The Executive Branch and the EPA, Facebook, and Free Speech

HUGH HEWITT: Morning glory, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. That music means it's time for the "Hillsdale Dialogue." Once a week, we go high, they go low-- the rest of the media. But we go very high, back to first principles, back to the origins of Western civilization and our wonderful constitutional republic.

This week with Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College. All things Hillsdale, including a brand new course on Western civilization, are available at Hillsdale.edu for free-- including Imprimis, their monthly speech digest, which you can get for free. I always recommend you give it for Mother's Day and tell your mom you paid for it. Hillsdale.edu, sign up for it. And all of our conversations dating back to 2013 are collected at HughForHillsdale.com. Dr. Arnn, good morning.

LARRY ARNN: Good morning, Hugh, how are you?

HUGH HEWITT: I'm great now, because we're going to have to talk in this hour, which may be one of the most consequential hours we've ever spent. I'm going to have to talk about Scott Pruitt. I want to say at the beginning, he's my friend. And my son works at the EPA. That way, as you always talk about-- Hillsdale K through 12, you always point out your daughter works at one of them. And that's because we disclose, right?

LARRY ARNN: Yes.

HUGH HEWITT: So that people can correct for the lie of the green. They can say, well, maybe we're disposed to like them more than we are. I don't think it's the case, in either case. But I always say it.

Now, here is my proposition for you. We have been going through the Constitution. Article II of the Constitution begins, Section 1, "The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America."

Full stop. That's the first line of Article II. Last night, our friend, Mark Levin, did a very edifying monologue on why Special Counsel Mueller works for the president, on why Scott Pruitt works for the president, on why the executive power-- there is no one who orders the president around. Can you expand on what the theory of the unitary executive means, because I think it's at the heart of the fight with the administrative state.

LARRY ARNN: It centers on the word "responsibility," which is a key word in two of The Federalist Papers, 68 and 70, written by Hamilton. And Charles Kesler, a friend of mine and a wise man, says that they used that term in this way-- responsibility-- in this way in The Federalist for the first time. I bet you can't find it an earlier text that does that.

And what does responsibility mean? It means you are accountable for what you do, ultimately, to the people, and you are watched. Now, you have a guaranteed term, short of impeachment. But that means you have time. But that means that everything that happens to the executive branch, there's no confusion about who did it.

It just means, "the buck stops here," Harry Truman's great sign he put on his desk. It wouldn't matter, if he put that sign there or not, everybody would know. And there have been attempts in American history, in particular against Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, during and right after the Civil War, for Congress to more or less appoint a committee that would oversee appointments to the executive branch.

And that means that the president could not fire somebody unless the Congress agreed. And Lincoln successfully resisted that, and Andrew Johnson, by the skin of his teeth, did. But what that would mean, if that happened was, then somebody-- who would I name as an example? Anyway, well, Trump's fired so many people, it's easy to come up with a list.

HUGH HEWITT: Tillerson, yeah.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, Tillerson, right. So Tillerson, he didn't win many hearts, right? In general, Trump, he doesn't just fire people. There's a lot of upgrades that come out of this, in my opinion. So Tillerson could have made his friends in Congress and on that committee.

And then the next thing you know, he'd be bickering in public, with his supposed boss, about who's doing what. And you wouldn't know who to blame. And so it's very carefully contrived. Much of the burden of the argument in The Federalist about the executive is that it will lead to protection if there's just one of them.

HUGH HEWITT: Just one of them, yes. And they are in charge. And so, if the trade war goes well with China, it is because Donald Trump initiated it and followed it through. Larry Kudlow may explain it. We might need some additional explainers out there. But it is Donald Trump's trade policy.

And if EPA successfully fights back at the Clean Power Plan, at the Waters of the United States Rule, at the CAFE standards and gets us out of the Paris nightmare, Scott Pruitt may have done it. It may have made him very popular, as he is, with the Heritage Foundation, with Freedom Works, with Americans for Prosperity, and a bunch of senators named Cruz and Rand Paul and James Inhofe.

That doesn't matter. He works for Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump doesn't like him, he can fire them. And if Donald Trump likes him and the New York Times doesn't, he can keep him. And when it comes to the upgrades, Mike Pompeo at State, Gina Haspel to CIA, John Bolton arriving on Monday, what they do is important, but they all do it for the president.

LARRY ARNN: That's right. That's right. If you read the New York Times, which I do pretty often, they're often breathless, speculating about these firings. But they never seem to happen because the New York Times calls for it.

