Bill Thompson (133:55)
In case they needed. At some point we needed to come up with a narrative or get rid of somebody who's inconvenient or whatever else that just flies in the face of individual American rights and American autonomy and is really in my mind the anti pattern to freedom. It's just really, really bad. I mean I'll give you one that people always crap on me whenever I talk to them about it. But there's two that really bother me. One of them being like the 17th amount amendment. Do you know the 17th amendment to the Constitution? So the 17th. So when the Founders. When you read the Federalist Papers and the Federalist Papers. I really love reading the Federalist Papers. I love reading how they informed the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration. Even John J. James Madison wrote these documents explaining the framework and the 17th amendment. Essentially how the Senate. The Senate. Right. The 50 people there that are supposed to be representing a was originally constructed was a state would have legislatures and the state legislatures and the governor would appoint the senator. The reason that the founders did that was because they the state governments had to give power to the federal government to exist Back with the Articles of Articles of Confederation. Confederation, Is that right? Articles of. I think it's Articles of Confederation. I'm blowing up. Sorry, I'm going now nuts back before there was a strong, centralized American government. We had problems with money, we had problems with interstate commerce and those types of things. And those articles eventually turned into what is the Constitution. But the states had to grant that power. And the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution knew that the states needed to be those small projects that we talked about before where if California wanted to go nuts, let them go nuts. But it shouldn't impact what's happening in Texas. It shouldn't impact what's happening over in New England. It shouldn't impact what's happening in the Midwest. But if that goes nuts and it fails, it needs to fail. So the state senators, I'm sorry, the state legislatures would come together and they would vote for a senator, they would elect a senator, and that senator's job was to go to the federal government and protect the rights of the state, not to protect the rights of individuals per se, and certainly not to embolden the federal government. But with the 17th Amendment, what happened was the House of Representatives function was to be the petulant children of government. So their job was to come up with crazy ideas, crazy laws, all of those things. The more liberal version of government jurisprudence would be the House of Representatives, your crazy ideas. And then you had state senators who were supposed to be between the House and the president, who would say, well, here's a good idea, but the rest of this is retarded. Aoc, like, we're not doing all this. That's crazy. Or whoever else. Name your Republican who's an asshat as well. We're not doing these things. And that's because it would erode the state's rights and the state's constitution and what made this state great. Because what the legislatures would do is say, hey, Joe Rogan, you've made a lot of money and you've got a big podcast and a big voice, and you've learned some lessons around the way, and you're able to do that in Texas. And you decided to come to Texas because we had all of these things that California didn't have. We need you to go to the Senate for three years or six years or seven years, whatever it was back then, and represent those same principles. So when Obamacare comes through, you can say, not only no, but fuck no, like, I'm not voting for this thing. And it was to protect the state. But what the 17th Amendment did was it was redundant with the House of Representatives, which was, in the founder's eyes, the only popular vote part of the American government was the. The popular vote. And then you had the way the president gets elected through electors, but you had the state Senate, which was appointed by the states, so the legislatures. And I'll use North Dakota, where I'm from. You'll have two big cities, Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota. It's where the universities are. It's where your crazy kids are. Crazy thought exists, hyper crazy ideas, but some of them are useful. The rest of the state's agriculture, right. So all of those legislators from all those counties, those legislative districts would get together and say, we're going to put Bill Thompson, that would never happen. But in charge of. He's going to be at the Senate representing North Dakota, but he has to represent the whole state. In other words, you can't do things that will help Grand Forks or Fargo because that's where the universities are. That's where all the crazy politics are. You also need to be thinking about the guys out in the western counties, Lamour county and North Dakota or way out west. You have to protect agriculture, you have to protect small businesses, you have to protect families. What the 17th amendment under Woodrow Wilson and how they really usurped the Constitution and made the Senate a redundant. They made it a redundant House of Representatives and using the popular vote. So now we use popular vote for that. But if you want the popular vote In North Dakota, 85% of the population is in Fargo and Grand Forks. So now you've got. If I want to run for Senate in North Dakota, I'm just going to spend all of my time in Fargo and Grand Forks because if I can repeat back to those people all the ideas that they want to hear, I'm going to win that vote and I don't have to represent those people out in the rest of the state in anything. Right. So they created a redundant House of Representatives. But another reason why it happened was they wanted popular vote because there is no amount of money that you could stick into a legislature out in the western part of North North Dakota. You can't bribe these people. But the DNC and RNC now can say, look, these two senators are running. We like this guy. So we're going to. This guy will do whatever we tell him to do. And it has nothing to do with the state or representing the state's rights or the rest of those legislative districts. We're going to pick this senator and he's getting $300 million for his election bid. And this other guy who's a slower moving constitutional conservative who might be a free market absolutist and a Classical liberal, he's not being funded. But under the state architecture, you might have been a better representation of the state. And that's why the legislators had to vote for you to put you in as a senator. You had to represent the whole state. But now all that someone who wants to be a senator needs to do is go to the Republican National Committee or the Democrat National Committee and say, I'll do all the things you tell me to do, fund my campaign, and I'm going to go stump in Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota, and the hell with the rest of the state. It's very important. It's a very important sleight of hand. And when that happened, you made a redundant House of Representatives, and the state no longer was protected at the federal level. And what happened was all of the power from all of these states and these legislatures and these individuals