Civil War. So he never decided which of those two things-- never got a chance to decide which of those things was the most important to him.

But South Carolina proposed that a state could, and it would, nullify the operation of a federal law within its borders. It's called nullification. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, when he gave his farewell speech to the Senate to go join the new sovereign country of the Confederacy, he gave a speech and said that nullification was a vain attempt to keep the Union together and misguided policy.

But anyway, so you see that things had gotten a lot worse by 1860.

HUGH HEWITT: Right.

LARRY P. ARNN: So there's a thing where Andy Jackson was a very salty guy. And he wasn't an aristocratic kind of guy. Calhoun was academic, and complicated, and tall, and reserved, and a very good talker, though. And Andy Jackson was a fighter. He was just really something. And Trump likes him a lot, right? They're kind of alike in that regard.

So Jackson makes a famous toast, just before Calhoun resigns from the vice presidency, "To the Union, one and inseparable now and forever." And Calhoun responded with a toast to the Union, "Next to our liberties most dear."

HUGH HEWITT: I hadn't heard that.

LARRY P. ARNN: Those guys were pretty good.

HUGH HEWITT: I had not heard of that exchange.

LARRY P. ARNN: Those tensions, the tensions that we're talking about right now, that is a feature of the secession crisis. I said it started in 1832. It didn't really. It started a bit before 1820 and the Missouri Compromise, when very large forces emerged that attempted to keep slavery in the advantage or to destroy it. And that and the movement of the Western lands is what drove the crisis. And it ultimately led to the Civil War.

HUGH HEWITT: You know what's a large question to me? I was reviewing the Northwest Ordinance, the mother of Ohio. So it's an important document. And it passed without opposition from the south, Dr. Arnn. And I mean, this is an unfair question to ask you to do in a minute and a half. How did it go from the recognition that that would be land forever free of the taint of slavery, but then the compromises fell apart?

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, no law ever passed Congress without opposition. And that one didn't either. But the opposition was mild. And the point was there were some Southerners who objected, but thought they saw other interests in the thing for them, which means the slavery problem was not central or intense. Which means-- because remember, Virginia gave up the claims to the Northwest Territory.

HUGH HEWITT: Right.

LARRY P. ARNN: And Jefferson, the slave holder from a slave holding state, is the one who caused-- Jefferson and Virginia caused this provision that there'd be no slavery in the Northwest Territory. Now, the Missouri Compromise is exactly 33 years later.

One human generation and the debate is transformed. Now you've got to parcel out who's slave and who's free with an idea of keeping the number, at least the partisans of the slavery, keeping the number of states equal or not deteriorating further, because there were more free states. And so they had to keep their power in the Senate.

And that means that a sentiment had grown up. And John C. Calhoun is the prophet of that sentiment. And John C. Calhoun, and Jeff Davis, and Alexander Stephens, and all those guys who we read in our Constitution reader, they just came to the view that evolution had created an inferior race.

HUGH HEWITT: They created a theology.

LARRY P. ARNN: Not all men are created equal.

HUGH HEWITT: They created a theology to prevent the Declaration of Independence from reaching its logical conclusion. We'll come right back with Dr. Larry Arnn and talk about what's in the Wall Street Journal. Peter Wallison, Kim Strassel columns, go and read them. Stay tuned.

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. Thank you for joining The Hugh Hewitt Show this morning. It's the Hillsdale Dialogue. All things great and lasting are talked about in this hour, the last radio hour of the week with Dr. Larry Arnn and one of his colleagues from Hillsdale College, hillsdale.edu.

But we also-- we love to get President Arnn out of bed early. He's president of a college. He often does not rise until noon. And so he's up early. And we get to talk with him about tweets as they occur from the President of the United States. And indeed, the President of the United States has tweeted.

HUGH HEWITT: "Please do not forget," writes the President of the United States, "The great help that my good friend, President Xi of China, has given to the United States, particularly at the border of North Korea. Without him, it would have been a much longer, tougher process." Dr. Arnn, he's declaring victory a little early here. I'm worried.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah, well, there will be another tweet before the morning is out. And so I wouldn't worry too much. But that's the right thing to say, isn't it? I mean, the danger is he actually thinks that. And what he should think, in my little opinion, is that he should be watching, and talking, and paying the closest attention, because-- we were talking again in the break. I'm sorry people.

