Presidential Pardon Power and Treaty Power

HUGH HEWITT: Morning glory, America. From the ReliefFactor.com studios inside of sodden Beltway, Washington, DC, I am Hugh Hewitt, where it rains, rains, rains. When Bill Bennett retired, he didn't tell me when I moved from California I had to bring a boat. It is that time of the week, the last radio hour of the week, when we turn to matters of great importance, of civilizational lasting significance, with Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, in the Hillsdale Dialogues. All things Hillsdale collected at hillsdale.edu including Mike Pence's commencement address, including amazing online courses on the Constitution, on Winston Churchill, and many other issues. And for all of our conversations dating back to 2013, they are collected at hughforhillsdale.com-- the best serial-binge podcast listing available anywhere.

Dr. Arnn, good June 1 to you my friend.

LARRY P. ARNN: How are you doing?

HUGH HEWITT: I'm wet. Don't come back here without an umbrella.

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, there's another one. All the weather is coming from us to you, so wait till tomorrow.

HUGH HEWITT: Oh dear. Last night-- it just hasn't stopped raining for a month. All right. Let me begin quickly by saying I've known Dinesh D'Souza a long time. He's been on this show many times. I don't consider him a friend. He's an acquaintance. And in recent years he has become too edgy for me and over the line, and so I haven't had him on.

However, I always thought, along with Andrew McCarthy, that he was prosecuted unjustly. And, therefore, as Andrew McCarthy explains, I'm not surprised he's being pardoned. But we happen to be in the middle of Article II of the Constitution in our series. Article II, Section 2 provides that the president, quote, "Shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States except in cases of impeachment," end of quote. So the pardon power is in front of us. Dr. Arnn, do you think the president exercised it usefully yesterday?

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. First of all, anybody who gets pardoned-- I mean, there are people who commit violent crimes and do lasting damage forever, and so you've got to be cautious about that, right, because you don't want to do injustice to the victims. But the prosecution of Dinesh was questionable, and the meddling in campaign finance can be used as a partisan tool. Whereas transparency in campaign finance, it's harder to do that with. And that's the real solution. So, yeah. First of all, it's a questionable conviction.

But, second, that whole provision-- it's a very interesting thing you just quoted because it has two kinds of things. The first is the president can give mercy, and mercy is not-- you know, the quality of mercy is not strained. But the second thing is except in cases of impeachment, and what does that mean? That means the prosecutorial power is with the president and he can use it, including to do mercy, but there is an exemption. Because if you need to prosecute the president or a judge or another high constitutional officer, the process is impeachment and that's not in his hands.

That process is placed in political hands that are turned into a judicial process. The House prefers the charges, and the Senate tries them. And that's the way in which we hold the president accountable to the law or judges. And so I've always liked that passage as a clue to how we should think about corrupt presidents and how we get rid of them.

HUGH HEWITT: Now I want to quote Andrew McCarthy, he of National Review fame and famed former prosecutor. In his column yesterday, he began, "In Alexander Hamilton's view," quote, "'humanity and good policy'" close quote, "counseled that" quote, "'the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed.' Why? asked Andrew. Because all criminal justice systems occasionally work injustice, whether because of some laws that are too draconian or some enforcement actions that are too zealous or, worse, are politicized."

As Hamilton elaborated in Federalist No. 74, quote, 'the Criminal Code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel,'" close quote. "The selective politicized prosecution of conservative author, producer, and activist Dinesh D'Souza was an exercise in gratuitous severity. President Trump's pardon of D'Souza, announced today, is the remedy the Framers had in mind." He goes on and talks at great length about the specifics of the prosecutorial excess of zeal here, but that is interesting that Andrew had at his fingertips Federalist 74 and that it is an unfettered power.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah, I knew why we thought that guy was smart. You see, that's a fundamental thing. This will be in the news for, you know, 48 hours. It's not like it strikes any important political blow. If you just look at the thing, right, it's too bad.

I mean, Scooter Libby is my favorite example of this kind of thing. You may know he was an official in the Bush administration. He was prosecuted by Patrick Fitzgerald, who was appointed by James Comey as special prosecutor. And what did he prosecute him for? He just found something in his testimony, hours of it, and prosecuted him for obstruction of justice, I think it was. And there was a really great David Brooks column about Scooter Libby. And it said that Brooks had several times had lunch with Libby and that the most controversial thing he'd ever got him to say was something on the order of "I don't like mayonnaise." And he's a lawyer, that guy, and he's careful, and he's not a particularly partisan figure. I know the man.