HUGH HEWITT: Well, you know, I got to read this to you. In the New York Times, they're throwing the kitchen sink at my friend Pruitt, right? They're down to everything. And here is the latest indictment of Pruitt.

"Several senior staffers separately used the word 'toxic' to describe the atmosphere at the agency, with its political appointees adopting a bunker mentality amid the questions about Mr. Pruitt's behavior. Some career civil servants at the agency, many of whom have worked there through several presidential administrations and are dismayed over Mr. Pruitt's policies, appeared hopeful at the prospect of the administrator's downfall. I had to laugh." End of quote.

Larry Arnn, when you take over an agency with 14,000 people that's been run by Gina McCarthy and Lisa Jackson for eight years of power-grabbing, anti-constitutional imperialism, you're not going to like the guy who comes back talking about rule of law, are you?

LARRY ARNN: No. And see, never mind that he's a friend of yours. That's the only thing I know against him. He is a thoughtful man, right? He's a lawyer, and yet seems highly intelligent. And so just look at what he does, right? He's trying to follow the law. And the law is strong. It gives the federal government great powers in protecting the environment. It just doesn't give the EPA the power to make its own laws.

HUGH HEWITT: That's it. That's it. And that's what really is the issue here. There's all this nonsense about the apartment. It's all just nonsense. It's absurd. It's really the administrative state and its clients in the environmental movement-- and we know them well-- fighting back to regain control of the mothership, which they've lost the deck of.

LARRY ARNN: That's right. And see, remember this. What they will think, what the clients, that you just named, will think when you say that is, yeah. It's being delivered into the hands of the clients in the corporations that want to pollute the land. Well, maybe. But the real point is neither group of clients is supposed to control the EPA. The EPA is to carry out laws passed by elected representatives of the people and enforced by an elected president, who is accountable and, therefore, responsible.

HUGH HEWITT: And is in charge of the EPA, which brings me to the second major point that Mark was making-- Levin-- last night.

Mr. Mueller has special powers pursuant to regulations promulgated appropriately under the Administrative Procedures Act and at the Department of Justice. They are not unlimited. He must answer to Rod Rosenstein, because the attorney general is recused. And under those powers, he has made it known to the president that he is not a target of the investigation but remains a subject of it. Which in US attorney speak and prosecutor speak, means, we don't think you've committed a crime, but you're on the peripheries of this thing. But you haven't committed a crime, by everything we know, as of a week ago. That's the report. I don't think the president should sit down with an inferior officer, Special Counsel Mueller. I don't think he can be subpoenaed. I don't think there's any upside. I think they'll try and trap him in the law and then file a report with Congress.

And Mark Levin is on the warpath about this. What do you think, Larry Arnn?

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, I don't-- I agree. You know, Trump is a very cagey guy. And Trump is talking to two constituencies. And one is inside the Beltway, including Mueller himself, and the other is the rest of us. And he wants to demonstrate to the rest of us that he hasn't done anything wrong. I mean, the colluding with Russia thing is implausible, right?

You know, at one point, Mollie Hemingway wrote a very good column about this in The Federalist lately. They were trying to style Jeff Sessions as an agent of Russia. And that's just not plausible, right?

HUGH HEWITT: No, it's not.

LARRY ARNN: It isn't plausible that Trump would be that either. But Trump wants to demonstrate, clearly, that he's confident. And he wants the people to know he didn't do this. He didn't betray their interest to the Russians. And he laughs at it mostly.

But I agree with you, that this thing about talking to Mueller-- "Muler," however you say his name-- it might be a better policy to pour contempt on him. You know, he's just a prosecutor, right? I appoint all the prosecutors. If you don't have that, by the way, just remember, if there's a judicial or legal officer who can take the president down, effectively, that person becomes the president.

HUGH HEWITT: Which is why you cannot indict a president. We're going to come back to this. Again, Article II, Section 1, Line 1, there is only one president. I'll be right back. Stay tuned, America.

Welcome back, America, it's Hugh Hewitt. Thank you for joining me this morning on the Hugh Hewitt Show. It's the "Hillsdale Dialogue," that time of the week when I'm joined by Hillsdale President Dr. Larry Arnn or one of his colleagues at Hillsdale-- all things Hillsdale, at Hillsdale.edu-- to talk a matter of first principles or history.

