It is an honor for me to join all of the distinguished lawyers in this room. Thank you for that introduction. I am the 85th attorney general. [laughter] attorney general barr chinese has come in handy because i find that when you read congressional enactments from right to left, they make a lot more sense. [laughter] [applause] attorney general barr it is an here this evening. And to deliver the 19th annual Barbara K Olson memorial lecture. I here this evening. Have had the privilege of being friends with ted since we first met in the reagan administration. Ted was head of the of his of legal counsel. Of the office of legal counsel. I miss barbaras in bullions d barbaras ebullience. I was trying to figure out what would be an appropriate speech to give here at the Federalist Society. I was having difficulty. I thought the notre dame speech had done so well. I was just going to deliver it again. [applause] but,ney general barr recognizing that this years annual convention is a ritualism is originalism, the theme of it, is an original choice. It is not unoriginal for the Federalist Society. We know the Federalist Society has played an historic role in advancing the principles of originalism. While other organizations have contributed, the Federalist Society has been in the vanguard. A watershed for the cause was the decision for the American People to send Ronald Reagan to the white house, accompanied by his close advisory and the cadre of others who were committed to an originalist approach to the law. I was honored to work with ed and ken in the reagan white house. I was also honored to be there several weeks ago when President Trump presented ed mees with the president ial medal of freedom. [applause] attorney general barr as President Trump aptly noted, over the course of his career, ed mees has been among the nations most eloquent champions for following the constitution as written. I am also proud to serve as attorney general for President Trump, who has taken up that george in his judicial appointment that torch in his judicial appointments. That is true of his two outstanding appointments to the Supreme Court. The preand Court Justices neil gorsuch and brett kavanaugh. Supreme Court Justices neil gorsuch and brett kavanaugh. [applause] attorney general barr and the numerous appeals and District Court judges he has appointed. The many outstanding nominees to come, many of whom are also here this week. [laughter] attorney general barr i wanted to choose a topic for this afternoons lecture that had an originalist angle. It will likely come as little surprise that i have chosen to constitutions approach to executive power. I admire the presidency as a political and constitutional institution. It is one of the great and remarkable innovations in our constitution and has been one of the most successful features of the constitution in protecting the liberties of the American People. More than any other branch, it has fulfilled the expectations framers. Over the past several decades, we have seen the steady encroachment on executive authority by the other branches of government. This process has substantially weakened the presidency to the detriment of the nation. I would like to expand on these themes. First, we say what the framers had in mind when establishing an independent executive in article two of the constitution. The Grammar School civics class version of our revolution is that it was a rebellion against an article tear any against monarchical tierney. It was to keep the executive week. This is misguided. By the time of the glorious revolution of 1689, m onarchical power had begun its steady decline. Was on itsry power way to supremacy and was in the drivers seat to by the time of the american revolution, the patriots understood their prime antagonist was an overweening parliament. British thinkers came to conceive of parliament as the very seat of sovereignty. During the revolutionary era, american thinkers who considered inaugurating a republican form of government tended to think of the executive component as an of a supreme executive branch. It was conceived as a creature of the legislature dependent on and subservient to that body. The sole function was carrying out the legislative will. Under the articles of confederation, there was no executive independent of the legislative power. Things changed by the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The real miracle in philadelphia was the creation of a strong executive independent of and coequal with the other branches of government. Consensus for a strong independent executive arose from experience in the revolution. They had seen the war was almost lost and was a bumbling enterprise because of the lack of strong executive leadership. Under the articles of confederation, they had been mortified by the inability of the states to protect themselves against foreign impositions or to be taken seriously in the international arena. Seen that after the revolution, too many states had adopted constitutions with weak executives subordinate to the legislators. Provenovernments had incompetent and tyrannical. From these practical experiences, the framers had come to appreciate that to be successful, a republican government required the capacity consistency,nergy, and decisiveness. They had come to agree that those attributes could be provided by making the executive power independent of the divided councils of the legislative branch and branch, investing the legislative investing the executive power to an individual bycted for a limited term the nation as a whole. As jefferson put it, further clear and Consistent Actions are necessary in