But the special prosecutor, they put together this massive thing. They've got unlimited resources. They dominate the news, and they need to take a scalp. And so those things can go wrong, and they're very political, and in the way they are used today, in my opinion, they're unconstitutional.

HUGH HEWITT: Now, there is today, in the story-- I had Matt Zapotosky on from The Washington Post earlier today to talk about this. "Investigators from the DC US attorney's office recently interviewed former FBI director James Comey as part of a probe into whether his deputy, Andrew McCabe, broke the law by lying to federal agents, an indication the office is seriously considering whether McCabe should be charged with a crime, a person familiar with it said." This is one of those 1001s. It's what they charged General Flynn with, though that might have been a down-charge and we're not sure that that wasn't in lieu of something more serious.

But 1001 charges are the flimsiest of things, and they up-charged Dinesh by taking his campaign contribution crime-- and it was a crime what he did-- but they up-charged it by combining it with an 18 USC 1001 false statement act. And McCarthy makes the case that just double jeopardy, that's double charging. And it's a persuasive case. I am very leery of this statute, Dr. Arnn, because the occasions for false statement are many, often unintentional, and easily abused.

LARRY P. ARNN: You know, there's a saying that arose from these special prosecutor laws-- and we should say to the listeners that special prosecutors in state law are an old thing, well into early in the 19th century. And lawyers are trained to think, like people like Hugh Hewitt-- I warn you against them, O listener. But they're trained to think a good thing. And that is they're trained to think about conflict of interest, because you can't represent two clients who are adverse to one another.

HUGH HEWITT: Correct.

LARRY P. ARNN: Judges can't make rulings about things where they have some stake or personal involvement, and so of course you have to have conflict of interest laws. And then it gets transferred to a special case, because what if the person to be prosecuted is your superior in prosecution? And the superior of all superiors happens to be the president of the United States. So what about that?

And when you take that simple rule that's very important and very old and apply it to the president of the United States, you run up against a second thing. And that is the president of the United States is one of the three most important things in the government, and they are arranged in a system of separation of powers. And separation of powers, Madison writes, is the chief thing about the Constitution that will keep it safe. So the point is, they understood in the Constitutional Convention you need a way to hold the president accountable. And if you do it by these ordinary conflict of interest laws, where the president would then be recused from somebody prosecuting him because he's got a personal stake, he's the one being prosecuted, then-- because it's so easy in politics.

And so many partisan reasons abound to gin up some charges. Then that would take the president down. And people have a huge interest in this. So in their wisdom and it is, by the way, one of the most elegant things in the Constitution. They got both houses of Congress in charge of the process.

HUGH HEWITT: When we come back, we're also going to talk about the outrage over the pardon versus the silence over the non-use of the treaty provision. Stay tuned, America. Always talking the Constitution with Dr. Larry Arnn as the Hillsdale Dialogues continue. All things Hillsdale, hillsdale.edu.

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt in the ReliefFactor.com studio with Dr. Larry Arnn. It is time for the Hillsdale Dialogues. We are in the middle of it. This is the preface to my conversation. Dr. Arnn mentioned James Madison in the last segment. Last Sunday, fetching Mrs. Hewitt and I said, you know, it is only an hour and three-quarters to drive down to Montpelier, which is the home of James Madison, and we did that. And, Dr. Arnn, it's a remarkable place befitting a remarkable man.

LARRY P. ARNN: Oh, yeah. I confess I have not been there, and that's a shame. But people who have described it to me as being like him and, that is, sort of precisely arranged and compact. Is that what it's like?

HUGH HEWITT: Very. Very. And one room in which he labored over the notes of the federal Constitution, which he sold for money. But what struck us was a number of things. His mother lived to be 98. Another thing is that Dolley Madison would carry him on her back. But mostly it's a quiet place far away, and you've often thought-- you've made this argument that in the Constitutional Convention, people had to persuade. In the ratification convention, they had to persuade. In the first Congress, they had to persuade. Well, he learned how to do that by himself with a bunch of books, thinking, because it's in the middle of nowhere.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. Yeah. And think about that. That turned out to be an important thing, because just before the Constitutional Convention, he had to go talk George Washington out of withdrawing from the convention, and that was a hike. And he just got on his horse and went right there.