In this case, the first principle, what it means to have a unitary executive. During the break, I went and read David Brooks, who's one of my favorites, but he's now engaged in Pruitt-stomping. And I wonder if people understand, Dr. Larry Arnn, how engaged the left is. Tom Steyer is pouring lots of money into organizing attacks on all of Trump's appointees, not just Pruitt, for the purpose of, I think, deterring people from going into the government, basically.

And they're going to do it to Gina Haspel, who's going to the CIA. They're going to do it to Mike Pompeo. They want to bleed everyone for a simple purpose. They never do it to the left. They didn't do it to Gina McCarthy or Lisa Jackson and their travels. They didn't do it to John Kerry and his travels-- they just do it to us, for a purpose of deterring people from going in.

LARRY ARNN: Well, of course they do. And the presidency is a big, powerful office. And you need lot of help. You've got to have a bunch of people. And if the conditions under which those people work deteriorate, then you might not get as good of people. Of course, it could also work the other way. You might get better people.

I don't see Scott Pruitt backing down. And you know, he seems to be a pretty tough guy. And all of this, you know-- and just think about his situation. I talked to Betsy DeVos about this one time. You know, she's in that big old building sitting up there at the top of it. And she knows like-- back when I talked to her-- like six people in the whole building who came to help her.

And Scott Pruitt is surrounded by people, many of whom mean him ill. And so that means that the donors who want to take him down and David Brooks-- I haven't read his column-- but they got plenty of sources.

And I'm glad you started quoting that thing by Mark Levin today, because people should remember the constitutional point. Scott Pruitt is supposed to do two things. He's supposed to do what the president says. And he's supposed to do what the law says. And the art is to reconcile those two things. And you know, I don't know of Trump giving anybody any orders to do anything illegal.

So as long as he does that, he's doing his job. And he does it just so long as the president wants him to do it. And that's why-- and just remember the point about that. If these people got to pick who the president's cabinet was, then these people would be responsible for their actions, the cabinet officers. But nobody elected these people to do that. In fact, their names are unfamiliar to most everybody.

HUGH HEWITT: Right. And that goes back to why the framers set this up, so that responsibility, and with that accountability, would be vested in one individual. It's, by the way, why the president could fire Scott Pruitt, if he didn't like the way it was going, or keeps him. He sends a message one way or the other. Acting or not acting, he sends a message. But with Mueller, he's allegedly not allowed to fire him. He actually can fire him, but it becomes a political issue.

And I've begun to think-- and tell me what you think about this. I don't think the president's afraid of impeachment. And if you're not afraid of impeachment, because you think, like Bill Clinton, you can't be convicted, you're going to be a different kind of president. In fact, all along he's been a very different kind of president. I may be late to this game, about his indifference to the opinions of the collective empowered.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, well, the sentence, I don't think the president is afraid, is generally true.

It is very remarkable, right? I mean, just think about his experience in politics. He was the darling of the press for months and months. What an unusual guy, you know? And of course, a lot of them were calculating, this guy could never win the general. We want him! He's the one to put up against Hillary.

But once he's the nominee, by the way, that stopped in a heartbeat, as it did for John McCain years earlier. Maybe John McCain was surprised. Trump seemed unfazed by it. And all this stuff since he's president is worse. And he seems unfazed by that.

HUGH HEWITT: Completely. I'll be right back with Dr. Larry Arnn. We turn to China, after the break. What is going to happen next with the trade war? Don't go anywhere. It's the Hugh Hewitt Show.

Welcome back, America, it's Hugh Hewitt. Thank you for listening. I have to explain to my new affiliates-- WQTK, 92.7 FM, "The North Country's News and Talk Authority," in Ogdensburg, New York, WATN, 1240 AM, "North County's News and Talk Leader," in Watertown, New York, WWLZ, 820 AM and 101.3 FM, "The Talk Station" in Elmira, New York, and WWSC 1450 AM, "New York and the Tri County's Talk," in Glens Falls, New York-- that every hour, at this time of the appointed hour of the week, I talk, with Dr. Larry Arnn or one of his colleagues from Hillsdale College, about big things, about big issues, and about old books, and about old writers, and about the ideas that endure.

And Dr. Larry Arnn and I are old friends, although he is loathe to admit it. And so we often veer into trying to harm the other's reputation, publicly. But we also cover breaking news.

Dr. Arnn, NBC News is reporting that the United States Treasury says it has sanctioned numerous Russian oligarchs, government officials, and company over malign activity around the globe by Russia, including in Ukraine and Syria, subversion of Western democracies, and malicious cyber activities.