an executive, unity of person, is essential. While there have been some differences among the framers as to the precise scope of executive power in particular areas, there was general agreement about its nature. Just as the great separation of powers theorists such as cke, justeu and lo as they had, the framers thought of executive power as a distinct species of governmental power. Executive power includes the responsibility for carrying into effect, executing the laws passed by the legislature. That is applying the general rules to particular situations. The framers understood that executive power met more than this. Meant more than this. It entailed functions such as the prosecution of war, which by their very nation, cannot be directed by a preexisting eagle regime, but demand speed, secrecy, unity of purpose, and prudent judgment to meet contingency. They agreed that due to the nature of the activities involved and the kinds of decisionmaking that are required, the constitution generally invested authority over these fears in the executive. Jefferson, our first secretary of state, describe the context Foreign Relations as executive altogether. Subject only to the explicit exceptions in the constitutions such as the senates power to ratify treaties. A third aspect of executive power is the power to address circumstances that demand quick action to protect the wellbeing of the nation on which the law is silent or inadequate such as dealing with natural disasters or plagues. This risk this residual power to meet contingency is discussed by locke. Finally, there are the executive powers necessary for internal management. These are the powers necessary for the president to control the executive functions, including the powers necessary to protect branchependence of the and the confidentiality of its internal deliberations. Some of these powers are expressed in the constitution such as the power of appointment , and others are implied, implicit in the constitution. For example, the removal power. One of the more amusing aspects polemic isrogressive their breathless attacks on the unitive executive theory. [laughter] [applause] attorney general barr they portray this as some new theory to justify powers of sweeping and unfettered scope. Some of you may have seen the horrible movie, vice, about vice dick cheney. He was chief of staff at the white house. Non in to meet the the young nina scalia, and they talk about this new nefarious theory that will allow them to take over the world. It is called the unitary executive theory. [laughter] attorney general barr some of you may recall when i was up for confirmation, all these Democratic Senators say how concerned they were to the unitary executive theory. [laughter] inorney general barr reality, the idea of the unitary does not go so much to the breadth of the executive power. Whatever the executive power may be, those powers must be exercised under the president s supervision. It is a description of what the framers did in article two. [applause] attorney general barr after you decide to establish an executive function that is independent of the legislature, the next question is, who is going to perform that function . The framers had two potential models. They could insinuate checks and balances into the executive branch by dividing the power within the executive. Alternatively, they could invest executive power in solitary individual. The framers uniformly chose the ter model because they believed in investing believed investing power in one person would invest the president with the powered necessary for government. Was insistent that executive power be placed in single hands. Unitary the americans executive as the single feature that distinguished americas success from frances failed republican experiment. The influence of the decision are obvious. Vestngress at thames to the power to execute the law in someone beyond the control of the president , a contravenes that it contravenes the vest theintent to power in the president. So much for this new theory of the unitary executive. You understand the framers expected the three branches would be jostling and jousting with each other as each threatened to encroach on the prerogatives of the others. They thought this was natural. They provisioned each branch with the wherewithal to fight and defend itself in these interbranch struggles for power. Let me turn to how the executive is faring in these interbranch battles. I am concerned the deck has become stacked against the executive. Since the mid1960s, there has been a grinding down of the executive branchs authority that accelerated after watergate. More and more, the president s ability to act in areas in which he has discretion has become smothered by the encroachments of the other branches. When these disputes arise, there are two aspects of contemporary wisdom, conventional that tend to operate to the disadvantage of the executive. The first is this notion that politics in a Free Republic is all about the peoples branch, the legislative branch, and the protectinganch, liberty by imposing restrictions on the executive. The premise is that the greatest of government, becoming oppressive, is from the executive. The prospect of executive success. Tendencythis kneejerk to see the legislative and judicial branches as the good protecting the people from a rapacious autocrat. Generalthe medias presentation of separations of powers. This is wrongheaded. It comes out of the english whig view of politics were political evolution was precisely the. You start precisely that. You started out with the king having all of the cards. He holds all power including