- People think that the federal government
has any power except things
that are expressly prohibited,
and it's actually the other way around.
(calm music)
- I'm Dave Rubin and
this is the Rubin Report.
Here's my friendly
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notified of our videos.
Okay, now, joining me today is a lawyer
and the author of several books
including The Indispensable
Electoral College,
How the Founder's Plan Saves
Our Country From Mob Rule,
Tara Ross, welcome to the Rubin Report.
- Thanks for having me.
- I am glad to have you here.
You actually live in Dallas
and you sort of just missed
this crazy tornado
situation, so I'm doubly glad
to have you here.
- Barely made it,
but I'm here, yes.
- Okay, good to have you here.
We're gonna focus heavily
on the electoral college,
because there's a lot to talk
about the electoral college.
I became familiar with you
because your PragerU video
has 60 million views about
the electoral college.
That is crazy that that many people care.
Were you shocked that that
many people care about a topic?
I mean, it's their number one video.
- It came out before the election,
probably a good year and a
half before the 2016 election.
I didn't really think about it.
I mean, just to be honest,
then the 2016 election happened
and next thing I know, I'm
pulling up on my Facebook feed
and my face is showing
up over and over again
in feeds from my friends
and I was as blown away
as anybody else, but I
think that Prager has set up
a good system where they
have informational videos
on all these different
topics, as you know,
and people were looking for information
in the wake of the
election outcome in 2016
and that was readily available
and I'm so happy, so happy
that Prager did that.
- Yeah, and as we now ramp
into this 2020 election,
this conversation about should
we have an electoral college,
why do we have it, should
it be popular vote,
this whole thing keeps
ramping up more and more.
So we're gonna spend
most of our conversation
talking about that, but
I thought we'd just start
generally talking about the Constitution.
And some of the laws that
govern us these days,
because people seem very
confused about them.
Tell me a little bit about something
that we don't know about the Constitution
that we should know.
- The first thing that leapt to my mind
was people think that
the federal government
has any power except things
that are expressly prohibited,
and it's actually the other way around.
The federal government only has the power
that the Constitution
expressly gives to it.
Everything else is reserved
to the states or the people.
And if you think about that,
that's a really important distinction.
The federal government can only do
what the Constitution explicitly says,
"Yes, you may do this".
And the federal government
has grown so out of bounds
that it's doing the opposite.
Everyday, it does the opposite.
- Yeah, well it seems that
that's how we're governed now,
that almost everything is
through the federal government,
and especially if you listen
to the democratic candidates now,
that they seem to want
to do all of these things
regardless of what states
want and things like that.
How do they get away with it?
I don't mean to make this even partisan,
in general speaking, you know.
- I would say both parties do it.
I don't, I think it
starts with us, honestly.
Because think about
anything that's happening.
If a natural disaster
hits, tornado in Dallas,
people hopefully in
Texas a little bit less,
as a Texas girl, but we
look to the government
and we look, we don't look
even to the state government.
We look to the federal government.
We want our governor to
declare a state emergency
because then we know
there's more federal funds,
there's more this, there's more that.
I think the mindsets of
everybody has changed so badly
that we're enabling the
situation to continue.
So maybe we can start at home by look,
I'm from Dallas, I'm, I hope we all,
we're pitching in, we're
helping our neighbors,
we're hopefully looking
to our state or our city
before we start looking
to the federal government.
I think that if we can work on that,
that's a really big
problem I just outlined.
But-
- Well, are you shocked at, sort of,
how little it seems people know or care
about our founding documents?
I mean, I talk about
them here all the time,
the Constitution and the
Declaration of Independence
are sitting on the wall in my
control room right over there.
But that so few people actually really
think about the documents that led
to the unprecedented freedom
that we're living in right now.
- We live in a world
that has created that.
We have schools that teach social studies,
when they used to teach history.
We don't teach the federalist papers,
which of course were the, and
the anti-federalist papers,
which were the arguments back and forth
at the time of the founding
about the Constitution
and why it exists as it does
and what they were trying to create.
We just, we don't do any of this stuff
in our schools anymore.
And then we have adults that grow up
having never been exposed to this,
and so nobody knows.
Literally nobody knows,
and I think the founding generation,
if you read in the federalist papers,
especially over and over and over again,
James Madison or Alexander
Hamilton will say
the people will keep this in line.
And they talk about the people
as if we will be educated,
as if we will know,
as if we will take all of
this into consideration
when we're voting, doing
all the things that we do,
but once you undermine
education and once that's gone,
how can you possibly keep the
structure in place anymore?