Mark Knoller adding that the oligarchs are seven in number, and 17 senior Russian officials, not Putin himself-- for the brazen malign activity and aggression against Ukraine and support for the Assad regime.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump said, no one's been tougher on Russia than he has. And some of our colleagues in the mainstream media laughed at him and my friends at MSNBC. But the truth of the matter is, he gave lethal weapons to the Ukrainians. He's gotten NATO to up its budget. And now he's hell on wheel on the sanctions.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah. Well, it's possible. The narrative is that Donald Trump, somehow, made a deal with some Russians to rig the election, because they could do cyber stuff. And I don't know what else they're supposed to have done. That's always been implausible to me, because it would be stupid. Trump set out and probably will return to the point that we ought to try to get along with Russia.

And my own view, derived from long study of Winston Churchill, is you ought to try to get along with everybody, because you're always going to have more enemies than you want. But having said that, look at these things, right?

And these Russians-- it is an oligarchy. What it is, Russia is a despotism of a different kind now. And the Russian people, alas, are given to that kind of thing. And they have elected him. And they're just running riot around the world. And so he's going to try to stop it.

And also, remember the background to all of this. When Donald Trump is a candidate for public office, he is for much larger defense spending. And that means our enemies around the world and potential enemies-- North Korea, enemy, China, potential enemy, Russia, potential enemy. Those are all places where the rulers stay in power through force. And that means they understand force.

And so the idea that Russia would think it in its interest to favor Donald Trump in the election over Hillary Clinton, when Donald Trump says he's going to build up the military, which he is now doing, that's something in the background that's fundamentally important.

And all these stream of stories and gestures and charges and counter-charges that go on day after day, just imagine that we were in, say-- to name a very noble country that is a great country-- Belgium. Would anybody be taking notice if the prime minister of Belgium was saying things like this about Russia or doing something to Russia? Belgium is not a powerful country.

HUGH HEWITT: Right.

LARRY ARNN: So that thing, see? In the end, why is Donald Trump trying to build up the military? He wants the United States of America to be strong.

HUGH HEWITT: The master narrative term has been coined by Ross Douthat at the New York Times. A very wise guy, and he's got a great new book out about Pope Francis-- and that Pope Francis is, in fact, causing deep divisions in the Vatican-- To Change the Church. You might want to read the interview I did with him yesterday. But he's a very divisive figure.

But the master narrative of the conservative Catholic is different from the master narrative of the liberal Catholic. The master narrative of the left in the media is that Putin has Trump in his pocket, somehow. But the master narrative of the facts is that $700 billion for the Defense Department is $700 billion. And getting rid of sequester is getting rid of sequester. And lethal weapons to Ukraine are lethal weapons.

And getting NATO to ante up is getting NATO to ante up. And sending cruise missiles into Syria is sending cruise missile into Syria. The master narrative, the facts is, he's been hell on wheels on Russia, whereas President Obama lent over to Medvedev and totally said, tell Vladimir that, after the election, things will be easier.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, that's it. You know, I always forget that thing. Thank you for bringing it up, because that is shameful. And see, it's not shameful if, in fact, it's in the interest of the United States of America. It just isn't.

Because, of course, presidents make deals like that all the time. And that could even be a Machiavellian thing that Obama said to set up Russia. He just didn't do anything about it. He didn't do that.

HUGH HEWITT: It all depends on things we don't know. But the media is interested in reporting a story and a narrative. And there's value, there's money to be made in beating up on Trump. And there's money to be made in defending Trump. That's why you have MSNBC and Fox.

I'm not sure what we do about the real story. Because often, we don't get the real story for decades, right? We don't understand what the heck is really going on at the Vatican right now. And we don't need to go. But we do need-- and this brings me to The Atlantic and the firing of Kevin Williamson.

Are you familiar with the facts of this controversy?

LARRY ARNN: No.

HUGH HEWITT: Well, Kevin Williamson, fine writer at the National Review, but he wrote a very controversial tweet that women should be hanged if they had abortions, many years ago. It was a tweet. It's over the top. I don't agree with it. I'm sure you don't agree with it either. So The Atlantic got a fusillade of criticism from the hard left. And it kept up. So they fired him after hiring him a week ago. They fired him on the basis of this one tweet. What do you think about that?

LARRY ARNN: Well, I mean, first of all, they ought to have done their due diligence. Yeah, so he shouldn't have written that. But, is that a firing offense?

And also, wouldn't you have to judge things like that generally? So let me try to compare it to something I know. So I have a lot of faculty members working for me. And they have something in common with me. They say silly things sometimes. So if I fired them every time, that would be really bad.