HUGH HEWITT: We tried to estimate how long that would take. We came up with it had to have been a two-day ride.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. Yeah. And just think. He was an extremely important man in enormous things. The people used to do their work in this atmosphere. I think it was good for them. He wasn't in communication with anybody all that time. So if he's two to four days on a horse, out in the middle of nowhere, with the Constitutional Convention looming, right? By the way, it shows the importance of George Washington.

And so just think, you know, back in the day, people-- the great Mark Helprin wrote a story in Forbes magazine about technology that lasted about three years and was very good. And it begins with a description of two ways of living. And one of them is a British statesman from the 19th century goes away on vacation in Lake Como. And, you know, Britain is ruling the world, and he's the foreign secretary, and it takes four days or five days to get a letter and that means 10 days to get an answer. And he's gone for a month or something. And his letters are reflective and intelligent, and they delegate in a way that describes ends and means only generally. And he's able to think and articulate that way.

And in the second one he dashes ahead to somebody in the 21st century. And he's in constant communication. And he's in so much communication that he has algorithms that devise his responses, and then he gives back responses from algorithms. And he sees from one of them that he has to adjust his algorithm, because it's being too whatever. He thinks it's being-- right. And that means that if you lived like James Madison, you didn't live in a swirl, and if you live like we live today, it's everything all the time. It's one reason--

HUGH HEWITT: And that is, you know, that is a true comment on-- what's the name of the story by Helprin?

LARRY P. ARNN: It's his first column, and I can only remember the name of the column. It's in a magazine called ASAP, and the column was under the title "Written on Water."

HUGH HEWITT: OK. I'm going to have to find that, because you do get that overwhelming impression that they had the time to think. And, moreover, Dolley Madison-- if the man who wrote Hamilton ever returns to writing about the Framers, there is a musical about Dolley Hamilton, widowed and bereft by the fever that swept Philadelphia. Towering over James Madison, marries him and nurtures him. Dies in penury because of her wastrel son, who's drinking lost-- that drank away all the assets that James Madison collected and accumulated, having been president. Dolley Madison saving George Washington's portrait from the White House-- I mean, what a remarkable human drama, but also lived at the pace at which life was intended to be lived, right?

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah, and think how much they produced, too, because it wasn't like they weren't doing anything, right? I mean, if you read Thomas Jefferson's letters, they're a massive body of work written in several languages. They worked hard in their study.

HUGH HEWITT: I will be back with Dr. Arnn, the Hillsdale Dialogues, to talk about pardons and treaties. Don't go anywhere. It's the Hugh Hewitt Show.

Welcome back, America, from the ReliefFactor.com studios inside the Beltway. I am Hugh Hewitt. This is the Hillsdale Dialogues, this week with Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College. Sign up for Imprimis, if you have not already done so. It's absolutely free. And I think it goes to a million and a half. How many people does Imprimis go to now, Dr. Arnn?

LARRY P. ARNN: 3.75 million.

HUGH HEWITT: See, if I miss a couple of weeks, it goes up by a quarter million. 3.75 million people receive Imprimis. Why be stupid? Get Imprimis, and get smarter, and it's free. All you have to do is go to hillsdale.edu and sign up for it, and you'll get a great speech digest almost monthly.

It is sometimes better to be lucky than well-organized, and I am very lucky this week, because we are in the middle of our Constitution series on this Hillsdale Dialogue with Dr. Arnn. All of them collected at hughforhillsdale.com. And we are in Article II, and we are in Section 2, the pardon power.

I will repeat for those of you who are late arriving. "The president shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States except in cases of impeachment." And many people are [? exercised ?] this morning about the pardon of Dinesh D'Souza and the possibility of clemency for Martha Stewart and the possibility of other pardons forthcoming and the past pardon of Scooter Libby. However, it is an unqualified power. I was trying to point this out to people on Twitter yesterday, Dr. Arnn, and it immediately precedes this power. "He"-- the president meaning-- "shall have power by and with the advice and consent of the Senate to make treaties, provided 2/3 of the senators present concur."