legislative and judicial. Political evolution involved a process by which the legislative andr reigned in the king extracted and established its own powers as well as the powers of the judiciary. Certainly, a watershed in this revolution was the revolution of 1689. By 1787, we had the exact opposite model. Admired how greatly the british constitution had given rise to principles of balanced government. They felt the british constitution had achieved only an imperfect form of this model. They sell themselves as framing a more perfect version of separation of powers and a balanced constitution. Perfecttheir more construction was a new kind of executive. They created an office that was already the ideal whig executive. It already built into it the limitations that whig doctrine had aspired to. Ofwas subject to the writ habeas corpus. It was bound by due process. It was elected for a limited term of office. It was elected by the nation as a whole. That is a remarkable democratic institution. The only figure selected by the nation as a whole. With the creation of the american presidency, the whigs focus on the dangers of monarchical lost focus. Concerns were very weighent than those that d on the whigs of the 17th century. It was the danger of the legislative branch, which they viewed as the most Dangerous Branch to liberty. As medicine warned, the legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all powers into its impetuous vortex. They viewed the presidency as a check on the legislative branch. Way ofond contemporary thinking that operates against notion thate is the the constitution does not sharply allocate powers among the branches. The political branches share powers. That becauseork is two branches both have a role to play in a particular area, we should see them as sharing power in that area. It is not such a big deal if one branch expands its role within that sphere. Whenever i see a Court Opinion that uses the word share, i want to run in the other direction. There is a kid at my grandchilds preschool who as soon as my grandchild is playing with a toilet, with a toy, reaches over and says, share . [laughter] thisney general barr obscures what it means to share that powers are shared. Extends powersn to the areas. The legislative power is granted in the constitution. Whatever the legislative power is in the constitution, is granted to congress. At the same time, the constitution gives the executive a specific power in the legislative arena, the veto power. Shares legislative power but only to the extent of the grant of the veto power. The executive does not get interfere in the legislative power in a broader sense than that that was the legislative power that was assigned. To congress assigned to congress. Arelegislative and judicial responsible for encroaching on the president s authority. As i said, the framers fully expected intense pulling and hauling through congress and the executive. Unfortunately, from the past few years, we have seen these conflicts take on an entirely new character. Immediately after president opponentselection, inaugurated what they called the resistance. Around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver to sabotage the functioning of the executive branch. Resistance is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an Occupying Military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous and indeed, incendiary notion to import into the politics of the democratic republic. [applause] attorney general barr what it means is that instead of viewing themselves as the loyal opposition as opposing parties have done in this country for over 200 years, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple by any means necessary, a duly elected government. A prime example of this is the ofates unprecedented abuse the advice and consent process. The senate is free to exercise that power to reject what it deems to be unqualified nominees. That power was never intended to allow the senate to systematically oppose and draw out the approval process for every appointee so as to prevent the president from building a functional branch of government. [applause] attorney general barr that is precisely what the Senate Minority has done from President Trumps very first day in office. Year, theember this senate has been forced to invoke eachre on 200 nominees, representing its own massive consumption of legislative time meant only to delay the inevitable confirmation. Was closure times and vote on nominees of president Obamas Administration . 17 over eight years. How about the second president bushs first term . Four times. It is reasonable to wonder whether a future president will actually be able to form a functioning administration if his or her party does not hold the senate. Congress in recent years has largely abdicated its core the most pressing issues facing the nation. They either decline to legislate or if they do, they pond the most difficult issues by making broad delegations to a modern Administrative State that they seek to insulate from president ial control. This first arose in the wake of the Great Depression as congress created a number of independent agencies and housed them in the executive branch. More recently, the dodd frank of the cfpb, an agency that functions as a jr. Bar said he president for economic regulation, is one of many examples. Withdrawal from the business of legislating leaves it with a lot of time on its hands. [laughter] attorney general barr in the pursuit of this the choice of how to pursue what to do with all this time, they have decided , especially opposition party, to drown the executive branch with oversight demands