Thats one of the breaks. Every brick in the home was a hand cut piece of italian marble the wealth and saddams personal home was unbelievable and so one day as i walked by it was getting late at the mission and i knew we were going to be going home before too long. Host you talk about the crystal. What are the rules of taking Something Like that . Guest the rules largely where we gave specific instructions to our soldiers that anything that was museum related antiquities anything like that was absolutely handsoff. Armed combatants and enemies that you fight are different story. We brought back uniforms. I have a uniform of saddams one of only two that im aware of in the country. On display at the Oklahoma History center in a hama city. I think the other one is on display in florida. Im not aware of any others. I have a lot of other interesting things but they were all related to the people we were fighting in a wizardly chew that we are fighting saddam and his henchmen during the hunt. Host we got him is the name of the book a memoir of the hunt and capture of saddam hussein. Congressman Steve Russell republican from oklahoma is the author. What is it like working on the Armed Services committee working with the military from the side being a congressman . Guest i never would have imagined i would be doing this number one. I mean the events surrounding saddams hunt and capture literally alter the course of my life as it did many others. I did not everything that i i would be sitting here as a congressman on the house Armed Services committee listening to to the secretary of defense at the chairman of the joint chiefs gives briefings which was interesting but it does give me great insight. For example in just the last 48 hours we have had very important briefs on strategy in the middle east or threats around the world and its just so easy for me to relate to these discussions and also provide military questions and insight to the situation having lived it and it also gives me a very sober mind because no one loves peace more than those of us who have provided for our country and you dont want to make bad decisions. You dont want people to misread threats or create new ones that we might have been able to reach out to diplomatic way. Ive been on the receiving end of foreign policy. Now i take it pretty serious so we have a prepared military and we also try to do whats responsible in congress. Host Steve Russell, thank you. Guest thank you very much. Cole. And including the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizures. This is about 25 minutes. My name is matt, i am the president of Freedom Works and im here with senator mike leigh from utah, he has written a new and important look, the willful subversion of americas founding document. Thank you for being with us, senator. Thank you, its good to be with you. I really enjoyed your book. I want to start with a question of your interesting upbringing. You have discussed the constitution and the separation of powers when youre a kid at the dinner table with your parents. I think i was 30 years old before i realized that not every family does that but its something that was common in our house. I didnt realize it was uncommon. My dad liked to talk about those issues and i grew up with it. These were just regular routine conversations in our house. That was not my experience as a child. In your office you describe two stacks of papers. In 2013 the legislation that was approved by Congress Versus the regulations that were promulgated by the vast bureaucracy. Can you explain why that story is so important . Yes, in my office i have to use tax of documents. The first that is 11 feet tall and contains 80,000 pages and the second is just a few inches tall. The first one that is 11 feet tall consists of last years federal register. The annual index of all of the regulations promulgated and released for comment and then finalized. By the executive branch bureaucracy. These are laws that are binding on the American People. They are passed by men and women who are never elected, wellintentioned, well trained and specialized as they may be. The other stack is a few inches tall and those are what was passed by Congress Last year, passed by people who are elected, but there are not many of them. This is a big problem. Congress has delegated its lawmaking power to the point that most of our laws are now made. This gets to the question of delegation and our constitution was quite explicit that congress have the authority to pass laws, and yet you have all of these bureaucrats. And i dont think this is constitutional. But why is this trend happening and why are they delegating to people that havent been elected . A couple of things. First of all we have the delegation problem. It relates to the fact that there is a natural tendency among politicians. You want someone else to have to do the dirty work and to actually engage in the difficult line drawing analysis. Its easier to say that we shall have good laws regarding the environment and we delegate that to the epa. Epa then has to make all the laws. Members of congress dont stand accountable to it. As far as constitutional lessons and deferring to the courts, thats more a function that culturally, for whatever reason, especially in washington, we have gone to an unfortunate point where questions about the constitutionality of a bill pending before congress tend to be conflated with the question of is the court likely to invalidate this. If the answer is no, some people assume that thats not always the case. And you just cannot assume, whether or not the court is willing to invalidate it, will determine the constitutionality. Every member of congress is his or herself obligated and required under article six of the constitution to engage in meaningful constitutional analysis and thats part of what we have to restore. This is not really about convincing senators and congresspeople to defend these rules. What you are doing is youre trying to have an adult conversation with the American People. What i find interesting about this book. I wanted it to be politically ecumenical. That for the most part these are those that are neither republican or democratic, just american principles that talk about protecting the American People against the excessive accumulation of power. There are a lot of people asking why should i care about these old rules that these old, dead white guys from 200 years ago wrote about. You try to translate the values like equal treatment under the law, respect for privacy, into things that we as americans should care about. Thats right. Overtime our economy has changed. The fashion trends change. The demographics in the country change. Human nature does not. The constitution is all about taking into account this and transcending time for a document that protects people and we know what people do when they take that into account and make it too much power. One of the most interesting stories that i wasnt that flew in on is the question of tension and franklin and how he rescued the constitutional convention. Ive always argued that if George Washington was a leader and sam adams was a Community Organizer and Thomas Jefferson was the philosopher of our founding movements, ben franklin was kind of a yoda. You dont necessarily call him that, but you suggest that he is the glue that holds together all of the fighting factions that led to the constitution. It could have made for a nice merchandising opportunity. Next time i will have to remember that but yes, he did say this. So there was this big fairly wellknown conflict between the big states and the small states. The big states, they wanted to make sure that their population was reflected in congress and the state said yes, we are equally sovereign and even after they reached a compromise. [inaudible] they were still deadlocked. They still could not reach an agreement until Benjamin Franklin came up with a great idea, saying that to sweeten the deal, lets make clear that any bills for raising revenue that