But the way this could go in North Korea is the unification of the peninsula under Chinese influence. Right? Which is what the Korean War was about in the beginning.

HUGH HEWITT: Yep.

LARRY P. ARNN: And the reason the line is where it is, is because the Chinese sent something like, if I remember right, a million people across the border to attack American soldiers under MacArthur. And it ended up in something like a stalemate. And that was some of the hardest fighting that the American military has ever seen.

And so China has ambitions all over Asia. And it's possible that this is an expression of Chinese ambitions. And I'm glad that it's going on. And of course, the talks have to be embraced. But then you've got to keep your eyes open, because this is dangerous stuff as well as opportune stuff.

HUGH HEWITT: Yeah. It is very, very complicated stuff, which brings us to the two Wall Street Journal pieces that you brought to my attention this morning. The first is by Kim Strassel-- always delivers amazing pieces, "How Trump Takes on Obstruction." The second is by an old acquaintance of mine, Peter Wallison, who succeeded Fred Fielding as counsel to President Reagan.

And Peter Wallison writes about senators on the verge of a political breakdown. So they are connected. How is the president dealing with the obstruction? The obstruction is primarily coming from the Senate, because of its rules. And Wallison writes that the government may cease to function because of this, Dr. Arnn.

LARRY P. ARNN: That's right. You could say, any time you set up a system, like ours, any time-- there's only one like ours, and only one that's really ever worked. And the fault lines between the branches, and between the federal government and the states, are where many of the greatest controversies arise. And those controversies are generally good.

This one is good, because this column this morning, for example, makes the point that the branches are at such loggerheads that they can't. The government might not function. And that's a signal to the people that they'd better start thinking about this. Because in the end, all of this is under their control, not the Supreme Court, not any branch of government, not the states. In the end, the constitutional majority, to quote Lincoln in the July 1861 message to Congress, a constitutional majority, and I'm paraphrasing, easily shifting with time and circumstance is the only true sovereign of a free people.

So these conflicts-- and it is true that the executive branch can be crippled. And it's good to state what would cripple it. There's an alliance between large parts of the Congress, a vast bureaucracy that makes most of our laws, and the court system that protects that bureaucracy. And those three things become a force unto themselves. And then the proper constitutional functioning of the government, in all three branches by the way-- we're talking mostly about the executive today, where the problems are acute and immediate, because the executive has to act in acute and immediate circumstances.

But all of the branches are distorted. And they fought into each other's clothes. Congress executes. The courts make laws. The president is a figurehead. And if we like him, we celebrate how great he is. But enormous things go on all the time without his direct control in the execution of the law.

So that's what the crisis is. And it's not-- and people think it's Trump. The reason Trump is the occasion-- Churchill had a saying. He'd say, big wars often start on small occasions, but never for small reasons. And so it looks like Donald Trump is causing all of this. But these problems have been present and growing. They started and they have been growing since the 1960s.

And Trump is the occasion, because he's trying to change things. He tried, for example, to restrain the bureaucracy.

HUGH HEWITT: He is direct. And in response-- and we also have around us a media culture now, which is ubiquitous-- and I am part of it. And you are part of it by being here-- that never stops. And it needs to be fed. And it feeds off of controversy. And it rewards the irresponsible.

So that, for example, Jon Tester of Montana, who is, just simply an embarrassment to the state of Montana, attacked an admiral in the United States Navy, Ronny Jackson, with unsubstantiated pages of allegations, including that he was drunk, and driving, and wrecked a car.

There's not a lick of proof of this. He just put it out there to drive him from the nomination process. And he was successfully so driven. Yesterday's hearing of Scott Pruitt was nothing but an avalanche of javelins, if I can mix metaphors.

And he endured it all. And he was fine. And he doesn't care. He's a smart guy. And as Ken Cramer, who's going to be the new senator from North Dakota said, I have never before seen a cabinet member who is in command of the facts of his agency as you are, Administrator Pruitt.

And I know Scott. He's a friend of my son, works at EPA. I always say that. But the fact is he's very, very smart. This is the war that is being waged because of the policy. And I want to read what you pointed out to me, the four paragraphs of Peter Wallison's piece.