for testimony and documents. I do not deny that congress has some implied authority to incidentversight as an to legislative power, but the sheer volume of what we see ofay, the pursuit of scores parallel investigations through an avalanche of subpoenas, is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch and indeed is touted as such. We all understand that Confidential Communications in the private internal deliberative process are essential to all of our branches of government to properly function. Congress and the judiciary know this well as both have taken great pains to shield their own internal communications from public inspection. Foia for congress and the courts. Congress has happily created a regime that allows the public to seek whatever document it wants from the executive branch at the same time the individual congressional committees spend their days trying to publicize the executive internal deliberations. That process cannot function properly if it is public, nor is it productive to have our government promoting enormous resources to squabbling about what becomes public and when rather than doing the work of the people. In recent years, we have seen substantial encroachment by congress in the area of executive privilege. The executive branch and the Supreme Court have long recognized the need for confidentiality in the executive branch means some communications must remain private. There was a time when congress respected this important principle as well. Today, congress is increasingly quick to dismiss good faith executive project branch equities, labeling such efforts obstruction of congress and Holding Cabinet secretaries, even the attorney general, in contempt. One of the ironies of today is that those who oppose this president constantly accused this administration of shredding constitutional norms and waging a war on the rule of law rule of law. There is no substance to these claims. When i asked my friends on the others, what exactly are you referring to . I usually get vacuous stairs and oruttering vacuous stares spluttering about the travel ban. The fact is, while the president has certainly thrown out the traditional beltway playbook and punk taleo, about what he was going to do, and the people decided they wanted him to serve as president. [applause] attorney general barr what i am talking about today are fundamental constitutional precepts. The fact is that this administrations policy initiatives and proposed rules, including the travel ban, have transgressed neither constitutional, nor traditional, norms, and have been amply supported by the law and patiently litigated through the court system to vindication. [applause] indeed, measures undertaken by this administration seem a bit tame when compared to some of the unprecedented steps taken by the obama administrations aggressive exercises of ascutive and i say that someone who admires a must or executive. The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, noholdsbarred war of resistance against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law. [applause] this highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have always had in contesting the political issues of the day. It goes back to the beginning of the republic. It was adverted to by the old, curmudgeonly federalist, fisher ames, in an essay during the early years of the republic. I paraphrase. In any age, the socalled progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides. What would we think if the shoe were on the other foot . Hear them irresponsibly tabling proposals to do away with the Electoral College or 2pac the courts. Who is shredding constitutional norms . Conservatives, on the other hand, do not seek an earthly paradise. We are interested in preserving over the long run the proper balance of freedom and order necessary for Healthy Development of natural Civil Society and individual human flourishing. This means that we naturally test the propriety and wisdom of action under a rule of law standard. The essence of this standard is to ask what the overall impact on society over the long run if what will be the impact on society over the long run if the action we are taking, or principle we are applying, in a given circumstance was universalized . That is, would it be good for society over the long haul if this was done in all like circumstances . Thats what rule is about and that is inherent in the conservative project. [applause] let me turn now to what i believe has been the prime source of the erosion of separationofpower principles generally, and executive Branch Authority specifically. I am speaking of the judicial branch. In recent years the judiciary has been steadily encroaching on executive responsibilities in a way that has substantially undercut the functioning of the presidency. The courts have done this in essentially two ways. First, the judiciary has appointed itself the ultimate arbiter of separation of powers disputes between congress and executive, thus preempting the political process, which the framers conceived as the primary check on interbranch rivalry. Second, the judiciary has usurped president ial authority for itself either by, under the rubric of review substituting , its judgment for the executives in areas committed to the president s discretion, or by assuming direct control , over realms of decisionmaking that heretofore have been considered at the core of president ial power. The framers did not envision that the courts would play the role of arbiter of turf disputes between the political branches. As madison explained in federalist 51, the Great Security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. By