includes new taxes, that it has to start in the house of representatives. I tell the story of that in this book and why we need to follow today. I also point out that we are not following it today like we should be. The origination clause, the idea that tax bills should originate in the house of representatives closer to the people is particularly relevant today as it we struggle with the destructive problems created by obamacare. Can you explain why we should care about Benjamin Franklin and that decision relative to today. We should care about the origination clause because it protects us and we dont follow it, it doesnt protect us. Obamacare is a case in point. What became obamacare started and originated in one technical sense in the house, the bill had nothing to do with health care. It had nothing to do with what became obamacare. It had to do with certain benefits, housing related benefits that would follow members of the Armed Services. It passed in the house, harry reid was the majority leader, he adopted a strip and replace amendment that replace that bill with what became obamacare. And these revenue provisions were added in the Senate Rather than the house. Had we been following this, had we had members of congress who are willing to say no, were not going to go along with that, because that is originating new tax laws in the senate contrary to the constitution we would have been protected by obamacare you talk about one of the Fourth Amendments of the constitution. The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. And no warrants shall be issued upon probable cause. Does that still matter in the internet age when the government can find out anything about us . Yes, it Still Matters and matters more now than ever. As i explain in the book that modern technology that we have makes government more efficient. And so that is why i have touched on this great story from john wilkes, english parliamentarian from the 1700, who was a subjected to a reasonable search through the use of general warrant issued by the administration of king george iii. He fought back against that. He thought was important he eventually won his freedom. These charges were brought in response to these publications of something out of north britain. Number 45, containing some Harsh Criticism of the king. It was on that basis they arrested him and they searched for anything that might serve as evidence to his alleged crime. But because of north britain number 45, and because he became such a folk hero across britain as a result of his fight for freedom, it became synonymous with john wilkes and the cause of freedom. On both the atlantic. In turn has led to some of the language that we now have in the Fourth Amendment, requiring that the government get a search warrant that its state provisions with particularity. So that you know what is lawful to be searched under it. You argue that today that under the Obama Administration certainly not starting with president obama, the nsa violates that right to privacy. Can you explain that . Yes. By now the nsa collects cell phone data, data regarding your cell phone usage, going back five years it knows who you have called. It knows who has called you. And how long it lasted. We know that for today, yesterday, and every day going back at least five years. From that theres an enormous amount of information about you. Thats what researchers using their own models that have concluded that using data like that they can figure out political affiliations, how liberal or conservative, how politically active they are, what your religious views are, your health conditions, what medications you are on and an enormous amount of information by studying your cell phone calling pattern. And yet all of this data is collected through the use of something that i think can be an analogized. A general warrant. Saying that we want all this information handed over to us. Thats not right and it makes the American People uncomfortable and we need to end this practice. There is this tension because of the internet and social media and in one sense it is this radically liberalizing force against people more information and the ability to connect with each other. Not constrained by constitutional principles to abuse power and thats really what the rules of the game come down to and what the constitution is all about. Power is dangerous, you need to keep it in check. Thats exactly right. Consequently when we have technology it will make it that much easier for the government to abuse that power and we have to be more diligent about reinforcing and enforcing our constitutional protections. I refer in the book to the frank Church Report issued in the 1970s. They reviewed the abuse of a technology that was then someone new and had been around for only a few decades. The abuse of wiretapping technology. The reports included among other things that every president ial administration from fdr through nixon had used nations intelligence gathering apparatus to engage in political espionage. This tells me that we have seen this movie before, we know how it ends and its not something that ends well. A new Technology Comes along, and so we put in place laws that strongly discourage and restrict the governments ability to review that power it will . One of the interesting transit is going on in the senate today is exemplified by her partnership with senator Patrick Leahy, one of the most liberal senators from vermont. He is your chief cosponsor on legislation that you have authored called electronic mitigations privacy act. There is a civil libertarian streak running through both Political Parties now. You have tea partiers working with progressives, what is it like to work for someone like Patrick Leahy and tell me why. I refer in the book to a couple of bills that im running with him. He is a liberal democrat from vermont and i am not. Though we both agree that there are limits on what the government can do. We agree that the Fourth Amendment has meaning. That the particular law, the electronic mitigations privacy act amendment, its one that has been around since 1986 but isnt known to most people. The original electronic privacy to medications act, giving them the power to read your email. As long as that email is at least 180 days old. Maybe someone thought it made sense, very few people had email us and those who did had no reason to keep them for more than just a few days and then they would delete them because they didnt have the Storage Capacity to store them beyond that. There is no such thing as Cloud Computing like what we have today. And so that is why the senator and i have run the spell and other bills that are designed to protect the Fourth Amendment. These are principles that are neither republican or democrat or liberal or conservative. [inaudible] though ive. You also deal with the over federalization of the criminal justice system. Patrick leahy is part of that and a number of others. Rand paul joins you, ted cruz, i do think that there is a trend towards understanding and getting back these american principles that have to do with limiting power. What is your experience on criminal justice umax. The criminal justice arena has been great. Dick durbin, there again, liberal democrat from illinois and im not. But we have guys like this, cory booker and others who are willing to join in this effort. We recognize something that i explained in the book, which is when we follow the constitutions directive on federalism and the idea that, you know, not every power is given to the federal government. In fact most of the power is supposed to remain at the state and local level and we follow this. More americans actually get more of what they want in government and less of what they dont in government. This does create some great alliances among people at opposite ends of the political spectrum. When they realize that everybody can get more of the kind of government that they want if they respect the constitution. Do we
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