"Some may think that Democratic senators today have simply been seized by the temporary insanity of their base. And that the old tradition will eventually reassert itself. But this hope ignores political reality. Republican senators also have a base. Although generally more respectful of the Constitution's structure, the GOP base is likely to insist when the next Democratic president takes office, that Republican senators follow the precedent Democrats are now setting. Things could get worse next year. If the Democrats gain a Senate majority in this November, that probably means no Trump nominee, other than one approved by the resistance, will be able to win confirmation thereafter.

Even if Republicans keep the Senate majority, it is only a matter of time before the tables are turned. Both parties could be caught in the same senseless game of retaliation. It's hard to imagine how this ends well. If there's a ray of light, it is that a wide majority of Americans would doubtless agree that the president they elected should be given the opportunity to govern.

This quiet middle should vote against the senators who are endangering the system. Any senators who care more for the institution than for their popularity with either side should see this group as a base from which to speak to the better angels of our nature. One example is Mr. Coons. Chris Coons, the Democrat from Delaware, who put a foot forward by dropping his opposition to Mr. Pompeo and voting present instead.

Perhaps he realized that a negative committee vote might have weakened both the new Secretary of State and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Given the temper of the times, it was almost a heroic act. And no one would want to be reading Mr. Coons's mail this week. But this is a point in U.S. history when a profile in courage consists of merely doing what most Americans would say is the right thing." That's eloquent, Larry Arnn.

LARRY P. ARNN: Oh, yeah, and timely. And see, that's exactly right. That's the Senate. I don't know why he did that. It sounds like Peter Wallison can't be sure. But I think it was a brave act. And that is the old temper of the Senate that we ought to be recovering, right?

That temper, if you just think, some of the greatest debates in Senate history involved John C. Calhoun, involved Jefferson Davis, involved Daniel Webster. And that used to be the best show in town. And it went on for years. And they were arguing through the slavery controversy in all of its many aspects.

The aspects were, to list them, the rightfulness of it. Claims advanced for the first time in American history that it was right, that it was a positive good. And then they included the constitutional issues, which are complex. What can the federal government do about slavery in the states?

What is the scope of the federal control of the vast federal territories, larger than the incorporated states and territory? Could the Congress forbid slavery in them? Could the Congress, could a state, free state, forbid me taking-- as the argument goes, the most extreme argument, constitutional argument, in favor of slavery is this, a slave is a piece of property. And wherever I take my property, into the federal territories, in my own state, or into a free state, it's a piece of property. And the federal government is required to protect it. You see?

And if you just think about the great and terrible Dred Scott case-- Dred Scott was a slave, who was taken both into free territory, Wisconsin, and into a free state, Illinois. And then with the help of some of his former masters, he sued for his freedom on the ground that he'd been taken out of the jurisdiction where slavery was protected.

And the Supreme Court ruled-- and see the conflict between the branches. Think of this, the Republican Party had been born, back when it was a genius party, had been born with the idea that we won't touch slavery in the states but will forbid it in the territories. And that will place it in the course of ultimate extinction, a constitutional way to destroy that institution. It will take time, alas. But that was the way. So what Taney did in a divided court--

HUGH HEWITT: The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

LARRY P. ARNN: He ruled it as unconstitutional.

HUGH HEWITT: And he did it, by the way, by grabbing power that was not his. He invented a controversy. He could have dismissed that case for lack of standing, which he did. He announced that Dred Scott had a lack of standing, because he could not be a citizen, because he was a slave.

And then he could have ended it. But he went further than that, Larry Arnn. And in an act of grabbing power that was not his, which is what the Senate is doing right now-- in an act of grabbing power that was not his, he brought about a civil war that killed 600,000 people.

LARRY P. ARNN: That's it. That's it. And like everybody else, he was trying to save it, right? He was trying to settle the matter. He was trying to put it to bed. And he was a fool. But that was his intention. And see, that's the point, right?

It's the reason why I do what I do for a living. On most days of the week, I live like a fraternity boy and, as you say, go to bed at 2:00 and get up at noon.

HUGH HEWITT: We are going to keep that. Dr. Arnn. Stand by.

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt with Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College. Now, it is time praise Mitch McConnell, the leader of the United States Senate. We've been bashing his institution, but for a couple of reasons, not the least of which, negotiating the approval of Mike Pompeo to be the Secretary of State, Rick Grenell to go to be our ambassador to Germany.