- Do you think that was a
miscalculation by the founders?
That over time, sort of,
that the state would kinda
slowly grow and then as it grew,
that education would kind of get worse,
and maybe they couldn't
envision all of that,
but that that was their miscalculation,
that the people would
somehow always be engaged?
- Yes.
I do, they assumed the
people would be engaged.
You read it over and over again.
They also assumed we
would always be more loyal
to our states than to
the federal government,
which probably by the way
comes with the education.
When you lose the education,
you lose the loyalty to your states,
'cause you stop understanding
why it's so important,
why that's an important part of the check,
system of checks and balances.
We talk about the
executive and the judiciary
and the legislative and
how they work against
and with each other and how they check
and balance each other, but also,
the state and the federal government
were supposed to be checks on each other.
And that doesn't mean states
always handle things correctly,
just like the federal government doesn't
handle things correctly,
but it's all a part of the process.
We assume that everybody's
gonna make mistakes.
We assume that the system,
where there are so many
competing powers going
head to head all the time,
that that will in the end protect us
because everything will
be, it would be difficult
to push anything through too quickly,
and in the heat of the moment emotionally.
- And isn't that sort of the
bizarre situation we're in,
where now it's like we've
had this incredible system
where the states could
tinker and figure out
what they wanted to do
with taxes and education
and gay marriage and
marijuana legalization
and literally every topic there is,
but now we're outsourcing all of that,
and it's like well now if the government
does some bad stuff, it's
not that you can leave
your state, 'cause the next
states gonna be the same.
You gotta leave the country.
- Right, that's not good.
- That's not good.
- When you were talking about that,
I was thinking there's so
many examples from our history
where Wyoming, for instance,
was the very first state
to let women vote.
They did it in 1892,
way before anybody else
'cause they thought it was a good idea.
Their reason was funny.
They wanted more pioneers,
women, to come out
and to join all the men,
'cause there were too many men
and they needed women.
But states used to operate for themselves
with their own interest in mind
and they made decisions
on all sorts of topics,
and we don't even consider that anymore.
- So we're here, we're here in California,
which is probably doing
most of that wrong,
and we have an ever expanding government,
and we now have this
progressive Governor Newsom,
but you're in Texas.
What are some of the things that you think
maybe Texas, which is
still a little more Texas-
- Yeah.
- That Texas might be doing right
that maybe California is doing wrong?
- I mean, I love my
state, we're not perfect.
So I can also list
things we're doing wrong.
But-
- [Dave] All right,
well let's do both then.
- Well you can't buy
Teslas straight from the,
you have to go through all these hoops
because of the automobile
lobby, from what I understand.
There are things that
I think are not great.
But mostly, what we do is
we regulate less, you know?
If you wanna use a straw, use a straw.
If you don't wanna use a
straw, don't use a straw.
- It's so funny you say that,
'cause I was telling
you, I was just in Dallas
this past weekend and you guys
still have plastic straws.
- [Tara] We like them.
- And I was in New York
a couple days before
drinking out of this
soggy straw and I'm like,
this is horrible.
- I know.
Look, there's arguments for an against it.
Whatever, I'm not trying to
dis anybody's opinion on that,
but it's just, in Texas
I think we are probably
more likely, not uniformly,
but more likely to say
make your own decision.
We add fewer taxes, which
I consider a great thing,
you know there's no income tax.
But we do have property
taxes, but you choose
to buy a house and then
you pay the property tax
when you choose to buy the house.
I hope that we're a little
bit more free down there,
just to kinda make up our own minds,
but I think the founders
would have liked that.
- They definitely would have liked that.
So, right now we're seeing what I think
are major assaults particularly
on the First Amendment.
So we'll start with that.
Particularly on free speech.
Now, people are very confused about
encroachments on free speech
relative to the government
versus just sort of mob rule
that we see all the time.
Are you, well, do you agree with me
that free speech really
is in a tenuous state,
that maybe it hasn't been, say,
in the last couple decades?
- Yeah, I do.
It's, yeah.
I think we kinda went from
a place where there were
a whole bunch of things
that we were trying
to become more tolerant of,
and then we got to the place
where we're more tolerant
of a whole bunch of stuff,
and now we're at a place,
we're on the other side,
where now you're no
longer to even say things
that were the norm 20 or 30 years ago.
It's like flipped on it.
It's very weird to me.
There's certain things
that I think you just,
you can't say without
all sorts of bad things
coming down on your head.