Now, everyone upset with the president-- not everyone, but many of the people upset with the president over the Dinesh D'Souza pardon said nothing about the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action with Iran, which gave $1.7 billion in American cash to a terrorist state without so much as a hello there, Congress. And Bob Corker, God love his misguided soul, passed the Iran Sanctions Act, which was an abrogation of the treaty power. So they are outraged over the president's use of a plenary authority, and they are forgiving, indeed did not raise a peep, against the abdication by the Senate of its authority or the president's grabbing of its authority when it came to the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action.

LARRY P. ARNN: See, it's a very good point. And just think of that. The reason, again, that this is serious-- it actually is more serious than the question of whether the Iran treaty is a good thing or not. If the arrangement of the powers is the key to the Constitution, the key to keeping it safe for freedom and yet strong enough to rule, which is what Madison said it had to do, then this particular thing you just read about the treaty power, that's one of those several places in the Constitution where the branches are required to cooperate.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes.

LARRY P. ARNN: And so, you know, Obama said the famous thing, "I've got a phone and I've got a pen, and I'm going to act if the Congress does not." And I will say something, and that is I say it in advance, if Donald Trump does things like that, then that's wrong. He mustn't do that. And I don't know of anything he's done like that.

HUGH HEWITT: And, in fact, today I was arguing with his exercise of the tariffs that he has placed. I'm against them. However, the authority that he employed was delegated to him by the Congress. They can take it back if they want. It's constitutional.

LARRY P. ARNN: That's right. It's delegated by the Congress and signed by the president, so they can't take it back by themselves.

HUGH HEWITT: No.

LARRY P. ARNN: But the point is that's a law, and they didn't-- so, when you proceed by law, you know, Trump is-- I pay attention to this because I endorsed Donald Trump after the primary and don't regret it today, but one thing I watch for is, when he talks about the rule of law, which he does, does he observe the rule of law? And there may well be some case arise where I don't think he did that, and if I do, I let the listeners keep me honest. It's not hard for me to be honest in this case, because I don't have any particular stake in Donald Trump. I care about the Constitution. And that's the point. Just think--

HUGH HEWITT: Let's pause for a moment. People don't believe us when we say that. They really don't believe, and that is the great divide. A new book is called The Great Divide. The great divide is between people who actually believe this thing works, that it is safe for freedom and strong enough to rule, and that to make it so for the long haul you've actually got to respect it. And that when the president exercises-- you might not like that his pardon power choices are not the ones that Barack Obama made or George W. Bush made or Bill Clinton made, although certainly Marc Rich is nothing to write home about or Puerto Rican terrorists or not pardoning Libby. I mean, you can argue about pardons all day long, but it's up to the president. That's constitutional. It is not up to the president to skip over the treaty power, or at least it ought not to be.

LARRY P. ARNN: Must not be. Must not be. And think about the unrestrained nature of the pardon power. That's a case where a citizen is benefited or forgiven, and there's no unrestrained power in the president to punish a citizen. And so think of the inclination in the Constitution that's present there. Like Marc Rich you talked about. He was a late-days Clinton pardon. Did I remember that right?

HUGH HEWITT: Yeah. An out-the-door pardon, and money is believed to have been-- vast amounts of money believed to have been involved.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah, and he's a rich guy who gave a lot of money to politicians and he was a fugitive. He fled the country. And they gave him a pardon at the last minute. And what I thought about that at the time was, shameful, well within his power.

HUGH HEWITT: That's exactly right. They say shameful, but the Constitution anticipated that. Now, what do you say about that JCPOA, about which the word "shameful" is never used, but it is actually such an abrogation of what was intended? So the people who get all twisted up over Joe Arpaio, whom I would not have pardoned, right? I would not have pardoned Joe Arpaio. I would not have pardoned Marc Rich. I would not have commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning. I would not have done any of these things, but they're all his.

It's his power, and it's the previous president's power. Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon is probably the most extraordinary exercise of the pardon power, and it probably cost the Republicans the election of 1976, and thus the country went down the Carter path. But it did bring us Reagan. You never know how it's going to work out. But not a word about the treaty power. So the people who selectively incorporate the Constitution into their thought aren't really thinking.