ambition will be made to counteract ambition. By giving each the congress and the presidency the tools to fend off the encroachments of the others, the framers believed this would force compromise and political accommodation. The constitutional means to resist encroachment that madison described take various forms. As Justice Scalia observed, the constitution gives congress and the president many clubs with which to beat each other. Conspicuously absent from the list is running to the courts to resolve their disputes. That omission makes sense. When the judiciary purports to pronounce a conclusive resolution to constitutional disputes between the other two branches, it does not act as a coequal. And, if the political branches believe the courts will resolve their constitutional disputes, they have no incentive to debate their differences through the democratic process with input from and accountability to the people. And they will not even try to make the hard choices needed to forge compromise. The long experience of our country is that the political branches can work out their constitutional differences without resort to the courts. In any event, the prospect that courts can meaningfully resolve interbranch disputes about the meaning of the constitution is mostly a false promise. How is a court supposed to decide, for example, whether congresss power to collect information in pursuit of its legislative function overrides the president s power to receive confidential advice in pursuit of his executive function . Nothing in the constitution provides a manageable standard for resolving such a question. It is thus no surprise that the courts have produced amorphous, unpredictable balancing tests like the Courts Holding in morrison v. Olson that congress did not disrupt the proper balance between the coordinate branches by preventing the executive branch from accomplishing its constitutionally assigned functions. Apart from their overzealous role in interbranch disputes, the courts have increasingly engaged directly in usurping president ial Decisionmaking Authority for themselves. One way courts have effectively done this is by expanding both the scope and the intensity of judicial review. In recent years, we have lost sight of the fact that many critical decisions in life are not amenable to the model of judicial decisionmaking. They cannot be reduced to tidy evidentiary standards and specific quantums of proof in an adversarial process. They require what we used to call prudential judgment. They are decisions that frequently have to be made promptly, on incomplete and uncertain information and necessarily involve weighing a wide range of competing risks and making predictions about the future. Such decisions frequently call into play the precautionary principle. This is the principle that when a Decision Maker is accountable for discharging a certain obligation such as protecting the publics safety it is better, when assessing imperfect information, to be wrong and safe, than wrong and sorry. It was once well recognized that such matters were largely unreviewable and that the courts should not be substituting their judgments for the prudential judgments reached by the accountable executive officials. This outlook now seems to have gone by the boards. Courts are now willing, under the banner of judicial review, to substitute their judgment for the president s on matters that only a few decades ago would have been unimaginable such as matters involving National Security or foreign affairs. The travel ban case is a good example. There the president made a decision under an explicit legislative grant of authority, as well has his constitutional National Security role, to temporarily suspend entry to aliens coming from a half dozen countries pending adoption of more effective vetting processes. The common denominator of the initial countries selected was that they were unquestionable hubs of terrorism activity, which lacked functional central governments and responsible Law Enforcement and Intelligence Services that could assist us in identifying security risks among their nationals seeking entry. Despite the fact there were clearly justifiable security grounds for the measure, the District Court in hawaii and the ninth circuit blocked this publicsafety measure for a year and half on the theory that the president s motive for the order was religious bias against muslims. This was just the first of many immigration measures based on good and sufficient security grounds that the courts have second guessed since the beginning of the Trump Administration. The travel ban Case Highlights an especially troubling aspect of the recent tendency to expand judicial review. The Supreme Court has traditionally refused, across a wide variety of contexts, to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action. To take the classic example, if a Police Officer has probable cause to initiate a traffic stop, his subjective motivations are irrelevant. And just last term, the Supreme Court appropriately shut the door to claims that otherwiselawful redistricting can violate the constitution if the legislators who drew the lines were actually motivated by political partisanship. What is true of Police Officers and gerrymanderers is equally true of the president and Senior Executive officials. [applause] with very few exceptions, neither the constitution, nor the administrative procedure act or any other relevant statute, calls for judicial review of executive motive. They apply only to executive action. Attempts by courts to act like amateur psychiatrists attempting to discern an executive officials