- If you had to sort of grade
the way the system's kinda
functioning right now.
- We're broken.
We're broken.
I've been saying that for a while,
and we're just, we're broken.
I do think, we're talking
about the electoral college
a little bit, I think that
is one thing that will help.
I do think we've been broken before
and we've come out of it.
We were broken in the
years after the Civil War.
It was a big mess then.
We had multiple elections where, you know,
the electoral vote and
popular vote did not match up.
And there were two elections where
the recorded national popular vote winner
did not win the election.
There was year after year
where the electoral map
looked really really similar,
very closely divided.
The red areas always seemed to red,
and the blue areas
always seemed to be blue,
which is what we're doing now.
Eventually because of
the electoral college,
we came out of that, is my belief.
Because if you think about it,
if you're a democrat in
the south in those years,
you cannot win the White
House, at all, period.
Because you don't have
enough electoral votes
in your safe areas.
But if you are a
republican, you kind of have
the opposite problem where you have enough
in the north, northwest, which
is where it generally was,
to win but kinda just barely.
And if the democrats
made any inroads at all,
you're gonna lose.
So both sides over time had
to reach out to the other side
and listen and figure it out.
So that's why I think we're there now.
I do think that's what's happening.
But I also have hope that
this, because of the structure
of the system, even
though we're not educated
enough about it, that we will come back
to a better place where we
just have to figure it out.
- All right, so before we do the full dive
on the electoral college,
- Sorry, yes.
- Which we'll spend the rest
of the conversation talking about,
because I really really want people
to understand why the
founders started this idea
and why it actually is the
right idea and all of that,
but in terms of the system working
or not working at the moment,
do you think part of it is just that
the way we operate, that the presidency,
the cult of personality
around the presidency
is such that people think
that it's the president's job
to do everything?
So they, if you like
Trump, you kinda think
oh he should just do whatever he wants
and executive actions are okay,
the same time when Obama was for it,
you probably weren't
for executive actions.
Or right now, listening to the candidates,
you know, the everything
that they want to do,
they don't realize they
are actually not the ones
that are supposed to write the laws.
They're just supposed to sign the laws.
Do you think that that's just
a cult of personality issue
that we just pick one
person, almost like we yearn
for a king in like, some
really perverse sense
or something like that?
- So, to really get geeky on you,
it goes all the way back-
- Let's get geeky,
let's go.
- It goes all the way back
to the 17th Amendment, which of course
changed the way that we
elect United States senators.
And it used to be that state legislatures
would pick those, and now of course
we have a popular election,
just like anybody else.
Which makes senators more like
the house of representatives
which is not what they
were supposed to be.
They were supposed to
actually represent the state
as a state in the
congress so that the laws
and the process and all of the stuff
that was happening in congress
would reflect the interests
not only of the people
from the house side,
but also the state
legislatures, which are expected
of course to be an
important check and balance
on the national government.
Well, unsurprisingly
when we turned the senate
into something more like the house,
we lost a check and now,
the congress has just become
a place to try to get the people
as much as we feel like we want.
You know, whether it's
good for the country,
whether it's good for the state or not.
And so that has, but then also it's hard,
and congress I think they defer.
They push it off into
an administrative agency
or they delegate power to the president
or they do these different things
to be able to give as
much as they possibly can
without always having
to be as blunt about it
as maybe they would have to be otherwise.
- So before the 17th Amendment,
did things function a
little bit differently
because they were chosen
by their own states,
they had to come back and deal with,
it was their own states, yes.
- The state legislature,
right.
- Yes, their own
state legislature.
- Well if you're
a United States senator
before the 17th Amendment
and you vote for a bill that includes
an unfunded state mandate,
you're not gonna get reelected
because the state legislator's
gonna be really mad at you.
So you're accountable to just
a different set of people
which is healthy because that,
or say the federal government
wants to take power
in some area, whatever it is,
they change the drinking age
and federal funds for
roads went along with that.
But if you're a state senator and you know
that your state, a United States senator
and you know that your state legislature
prefers to be in charge of its own roads,
you're not gonna vote for that bill.
It changed the dynamics completely
and made it much much easier
for the federal government
to swoop in and take over from the states
on a whole variety of issues.
But I think it also made it easier
for the congress to
delegate to the president
or to an administrative agency or,
there was just less accountability
overall for any of this.
And of course, the more power
the president's delegated,
exactly what you're saying happens,
which we think the president,
the president has become
such an all important elected official
in so many ways that
didn't used to be true.