And you know, the proper comment is, that was silly. And in my experience, they always say, yeah, you're right, it was. And then you have your agreement, right? At least that particular silly thing, we're not going to say again.

So there's a million things The Atlantic could have done, apart from that. But just think how weak that is and seems. Because whatever forces caused him to be fired, they have established control over the editorial content of The Atlantic.

HUGH HEWITT: It's run by a very smart guy, Jeffrey Goldberg, who is a friend of mine. He'd been on the show this week, after he did a rather revolutionary interview with Mohamed bin Salman, the new Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

And I just think it's hard to be an editor these days. It's hard to be in the public eye, because the amplification of the extremes that occurs online requires people to have very thick skins or just simply to ignore it. You can just mute it. And that's basically what I think you have to do. If you're going to be an honest intellectual, you're going to explore the logical arguments out there.

For example, Facebook. You don't even use Facebook, so you have no idea what this controversy is about. Do you know what happened yesterday with Facebook? They announced that all two billion of the accounts, every one of them that had ever been opened, the information had been sold, had been scraped.

All of them. And one of my law students, yesterday, took me to a place on Facebook and said, I went there. And they know everything about me. They know I'm this age, that I'm heterosexual, that I'm dating, that I own this car, that I buy these things. And they've sold that information. So if you use the new media, you're basically naked in the public square. And I guess young people are OK with that.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, I wonder if they are. Those things last and, you know, better if they didn't. People need a private realm. And they have a right to it. And see, a lot of these agreements-- like, I read a good column about Facebook's practices. And apparently, if you give Facebook access to your contacts, what you think, when you do that, is that they're going to use that to make it easier for you to reach them.

What they do is they treat them just like they've ticked the box themselves. And they find out everything about them. So if you're friended-- like, probably you and me, Hugh. I don't use Facebook. Probably, you and I, they have all the same stuff about us, just because somebody friended us.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes. Now, I do have a public space, where the show's transcripts go up, but I don't use the messenger service. And what is most scary about this is people use the messenger service to write to other people on the assumption of privacy. And so I don't use it. It's not a threat to me. But for many years, people have used the messenger service to send Larry Arnn a message, from Hugh Hewitt, for example.

The question I have for Jeff Zuckerberg next week is, did they let that go? That's like turning over everyone's emails and direct messages to the world, in which case everyone's compromised. And I really do think it's an existential moment when people realize, if they give themselves over to social media, they're giving away their private space, as you just said. And everyone needs a private space.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah. And then, do you just think, in any job that you get, somebody is going to want that job. And if it gets to be a big enough job and the right kind of people want it, then all these things that you're talking about, about Tom Steyer and all these people after Scott Pruitt, there's material on everybody. And that can be used.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes, and for malignant purposes. And that brings us back to how to govern. These new entities exist out there, Google, Facebook, Twitter, to a lesser extent, Amazon, which is really just a warehouse. But the social media organizations exist. Do you think they need regulation, Dr. Arnn, in the way that the railroads assumed such concentrated power, in the 1880s, that the Interstate Commerce Commission was birthed in order to oversee it?

LARRY ARNN: I do. But I wouldn't go about it the way the way we go about it now. Because what we do now is appoint a federal agency and hire 10,000 bureaucrats, and they write detailed rules. I think Congress should pass a simple law establishing privacy rights and liability. And then people can sue. And I think the law needs to be very carefully written, so that it's not just lawsuits against everybody rich, and they're always profitable.

But I think that-- I'll say I work for Apple Computer, the politics of which I can't bear. But their business model-- they make a point of this all the time-- is they sell you stuff that works really nicely and costs more than the average. And they make their money that way.

And then, if they say that they're going to protect my privacy, I believe them. And I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them about any issue of public policy, but I believe that. Because they have contrived their company around that. And Steve Jobs, in whom I do have some faith-- now gone.

HUGH HEWITT: Tim Cook, his successor.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, and Tim Cook is a different kind of guy.

HUGH HEWITT: Hold that thought. We'll come back to who we trust and why we trust them in the public square. Dr. Larry Arnn, whom I trust, the President of Hillsdale College. 51 minutes after the hour, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. Thank you for listening this week. And thank you to Dr. Larry Arnn for doing the "Hillsdale Dialogue." All things Hillsdale, at Hillsdale.edu. All of our conversations, going back many years, collected at Hillsdale, HughForHillsdale.com.