real motive often after ordering invasive discovery into the executive branchs privileged decisionmaking process have no more foundation in the law than a subpoena to a court to try to determine a judges real motive for issuing its decision. [applause] the courts indulgence of such claims, even if they are ultimately rejected, represents a serious intrusion on the president s constitutional prerogatives. The the impact of these judicial intrusions on executive responsibility have been hugely magnified by another judicial innovation the nationwide injunction. First used in 1963, and sparely since then until recently, these court orders enjoin enforcement of a policy not just against the parties to a case, but against everyone. Since President Trump took office, District Courts have issued over 40 nationwide injunctions against the government. By comparison, during president obamas first two years, District Courts issued a total of two nationwide injunctions against the government. Both were vacated by the ninth circuit. [laughter] it is no exaggeration to say that virtually every major policy of the Trump Administration has been subjected to immediate freezing by the lower courts. No other president has been subjected to such sustained efforts to debilitate his policy agenda. The legal flaws underlying nationwide injunctions are myriad. Just to summarize briefly, nationwide injunctions have no foundation in courts article iii jurisdiction or traditional equitable powers of the courts. They radically inflate the role of district judges, allowing any one of more than 600 individuals to singlehandedly freeze a policy nationwide, a power that no single appellate judge or justice can accomplish. They foreclose percolation and reasoned debate among lower courts, often requiring the Supreme Court to decide complex legal issues in an emergency posture with limited briefing. They enable transparent forum shopping, which saps Public Confidence in the integrity of the judiciary. And they displace the settled mechanisms for aggregate litigation of genuinely nationwide claims, such as rule 23 class actions. Of particular relevance to my topic tonight, nationwide injunctions also disrupt the political process. There is no better example than the courts handling of the rescission of daca. As you recall, daca was a discretionary policy of enforcement forbearance adopted by president Obamas Administration. The fifth circuit concluded that the closely related dapa policy along with the expansion of the daca policy was unlawful, and the Supreme Court affirmed that decision by an equally divided vote. Given that daca was discretionary, premised on the exercise of executive discretion, and that four justices apparently thought a legally indistinguishable policy was unlawful, President Trumps administration understandably decided to rescind daca. Importantly, however, the president coupled that rescission with negotiations over legislation that would create a lawful and better alternative as part of a broader immigration compromise. In the middle of those negotiations, indeed on the same day the president invited cameras into the cabinet room to broadcast his negotiations with bipartisan leaders from both houses of Congress District , a judge in the Northern District of california enjoined the rescission of daca nationwide. Unsurprisingly, the negotiations over immigration legislation collapsed after one side achieved its preferred outcome through judicial means. And just this week, the Supreme Court finally heard argument on the legality of the daca rescission. The court will not likely decide the case until next summer, meaning that President Trump will have spent almost his entire first term enforcing president obamas signature immigration policy, even though that policy is discretionary and half the Supreme Court concluded that a legally indistinguishable policy was unlawful. That is not how our democratic system is supposed to work. To my mind, the most blatant and consequential usurpation of executive power in our history was played out during the administration of president george w. Bush, when the Supreme Court, in a series of cases, set itself up as the ultimate arbiter and superintendent of military decisions inherent in prosecuting a military conflict decisions that lie at the very core of the president s discretion as commander in chief. This usurpation climaxed with the courts 2008 decision in boumediene. There, the Supreme Court overturned hundreds of years of american, and earlier british, law and practice, which had always considered decisions as to whether to detain foreign combatants to be purely military judgments which civilian judges had no power to review. For the first time, the court ruled that foreign persons who had no connection with the United States other than being confronted by our military on the battlefield had Due Process Rights and thus have the right to habeas corpus to obtain judicial review of whether the military has a sufficient evidentiary basis to hold them. In essence, the court has taken the rules that govern our domestic criminal justice process and carried them over and superimposed them on the nations activities when it is engaged in Armed Conflict with foreign enemies. This rides roughshod over a fundamental distinction that is integral to the constitution and integral to the role played by the president in our system. As the preamble suggests, governments are established for two different security reasons to secure domestic tranquility and to provide for defense against external dangers. These are two very different realms of government action. In a nutshell, under the