- Yeah, all right, so with
all that in mind then,
let's do electoral college 101.
Where did the idea of the
electoral college first come from?
- Well the delegates at the
constitutional convention
spent the whole summer
going back and forth,
should we have a national popular vote,
just like people want now,
should we do something else.
And they had crazy ideas.
Maybe we'll have three presidents.
Maybe we'll have, they talked
about legislative selection.
That was one of the
main ideas on the table.
Maybe we'll have congress
select the president.
They talked about governors
selecting the president.
They had a whole bunch of ideas,
but the two ideas that
were there at the end,
the primary ones, were
a national popular vote
and congress picks the president.
Nobody knows exactly what happened,
because there was a committee
for unfinished business
and they went behind closed doors
and there's one-
- [Dave] Some things
haven't changed that much,
that's what you're saying.
- Right.
And so there was one
report that James Madison
took a pen and paper and
sketched out the idea.
They came back and presented
to the whole convention.
The convention was surprised
that they had deviated
from national popular
vote, but this is what,
this is what they had decided on.
And it solved the concerns of
the big versus small states
that had been going back
and forth the whole summer.
The big states by and
large were more comfortable
with national popular vote idea.
The small states were
really uncomfortable.
They thought they would be tyrannized.
And there's a great quote
from a Delaware delegate
and he says, "I do not
trust you, gentleman.
"If you have the power-",
he says gentleman,
which I think is funny.
"I do not trust you."
It's like underlined in
italics, you know, gentleman.
"If you have the power,
"the abuse of it could not be checked
"and you would exercise
it to our destruction."
And that's what the small states felt,
that we will be destroyed
if you have this kind
of a system in place.
And I think it's important
to note, by the way,
that the divide here was
not slave versus not-slave,
it was small versus large.
And there were some large
states that had more slaves
than not, and there were, and vice versa.
And the same thing with the small states.
Somme had slaves, some didn't.
It was not a slave
versus not-slave divide.
It was a small versus large.
- Were there any reps,
say, from big states
that actually were for
the electoral college?
Because that would've
been giving power away,
but we do know that a lot of the founders
were trying to curtail that power.
- So James Madison's from Virginia,
and I think he was more
comfortable in the beginning
with just a national popular vote,
but he came, he felt like
this was the better compromise
in the end, obviously he sketched it out
behind closed doors.
- Right now, when people
say, and we're hearing this
more and more, we should
just have the popular vote.
That you know, the current president lost
the popular vote, he's an
illegitimate president.
What is the counter argument?
- I really wish people would stop
and just think about why
the democratic party lost.
The people who were upset
on the democratic side
because they lost, they've
spent a lot of time
blasting the system and
criticizing the system,
criticizing Trump, and I wish they would
spend more time thinking
about why they lost.
And the reason they lost
is because Hillary Clinton
spent too much time doing exactly what
the electoral college
does not want her to do,
or any candidate to do,
which is she focused
too exclusively on one kind of voter.
It's the kind of voter
that happens to live
in big cities in New York
and California, mostly.
She got 20% of her vote from
only New York and California,
and most of her vote in those two states
came from the big cities.
Towards the end of the campaign she,
people don't usually know this,
but she thought she was about
to win the electoral vote
and lose the popular vote, so she actually
doubled down on that strategy
and she started spending a lot of time
and resources on safe areas.
Areas that she was already
expected to do well,
because she wanted to
drive up the popular vote
in those safe areas so
that she would not have
that discrepancy between the
electoral and the popular vote.
But of course, if she'd
instead gone to Wisconsin,
Michigan, Pennsylvania,
spread out her base of appeal,
built coalitions, worked on that,
she probably would've won.
It was within reach and
she could've done it,
but she didn't.
- So is the main argument
then that basically,
you will create a situation
where a state like California
which has, what, like the tenth
biggest economy in the world
or something like that,
this huge population,
it's a huge land mass, and then New York
with the huge huge population,
concentrated in big
cities, that if we get rid
of the electoral college,
that almost everything,
but especially the middle of the country,
will just be completely ignored
by the federal government.
So it's the same issue
from 200 years ago, right?
- Right.
I mean, if you're a candidate,
you have limited time,
you have limited resources.
That's just human, that's not good or bad,
it's just what it is.
And you cannot, physically
cannot, go everywhere.
You cannot, it's not
productive or efficient
to try to strategize
how to bring in people
from different parts of the country.
What is most productive as
a purely strategic matter
is just to go to where
people already like you
and just start drumming up support.