got sucked up into the federal government. And then after that, you see all of these things that would never have been passed by a state getting passed, things like Obamacare, things like the Patriot act, certain war resolutions, all kinds of things where it just further erodes the power of the state. And federal government wants that because it puts all of the power up in the federal government. And people always say, we need to get money out of politics. No, we need to get power out of politics. That power that they've taken, you know, over the last 130 years or so, used to exist at the state and local levels because they wanted these thought experiments happening where we could pluck the best things out of them and forget the rest. But all of that power has now gone up to the federal government. And the federal government won't ever release that power. And they only want more budget and more spending to execute that power. And that's also because the interest groups that want to go, they don't want to have to go and convince a whole state of whether or not something is good that people are going to vote on. They just want to go take a lobby and go up to the federal government because they want all of the power up there as well. And the federal government wants all the power up there as well, because they make $300,000 a year before they become a politician. And they're worth $30 million when they're done being a politician, because all of the money has to go to the federal government because they're in charge of light bulbs. We can use computers, we can use flush toilets. We can have how our roads are going to look, what our medical care looks like. None of those Powers are explicitly written in the Constitution of the United States and they use things like the commerce law and other things in order to create things like Obamacare, where really we want competing states. If Texas comes up with a great way to do health care and North Dakota's isn't so great, they can look at that experiment, they can adopt the principles and they can have it at that level. But it's much easier to get change at the local level when the power is derived from the state and the individual. Because if I want to change the way that my state does health care, I have one of two options or three options. I can run for office, I can support someone who is going to go into office and do what I want, or I can move. But when everything's centralized at the federal government and everything flows from the federal government, all of the money, power and gravity is up there. And the individual, the 300 million of us or so, have really no power now to exercise either states rights or individual rights at the higher level. I hope I'm elucidating this correctly, but it's a real usurpation of individual and state autonomy that really got rid of state power, which was, if you read the Federalist Papers, was so important to the founders that there was this state, that the state's needs were organized because the state was where the founders wanted these thought experiments. You read Thomas Hobbs, Leviathan or John Locke or Montesquieu, all of them talked about this great experiment that was being set up and how it was built on all of this western politics and everything that came before it, on how we could have a government that was forced to respect the rights of individuals and allowed for these competing think tanks of ideas, and that the power would never rest at the federal government. But the 17th Amendment was a way that a lot of that power went from the state level and the state legislatures. And now to become the President, they want to do a popular vote. And under a popular vote you would just have to campaign in New York and la, right? You would get the popular vote out of the likely voting people. And now the rest of the country is not. And that would be another. You hear all these people saying, we need a popular vote. We can't have the Electoral College, we can't have all of these things. Everything needs to be pure democracy allows 51% to rule 49%. And that was another thing the founders were working fervently to get away from. And that's why we had an electoral college. And it's actually quite Beautiful when you actually read about it and examine it. It's why we had the state senate and state legislatures and this is why we had the House. You had all levels of the things of government that the founders cared about being represented in this body politic. And it was a beautiful thing. And I could go on for 15 more things about that. I won't do it for the sake of your listeners because I doubt this is what they wanted to do. But similar things happened with the Supreme Court, Marbury v. Madison, and allowing the Supreme Court to have judicial review. That was never a thing that was in the Constitution. And the Supreme Court, if you like the Supreme Court being able to have the power to describe everything as being either constitutional or unconstitutional, then you're not ruled by a democracy, you're ruled by an oligarchy. You've got eight people in robes that are going to tell you whether or not laws are good or bad. And that's not the founding of this country. It's not how it was intended to work. That all started back in Marbury v. Madison with Thomas Jefferson and these writs of mandamus that were. The Supreme Court, long story short, essentially granted itself the power to conduct judicial review under the old system or the old system. The system that was ratified and that the founders approved was if a law was deemed unconstitutional, it would go before the Supreme Court and they just wouldn't rule. They would rule in favor of the person and then eventually the government would figure out, oh, this law doesn't work. But it was never on the Supreme Court to say constitutional unconstitutional. You would get arrested for some law and it would get appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court would say, we're not punishing this person. This is against the Constitution. But the government would have to keep arresting people, have to keep going in front of the federal government. So what I'm saying is, and I'm sorry to go off on this, we can go back to tech. But all I'm saying is the core of the American experiment and individual rights and what makes this country so great and why I was willing to die for it after my initial enlistment and why I have such love for this is because it was the only experiment where the value of the individual was held at the top of the hierarchy and that people could truly be allowed to flourish. And in 250 years, we did more than any society could have hoped to have achieved in tens of thousands of years. Not that it's been around that long, but in thousands of years, everything tends towards disorder. And everything. Power always gets centralized. And we had a framework to do that. But we were willing participants in our own demise. And now we're scratching our heads and wondering why there's no individual and why there's no individual autonomy, why a guy can't smoke weed on the weekend or why a guy can't do X, Y or Z. Because we have centralized the authority and the power and the decision making structure and we're allowing them to. Bethere would be no problem with money in politics if the federal government had only the powers that were outlined to it in the Constitution.