constitution, when the government is using its Law Enforcement powers domestically to discipline an errant member of the community for a violation of law, then protecting the liberty of the American People requires that we sharply curtail the governments power so it does not itself threaten the liberties of the people. Thus, the constitution in this arena deliberately sacrifices efficiency. It invests the accused with rights that that essentially create a level Playing Field between the collective interests of community and those of the individual, and dilutes the governments power by dividing it and turning it on itself as a check, at each stage the check. And at each stage of the process, the judiciary is expressly empowered to serve as a check and neutral arbiter. None of these considerations are applicable when the government is defending the country against armed attacks from foreign enemies. In this realm, the constitution is concerned with one thing preserving the freedom of our Political Community by destroying the external threat. Here, the constitution is not concerned with handicapping the government to preserve other values. The constitution does not confer rights on foreign enemies. Rather the constitution is designed to maximize the governments efficiency to achieve victory even at the cost of Collateral Damage that would be unacceptable in the domestic realm. The idea that the judiciary acts as a neutral check on the political branches to protect foreign enemies from our government is insane. [applause] the impact of boumediene has been extremely consequential. I see its consequences every day. For the first time in American History our armed forces is incapable of taking prisoners. We are now in a crazy position that, if we identify a terrorist enemy on the battlefield, such as isis, we can kill them with drone or any other weapon. But if we capture them and want to hold them at guantanamo or in the United States, the military is tied down in developing evidence for an adversarial process and must spend resources in interminable litigation. As to whether there was sufficient basis to capture this prisoner. The fact that our courts are now willing to invade and muck about in these core areas of president ial responsibility illustrates how far the doctrine of separation of powers has been eroded. In this partisan age, we should take special care not to allow the passions of the moment to cause us to permanently disfigure the genius of our constitutional structure. As we look back over the sweep of American History, it has been the american presidency that has best fulfilled the vision of the founders. It has brought to our republic a dynamism and effectiveness that other democracies have lacked. At every critical juncture where the country has faced a great challenge, whether it be in our earliest years as the weak, nascent country combating internal rebellions and maneuvering for survival in a world of far stronger nations nations, or whether it be during our period of continental expansion, with the louisiana purchase, and the acquisition of mexican territory, that took us all the way across the continent, or whether it be the civil war, the epic test of the nation, or world war ii and the struggle against fascism, or the cold war and the challenge of communism, and the struggle against Racial Discrimination and most recently, the fight , against islamist fascism and international terrorism, one would have to say that it has been the presidency that has stepped to the fore and provided the leadership, consistency, energy and perseverance that allowed us to surmount the challenge and brought us success. In so many areas, it is critical to our nations future that we restore and preserve in their restore and preserve in their full vigor our founding principles. Not the least of these is the framers vision of a strong, independent executive, chosen by the country as a whole. Thank you very much. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] announcer tonight on q a, the Washington PostPakistan Bureau chief Pamela Constable talks about her experience covering the region. Quick sometimes people will say things that are very critical of the United States or of the west. Common than somebody saying something offensive about being a woman or causing problems. People tend to be generally speaking i am speaking very broadly now more helpful to a woman than a man. They can also try to take advantage or embarrass you in various ways. But my general sense is if they are not going to like something about you or trust something about you, its not going to be because you are a woman, its be because you are an american. 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspans q a. Be because you are an american. Cspans washington journal, live every day with policy issues that impact you. Coming up monday morning, we will preview week two of the impeachment inquiry hearings with a wall street journal reporter and senior staff writer for the hill. Later, p sure to watch cspan washington journal live at 7 00 a. M. Eastern monday morning. Join the discussion. Joining us from louisville, kentucky on cspans newsmakers program, democratic congressman john yarmuth, chair of the house budget committee. Thank you for being with us. Rep. Yarmuth good to be with you. Joining us in the questioning is cristina marcos, who covers capitol hill. Coveringorrespondent capitol hill for the wall street journal. Let me begin with the results. Esterday in new orleans in which john bel edwards, the democrat, winning with 51 of the vote. This is a state that donald trump won by 20 Percentage Points in 2016. He campane