I mean, if you're a republican,
maybe you go to Houston
and you look at the oil
interest and you say
I'll give you this, I'll give
you that, I'll give you this.
And you just try to drum up
as many people as you can.
If you're a democrat maybe you say
I'm gonna give the environmental
lobby everything they want.
I'm gonna go to LA and San Francisco,
I'm gonna start drumming up support there.
I'll ban plastic straws
in the whole country
or something, I don't know.
So it's just, it is just practical.
It's not even malevolent
or anything at all.
It is just what it is.
It is a huge, big diverse country
and if you don't give
candidates a reason to care,
they're not going to.
- What would you say to the people
that would just say, tough.
We should do this by how many
people vote for somebody,
and you know what, if you live in Missouri
in a small town, that's tough.
You don't live in a big city,
but the big city person's vote
doesn't count less than yours.
- You know, it's just,
it's so interesting to me
that people think that because
there is not any other context
where we would just say tough.
You know, we wouldn't say
if one race can outvote
the other race, tough.
You know, we can do whatever we want.
Nobody would say that.
We shouldn't say that.
So, why is it okay to say,
yeah if the big city people
outvote the farmers, eh who cares.
I don't think that's right.
I think what's right
is to create a society
that is just and to do our best
to take into account a wide need,
a wide variety of needs
and if you think about it,
if you let the big cities
dictate to the farmers,
where they do most of the
producing in this country,
by the way, you're telling the people
who are the end users
that they can tyrannize
over the producers.
That's going to create
a really bad situation.
- We see this in California all the time.
If you drive up the coast
where all the farmers
are complaining about water rights
and then the big cities
are getting all the water
and it's like guys, they're
the ones growing the food.
Does anyone care about the food?
- And so you have these
dynamics in the states,
it's in New York too, it's
in a couple of other states,
and it's in Texas really.
Why do we think that we
can change the system
and that these problems that already exist
at the state level will not
happen at the national level?
Of course they will.
So I have actually long
said I think California,
Texas, a handful of the big states,
for their governor, should
have an electoral college
kind of thing going on.
I think it would be, it would
produce better governance
in the big states where this happens.
- Interesting, so you take
an electoral college concept
and apply it even to those big states,
because that way you could
sort of control their need
to just serve the big,
you know, Dallas and say,
Los Angeles.
- Why should farmers
in California be tyrannized
by people in the big cities?
Why should people in the middle of Texas
where there's very
small population cities,
why should they be tyrannized
by, I live in Dallas,
but why should they be
tyrannized by us in Dallas
or Houston or San Antonio or Austin?
They have different needs and concerns,
and I, you know, I'm not sure
the gubernatorial processes
always reflect that.
- So I know that we don't
know everything that went on
in these meetings where James Madison's
sketching this all out,
but where did all the numbers come from?
- Well, the numbers come from congress.
So you have the same number electors
as you do members of the
house, plus your two senators.
So that is true for every single state.
That's how, I'm from
Texas, we have 38 electors.
We have 36 congressman plus two senators.
- So these can change over time, right?
- They do change over time, yes.
- And does that, how does that effect
the way everybody's
drawn up demographic maps
and all kinds of stuff?
- Well, I mean, it's really
just based on the census
and so you have, and it's
based on after the census
they decide how many people
are gonna be in the house
and then we reallocate the
electors just to match it.
- So do you feel that the system
is actually functioning
as it should, then?
Even if the people aren't
being as responsible
and maybe don't know civics
the way you would want them to
and all of those things,
do you think that the basic
election system, and especially again,
'cause we're rolling into an election.
We're gonna hear about election rigging,
we're gonna hear about foreign influence,
we're gonna hear about popular
vote verse electoral college.
But do you think that the elections
are basically safe and
secure and that this is
sort of the best way
that they can operate?
- Yeah, I do.
Look, I think we're a mess right now.
I think both parties are
being really super stubborn
about fixing themselves.
I think pretty much everybody
could do a better job
of working to build coalitions
and of being inclusive
and trying to understand the people
that don't fall in line
exactly where I am.
And until we figure that out,
it's going to look like this.
I hope we figure it out soon,
'cause I'm kinda tired of
it, as everybody else is.
But the system is not not working,
and the reason we're
having close elections
is because everybody thinks stubborn.
Which is, like I said, what
happened after the Civil War.
- Is the irony here
though that if the states
would actually take
back some of the rights
that they've been sort of outsourcing
to the federal government,
that none of this would
matter that much, right,
because the presidency
would have less power.