But he also invoked cloture yesterday. He's going to move six more appellate judges, federal appeals judges, bringing-- they'd already done that successfully 15 times, including Kyle Duncan. They're all originalists. 15 is the number that George W. Bush had confirmed by the end of November in his second year.

It's only May. And we're going to blow past that number so far by the end of this year. But now he's faced with a problem, Dr. Arnn. Four of his colleagues on the Republican side have done some grandstanding in the Judiciary Committee, which is run by the able, and man of integrity, Chuck Grassley.

They do not want Robert Mueller to be fired. Now, the president said he's not going to fire Robert Mueller. And he shouldn't fire Robert Mueller. But it is within his power to do so. And it is not within the power of the Senate or the Congress of the United States to tell him not to do so.

I mean, that is a clear constitutional-- they can create the independent counsel statute if they want. But they cannot forbid the firing of a member of the Department of Justice. And so Mitch McConnell will have to take the heat for this. And I think he will. I do not believe he will allow a vote. And I think we should praise him for that.

LARRY P. ARNN: Oh, yeah. So this is what the Republican Congress tried to do to Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War. They had overwhelming majorities. And so they started dinking around with laws that would prevent the president from dismissing the officials, whom they had approved for him to appoint.

And so that went beyond the comment that you talk about, where you let the president appoint his people, because he's been elected to do the work. And it went to, we're going to control them now. They can't be fired, right? So just think, this is-- even then-- they were talking about cabinet officers by the way.

Lincoln is very clever. And so he put that to bed by calling a meeting of the senators leading that charge. And then he invited the cabinet members in question, too, and didn't tell either one.

HUGH HEWITT: I didn't know that.

LARRY P. ARNN: It's really clever. And he's got them all in the room. And they're all astonished to be there, because, of course, they've been talking in backrooms all the time behind his back. And he says, these senators here are saying that you guys have got complaints against me and think I'm incompetent, is that true?

And they all said no.

HUGH HEWITT: No?

LARRY P. ARNN: No. Of course they did, right? So the point is the president has got to do the job. And just think, what's at the back of this, right? Mueller is a prosecutor. James Comey is an agent, an executive agent of the United States government carrying a gun and deploying thousands who do. And so if you make a case that they must be independent, the question is independent of what?

And in the American government, every use of force is traced to an accountability directly or indirectly to the people. So in this case, in the case of the FBI and any federal prosecutor, that runs through the elected president of the United States. And if those people become independent, then that means that people carrying guns have the authority to decide what's done with you. And you can't remove them.

HUGH HEWITT: Now should, do you think, Leader McConnell attempt to make that argument? Or should he merely allow it to die and take the heat? That's a hard argument to teach a country with an attention span of a minute.

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, first of all, attention span is growing, right? Is your show growing?

HUGH HEWITT: Yes, it is.

LARRY P. ARNN: And it's growing because there's a lot of trouble in the country and the world. And people are paying attention. So I actually think he should do both things. I think he should let it die. And then having let it die, he should say why.

LARRY P. ARNN: Explain it. I think he also has to make an argument, as we approach these elections, that the Senate-- that voters of goodwill, even Democrats, must vote for Republican senators, because we cannot have the government grind to a halt because of an antipathy towards Donald Trump. Postpone your antipathy toward Donald Trump until we get to the public election of him or re-election.

In the meantime, give us a government that works, and that means a Republican majority. Or we will get nothing done. There will not be appointees. And by the way, Justice Kennedy, if you're listening, you've got to retire now.

You just have to, because if the Senate, because of politics malicious and enduring, flips, they will not confirm for two years. They will pervert the Merrick Garland precedent, which was right and proper, into a total blockade, which is not.

LARRY P. ARNN: I think there's two. Politics are confused, right? And there's two antipathies in the people right now that affect this question of Trump you said. There are people who don't like him. And there are people who don't like the Congress for not following him.

And a lot of those people, in both camps, are Republicans. And if the Republicans are split, that's the kind of thing that happened-- I mean, that's what destroyed the Whig party, which Abraham Lincoln was a middler and which place was taken by the Republican Party. So that's right.

In other words, there's just a lot of thinking people need to do. They need to understand these issues. They need to settle on what is the center of this problem? And my own view is it's a new kind of government that's gone up among us that's huge and entrenched in fighting against change.

HUGH HEWITT: And we will return to that next week with the next Hillsdale Dialogue. Dr. Larry Arnn, thank you.