LARRY P. ARNN: Think about that Ford pardon of Nixon. That was, you know, very controversial and, as you say, had bad political effects for Republicans. I think that Ford knew that was going to happen. But the truth is there isn't any way you can put a sitting president of the United States in prison, under my reading of the Constitution, and that's explicit in the Federalist Papers, in Hamilton, which Mark Penn talked about on your show two or three weeks ago.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes.

LARRY P. ARNN: But, let's say, afterwards you can prosecute him. Well, if we get to the place where we're putting former presidents in prison, you know, that raises the stakes of politics in a whole different way. And so we should be extremely reluctant to do that. That's why I applauded when Trump, the day after the election, if I remember correctly, put aside all talk of prosecuting Hillary. And that's the right thing to do. And you just don't want, you know-- at some point even in the Soviet Union and in the Politburo, after Stalin and after the scramble of Stalin, they sort of reached an agreement. OK, guys sitting around the table here, we're not going to kill each other anymore. OK?

HUGH HEWITT: They had to get rid of Beria first, right? Have you seen The Death of Stalin, by the way?

LARRY P. ARNN: No, but I'm dying to see it.

HUGH HEWITT: You've got to go see it. Because when you've got a Beria-- would you explain Beria to people?

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, he was one of the inventors of the Cheka and the KGB, and he was meaner than all get out, right? In a police state, then the guy who controls the intelligence services and the domestic security services, he's the guy. He's like the commander of the Army. In any state that is governed by force, then the people who control the people who control guns, who carry guns, are the people who have to be subservient to political authority. The whole theory of the Soviet Union is against that.

And so Beria and the senior generals, all of those guys, those guys are political powers in their first right. And so they're killing each other. He's killing people. And you've got to think. You know, you're the commissar for something and a member of the Politburo, and you just don't want to cross that guy because they'll come get you in the middle of the night and you'll be dead by morning.

HUGH HEWITT: And when we did Darkness at Noon on the Hillsdale Dialogues when you were teaching your seminar on totalitarianism, I won't forget that they used to execute you as you walked down the hallway so you would be denied even the dignity of knowing the moment of your death.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. That's right. And, see, that also-- it was dark, not completely dark but dark, in the dungeon and there was no particular place to which you could go where people could come later and see this is where it's happened. It's not, you know. It's not a good thing to go up a scaffold and come down the fast way. But at least the scaffold is there and there's some formality to it, and that's the place.

And here, no-- like if there's an execution in the United States, they read out the legal orders that permit it, which has to be grounded in the laws that are passed by the Congress and signed by the president, or at the state level the state legislature and the governor. Judges, a third branch, have to agree. And all that authority is read to the prisoner.

And in Darkness at Noon, when they executed Rubashov, they just open the door and he knows it's time. And nobody says anything. They just walk down the hall, and all the other prisoners drum on their doors and tap out sentences to him, because they all know this tap language like the Vietnam War prisoners of the United States used. And so, that's right. No ceremony. No ritual. And you know you are entirely a creature of the state.

HUGH HEWITT: And that is what the Constitution is designed to prevent, and it only works if you actually live within its restrictions. And for people to assert that it is being dishonored or being broken via the pardon is simply-- I don't know if it's ignorance or malevolence or both, Larry Arnn. I really don't know, but it's one or the other.

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, first of all, some of it is just righteous anger. I don't like this guy, and I don't like he got pardoned. That's entirely legitimate in the American system. But more knowing minds carry the responsibility to point out, yeah, you can grump about this all you want to. That's your right. But this is not a violation of the Constitution of the United States.

HUGH HEWITT: That's what I spent most of yesterday doing online. Don't go anywhere, America. I'll be back because we have one final comment to talk about in terms of prosecutorial abuse, because it goes to all of the special counsel issues, all that is swirling around us. You might want to run off and see what Mr. McCabe is facing and remember Ted Stevens, the senator from Alaska who was hounded from office and wrongfully prosecuted. You cannot any time rest easy with prosecutors. They do their jobs. They're good, solid, wonderful patriots, but do not rest easy. I'll be right back with Dr. Arnn in the meantime.

Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. This is the Hillsdale Dialogues, the last radio hour, and this is the last segment of the last radio hour with Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College. All things Hillsdale found at hillsdale.edu. All of our conversations are found at hughforhillsdale.com, and everything Hillsdale. You've got to go and get the Constitution course, the Churchill course, et cetera.

Dr. Larry Arnn, as we have been talking, the Department of Labor released the latest job numbers. And the United States added 223,000 jobs in May, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 3.8%, which is the lowest reading since April of 2000. So it has been 18 years since America's unemployment number has been this low. So the only thing I can say about the tariffs is that if you're going to do this sort of thing, at least you could do it during a time of red-hot growth so that we can afford it. But that is kind of remarkable, is it not?

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. Well, did you see that on the Index of Economic Freedom-- and I'm not going to remember who publishes that thing-- the United States has jumped up three places to tops in the world. And we were forever tops in the world for 50 years, I think that's how long that thing has been going, since the Second World War. And then we, you know, in the last 30 years, with the growth of bureaucracy and regulation, have declined. And I think Japan and Switzerland and somebody was ahead of us. And we just jumped up a whole bunch.

And the job-creation strength of the American economy is a marvel when it works. And when it works, it works because we just think that every human being is a walking-around job, and they ought to find something to do, and they have the right to.

HUGH HEWITT: And average hourly earnings rose by $0.08 to $26.92 an hour in May. From a year ago, that's up 2.7%. That's higher than economists expected. Everything is on all cylinders. And so, of course, that isn't going to be the lead news. We're used to what happens during times of economic boom. The news turns to homeless people and other things. That's going to happen now, and it's going to turn to pardons. And I want to go back, though, and finish by talking about prosecutorial misconduct.

There are now five investigations. Hillary Clinton's server, closed. Investigation into how that investigation was conducted, open. Special counsel investigation, open. Investigation into how the FBI acted about the Trump campaign, open. And now investigation into whether or not Andrew McCabe lied, open.

So many investigations, so many headlines, Dr. Arnn. Do you think it matters, heading into November? Or does this understory of the overwhelming growth of the economy overwhelm those prosecutions?

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, of course, I don't know. The future, though imminent, is obscure. But I have noticed some things going on now. So you can know the present and a little bit about the past.

Along about the turn of the new year, all the things were-- all these stories were going to be the blue wave, and this is going to be historic. And then, you know, the radicals on the blue side of things said Trump will be impeached and out of office, you know by March of 2019. And you don't see those stories anymore now.

Now you see stories that Democrats have the edge in November. And I don't know whether they do or not. Historically they do. The party in power usually suffers in midterm elections. And I don't know how much or whether they will or not. But that looks to me like it's not playing that it's going to be a runaway.

And then you just listed all those investigations. One of my favorite things to say is try to reduce everything to three steps because you can remember them. And if you get to five, you've got to start making a list.

HUGH HEWITT: You're absolutely right. Now, I also think we're going to have an interesting election in California next week, right? And we're going to find out whether or not California's jungle primary shuts the door on Democrats taking it over, because there are at least three. The 38th, I believe, is where they've got three Republicans ahead of the one Democrat. Scott Baugh and Dana Rohrabacher are going to be in the run-off against each other. Diane Harkey is going to be running against Rocky Chavez. That crazy place that we used to call home is going to screw up the Democrats' plans even more.

LARRY P. ARNN: I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, you know, when you look out upon facts like that, like the politics of California, you know, this big court case this fall about redistricting, the way the millennials vote, the urbanizing of the country, you can make the case that the America that we have known is in eclipse. And it's very easy to imagine that. And Tom West, my friend and a great man, says sometimes nobody's responsible for what he thinks after midnight. And I think sometimes after midnight, it's all doomed.

HUGH HEWITT: It's all doomed.

LARRY P. ARNN: But when I get up in the morning, I just remember, I don't know about that. And look at all the great things going on, right? And anyway, I've got a really great job and I get to teach college.

HUGH HEWITT: You do. And there are 29 candidates-- 20 candidates running in the 39th, right? 20, and Assemblywoman Young Kim, who's been endorsed by Ed Royce and Bill Campbell, our friends, she's probably going to make the final. But Bob Huff might, and Shawn Nelson might, and if we're lucky no Democrats will make the finals in that race. I just want to say there is hope everywhere. Dr. Larry Arnn, good to speak to you.