So that really is the, that to
me strikes me as the answer,
right, like you keep as
much as you can local
and then it won't matter that much
what the executive branch can do.
- And if the states were back in charge
then there would be less
for the judges to do,
which means the judicial nominations
would be less of a, you
know, less of an influence.
I think people are just so worried that
their preferred policy
preference on whatever it is,
it's going to get decided
by judicial nominations
or by the president or by, you know.
And so it becomes so important,
and it's, the system that
was created by the founders
is very decentralized.
There should never be that
much power in one place.
There shouldn't be that much power
in the supreme court or the presidency.
It should be spread out.
And if it were, yeah exactly.
What would there be to be, who,
why would I be mad about anything?
Why would a Texan care what a Californian
decided about straws?
It wouldn't matter.
Who cares?
It doesn't matter.
- As it shouldn't matter.
- As it shouldn't, exactly.
- What do you make of the
executive action portion of this?
What do you think the
founders would be saying
about the way we govern, where you know,
and again everybody does
it, so this is not a,
this is not a partisan thing.
- [Tara] No,
it's not partisan, both sides do it.
- GWB did it too, and then Obama
reversed a lot of it,
- [Tara] President Obama.
They all do it.
- And now Trump
reversed a lot of that.
I mean, that's a really
dangerous way to govern, right?
- I agree completely.
And it, I see it all the time
and I wish it weren't happening.
I wish that people cared
enough to say something,
to call their congressman and say,
you know, go take that back.
That power that just got usurped from you.
Go take it back.
- Do you think it's maybe
that everything seems to be
more about optics than the way
things are supposed to be governed?
You never hear anybody talk about,
well you, I can't say never, I say,
a guy like Rand Paul maybe
and Mike Lee from your home state.
A couple guys that will actually talk
about the Constitution
and things like that.
Did you see that moment during the debate
when they were asking Kamala Harris
about confiscating guns
via executive action,
and Joe Biden said it
has to be constitutional
which of course is the correct answer.
And Kamala basically laughed at him
and said, "Joe, can't
we just say yes we can?"
Like this terribly smug answer meaning,
'cause what she's saying is I will take
whatever power I can
to literally take away
one of your, second bill of right.
- Again, I think it goes
back to not knowing history,
because if we knew our
history what we would know
is that, British, when they
were trying to keep us down,
the first thing they did
was they went after our guns
and our ammunition, and that's
why the shots were fired
at Lexington and Concord.
The British were marching to go take it,
and we said no you can't do that.
And it's, and it happened,
it actually happened
in several cities.
Lexington and Concord
is the one we know about
from our history books, but
there were several places
in '75, '76 where the
British were trying to take
our arms and ammunition because they knew
we wouldn't be able to
put up a fight without it.
And so the founders when they
created our Constitution,
it was one of the most
important things to them.
They felt like our liberty is protected
when we can protect ourselves.
And it's not only about hunting, you know.
It's about protecting your liberty.
And people like to laugh at that, I guess,
and say well our arms
don't match the Army's.
And you know, I guess that's true,
but at the time of the founding,
the arms that, it's not like they had
cannons on their farms, you know.
I mean, that was-
- Right, some well-armed
people that are really committed
to protecting what's theirs can do a lot.
- But over and over again, you
see examples of the British.
There was the Battle of
Pell's Point in New York.
The British were, they had trouble
because there was literally a colonist
behind every bush with a rifle.
And they were just having trouble.
And it changed their strategy
and it changed what they were doing.
And so, and actually they got,
those people that were
behind the bushes and stuff,
they delayed the British so much
that George Washington's Army got away.
That's the outcome of that story.
But you just, if you know your history
and you know what
happened in the Revolution
and you see these stories, what you see is
a founding generation that knew
the government cannot be
the only one with arms,
and so that's why they
created the Second Amendment.
- All right, so another thing that people
always talk about with elections is that
now we're in a position where we know
that certain states are basically
always gonna be blue,
we're in one right now,
states are pretty much
close to always being red,
you live in one in Texas.
Although that one's even getting
a little iffy these days.
But that now we're
putting so much pressure
on these few swing states.
So, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Florida, things like that.
Do you see a risk in that,
that then they do, almost
like an overcorrection
where they pretty much ignore,
like if a democrat's like,
well I've got California in the bag.
Forget California, and
then I'm gonna spend
all my time focusing on
these three other states.
- I'm not one who thinks
that red states stay red
and blue states stay blue.