The breaking news from the Washington Post staff, the new economic sanctions, the Trump administration's most aggressive action against Kremlin-connected individuals to-date, targets 17 government Russian officials, a state-owned weapons training company, and seven people known as oligarchs, and 12 companies affiliated with them. It's the most sweeping set of sanctions, ever, Dr. Arnn.

And I also wanted to bring to your attention a story over at Bloomberg Business Week, "How Facebook Helps Shady Advertisers Pollute The Internet." Quote, "They go out and find the morons for me." And it talks about going to a conference of the people who sell just the junkiest stuff on the internet. And Facebook helps them find the sweet spots, the scammed people, the targets, the marks.

It's a strange, crazy world, against which there is this book about the Pope, To Change the Church, which I'll be talking about with Ross Douthat on MSNBC, tomorrow, at 8 AM, in which he writes, "You and I might be too optimistic, that everything we trust about good institutions bouncing back might be completely wrong." What do you think?

You know, I'm kind of expecting Cardinal Sarah to become Pope Pius XIII and restore the Church and undo the craziness of Francis. I'm kind of expecting the natural order of the Constitution to assert itself and beat back the administrative state. And Ross is a pessimist. Where are you on this?

LARRY ARNN: Well, the future, though imminent, is obscure, said Winston Churchill. So first of all, beautiful and wonderful things decline, and they are sometimes lost forever.

And there's a story Churchill tells about a guy named Boris Savinkov, who warned David Lloyd George that you got to do something about this Bolshevik thing. It's going to be destruction for the world. And David Lloyd George says, well, you know, that every empire like that-- and he mentioned Rome. And Savinkov said, well, Rome was followed by the Dark Ages, was it not?

So you don't know. I mentioned Apple Computer. I don't like its boss, because he's a partisan, it seems to me. He lectures me about liberal politics in ways that I don't think he has any entitlement to do. But if Apple keeps making great stuff, they will be fine.

And that, by the way, is a point that he makes all the time. And the Catholic Church, I mean, in the end, isn't its fate going to be determined by whether its claim is true, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?

HUGH HEWITT: Right.

LARRY ARNN: And I think that, if that claim is true, that's dispositive. And if that claim is not true, then the Roman Catholic Church is going to pass away.

HUGH HEWITT: You took the words-- it's chilling. It's not chilling, it's funny. I said the same thing to my law students yesterday, when we were talking about the First Amendment and the Court, and that the Constitution works, eventually. It's a close run thing.

Mitch McConnell tweeted today, his greatest, most significant achievement is the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch. If Justice Kennedy retires and another Neil Gorsuch comes, the Constitution will be, at least on balance, preserved for another generation of jurisprudence. But it's a close run thing, always, Larry Arnn.

LARRY ARNN: Oh, yeah. And see, the courts have an outside power now, because they have made themselves the partner of the administrative state, where all the laws are made. And Neil Gorsuch is such a great appointment. And I can tell you, Don McGahn, White House Counsel, has said that the president intends that all of his appointments be like Gorsuch. That is to say, believing that the Constitution requires that the fundamental powers be in the popularly-elected parts of the government.

So there's a plan there. And Trump has apparently signed onto it. And so, yeah, that's right. And that is a major achievement by Mitch McConnell. Although, I'll tell you that I argued to him-- and like him, very much. I argue to him, the greatest achievement you could make would be to return the legislative power to the Congress, because that's the root of the problem anyway. One law in 10, or one law in 20 is actually passed through the Congress, and then the vast majority are made in a bureaucracy, the names of which are almost impossible to recall.

HUGH HEWITT: That's the administrative state. It's the great-- I don't use the term "Deep State," because that's Iraq's secret police, that's the Gestapo, that's the people that come and knock at your door and take you away to the gulag. But the administrative is real. And it's got its own interests. And it's growing.

And it has to be chopped back. It has to be brought under control. And that does require a Congress. But it requires more Republicans, too. You just can't do it with Democrats. They like it, right?

LARRY ARNN: Well, I don't know. I actually have had friends of mine who work on this stuff for a long time. And some of them are in the White House now. And they say that there are Democrats who understand that the Congress has become unimportant.

When this deal was made-- just remember, in The Federalist, Madison says, the reason separation of powers will hold is because each branch will have both a principle and an interest in protecting its authorities. The Congress gave away the legislative power. They thought they could manage this vastness they've created. Now this vastness ignores them.

HUGH HEWITT: And that may cause a fundamental shift. Dr. Larry Arnn, Hillsdale.edu, thank you, my friend.