I think that there are periods of time
where there is a stretch,
and that might happen,
but if you look at California,
as recently as 1988, you guys
voted for George HW Bush.
That wasn't that long ago really.
And you can look at any, if
you look at the whole history
of states voting, what you really see
are states that, well let me back up.
I also don't buy the idea
that only swing states matter.
Safe states are important.
Like you just said, no democrat wants
to go in the election without
California in its back pocket.
So what do they do to
make California happy?
It has to do with the governance.
It has to do with the
laws that are passed.
I mean, California is happy and blue
because it's happy with what
democrats have been doing
in office for the four years
that preceded the election.
And when they start to become unhappy,
they're gonna let people
know pretty quickly.
- I don't even know that they're happy
in this state anymore.
I think it's just like oh,
we're blue, we're blue.
That's just kind of how it is.
And the republicans here who,
I've talked to some of them,
are just so defeated.
They're like, we're trying so hard.
We're watching our state crumble,
and high taxes and more homeless people
and more drugs on the
streets and all this stuff,
but they're just kind of
throwing their hands up
like we've just lost so
many times in a row now.
- I always wonder what would happen
if people just voted without regard
to how they felt about it.
For every state.
Like what if all the
democrats came out in Texas
and didn't assume that
they were gonna lose,
they just came out.
What if all the republicans
came out in California
and didn't assume they were gonna lose,
just came out to see what would happen.
But also if you look historically,
you can find lots of examples of states
that just changed unexpectedly.
Or, they've threatened to change
and the parties reacted.
Utah in 2016 was threatening
to vote third party.
So they were just unhappy with everybody.
And Mike Pence was dispatched to the state
to make things right
because republican party
did not want to lose its small
safe little red state of Utah.
In 2000, West Virginia flipped.
They flipped because they
became really unhappy
with the environmental policies
of the democratic party
and they swung the election.
We all focus on Florida,
but without West Virginia,
there was no way that George W Bush
was gonna win that election.
So a safe small state flipped
and changed everything.
And you can look through history
and you can see states
changing their allegiance,
you know, back and forth over time.
So I tend to say look, you know,
the safe states matter, they just are,
they made up their minds
earlier in the process
based upon the governance that came before
and swing states are just
late to make up their minds.
They're indecisive.
But everybody's important.
You can't get to 270
without some combination
of safe and swing states.
You simply can't get there.
So you gotta do something
to get them on your side.
- So is there anything you would do
with the way the electoral
college is set up?
To tweak it, to tighten it or anything?
Or do you feel it's
basically as perfect a system
as we can do in a country of
320 million some odd people?
- I like it.
When I first started this,
close to 20 years ago,
there were small things I would change.
I thought well maybe we
could automate the elector,
so it's not, there's no possibility
of elector independence.
Or maybe we could change the
contingent election process
where the president's elected by the house
if nobody can get a majority.
And I thought maybe we could tweak it,
but the more I study it, the more I look,
the more I think, this is
just a really delicate balance
and if you change one
thing, you don't know
what kind of domino
effect that might have.
And so I would just leave everything.
I think it's, and it may not be perfect,
but it's the best we're gonna
do in an imperfect world.
I steal something Winston
Churchill said sometimes,
and he said, "Democracy is
the worst form of government,
"except for all the
others that we've tried."
So I say the electoral
college is the worst
possible form of presidential election,
except for all the others
that have been tried.
It's the best we can do
in an imperfect world
and it's got a lot of benefits.
- So this is a slight deviation
from the electoral college specifically,
but what do you think of sort of
the state of people believing
that the system itself works?
That the election process works
and is un-tampered with
and Russians and hacking
and all of these things and,
right, just fraud in general,
because it seems to me
that no matter what happens
in the next election, half the country
is gonna claim that it was illegitimate,
and we're seeing this even now.
I mean, just in the last couple of weeks
now that Hillary's sort of reappearing,
you know, she's basically calling Trump
an illegitimate president
because she did win
the popular vote, as we talked about.
So it's like, it seems to me that,
that again comes to the optics part of it.
Where it's like we're setting up something
where half the country, no matter what,
every four years is going to think
that something illegal or
immoral or awful has happened.
- Well this is what I would observe.
There's, again, there's no
such thing as perfection.
There will always be
people that want to cheat.
There will always be people
that will look for a way
to steal an election if they can.
I can't fix that, nobody can fix that.
The electoral college can't fix that.
But what we can do is we can
make it as hard as possible.
We can throw up as many
hurdles as we possibly can.
And if you have a national
popular vote system,
then what you have is one
centralized national base,
database that, or just
voting system, tabulation,
whatever you just have to hack one thing.
Okay, you have to, and
that means by the way also,
that you have to be on defense
in every single precinct of the country.
So you can be in the bluest
blue California precinct,
and if votes are stolen
there, you affect everybody.
Or the reddest red Texas precinct.
That vote affects everybody.
Right now we have a situation
where you don't have to be
on defense absolutely everywhere,
you just have to be on
defense in a few danger spots,
which means you can focus
all of your resources there
and that's better.
Also, by the way, if you're
talking about hacking,
it's not just hacking one national tally.
You have to actually hack multiple tallies
around the country, 'cause there are 51
different election systems,
50 plus DC, election systems.
So you'd have to identify which one
would be, you know, the most relevant.
Which state's gonna be close,
which state could swing this,
can I hack it, and you
have to be able to do all,
have to have all of these
things working for you
before you can actually steal an election.
Is it impossible?
Probably not.
I'm not gonna claim that,
but again, you can make
it as hard as possible,
and make it so that
they have to get through
as many hoops as possible
before they can influence you.
- Right, so okay, so as
somebody that obviously,
you like state's rights
and you're trying to set up
a system the way it was
originally set to be,
which is that you're trying not to give
too much power to the federal government,
would you leave the voting
mechanisms to the states
or should we have a federal,
a federally mandated system of voting?
Because right now it's like we got
hanging chads in one state
and we got electronic
voting in another state.
Some states have receipts
after the electronic voting,
some states don't, and a
zillion other punch cards,
and a gajillion different things,
which that in and of
itself seems really messy.
- I think one of the most important things
that people don't appreciate or know
about the electoral college
is how important it is
to protect a state's
prerogative just to choose its,
to run its own election,
choose its own electors,
and to be in charge of itself.
And maybe the best way to demonstrate that
is to show what would
happen on the opposite side.
If we did have one national tally,
well what that means is
a national election code,
a national bureaucracy, you know,
a new presidential appointees
for, to run this whole thing
that you've put in place.
And so now, you've got a,
potentially an incumbent president
in charge of his own election
because he's in charge
of the federal machinery
that will make it happen.
But how it is now, every
state makes its own decisions.
Some states will make better
decisions than others.
You know, again, it's like
the laboratories of
democracy kind of idea.
They'll see what works, what
doesn't work, they'll change.
But everybody will be
in charge of themselves
and that by itself is a protection.
- If we wanna isolate one clip
and next time somebody says to me,
"Dave, why do you think the
electoral college is good?",
can you give me like, the
sort of bumper sticker video
that we can use to just
push out to people?
In a couple minutes, the
cleanest clearest reasoning
for the electoral college.
- I just wanna say it makes
presidential candidates
reach out to a wide variety of voters.
Given how big and diverse our country is,
that's important.
The founders thought that 13 states
was too large and too diverse
to have anything else.
Well we're so much bigger right now.
And so people say it's outdated.
I say the opposite.
It's more important now.
How can we expect such a diverse country
to govern itself if we don't have,
this is the only person
expected to represent all of us.
The only one.
There are senators that represent states.
You know, or congressman
that represent districts.
Everybody else represents
a smaller subset of people.
The president must elect
the most liberal person,
or represent the most
liberal people in California,
and the most conservative
people in, you know,
Mississippi or something.
So it's just, you gotta have
a special system in place for that,
to make him or her take into consideration
as many people as possible.
- I think I know your answer to this one,
but would you say that
our founding documents
are basically the greatest
man-written documents?
- I do, I think so.
I think they came together
at a special moment in time.
They were not perfect people,
but they had no partisan interest,
in the way that we think of it today.
There's so many misperceptions
about the founding generation and,
it's become so easy to demonize them.
It makes me sad.
I, look, they owned slaves
and they did some things
that we obviously don't
want or approve of,
or think it was a big mistake.
But also what I think is, look,
they lived at a moment in time where
the king could tell you
what religion to be.
You know, women couldn't do anything.
Yes, there were slaves.
But my point is there was
a whole mess of problems
and it wasn't just America.
It was everywhere.
And so our founders did something amazing,
and they broke free of part of that
and they said we can be self-governing.
You can just make up your
own mind about religion.
And there were some things they got right.
And they took an important
first step down the road.
And we look at them and we criticize them
for not running the whole marathon.
- Right then and there.
- And it's not, it was
more like a relay race
where they ran the first leg,
and they passed the baton
to the next generation,
and the next generation took
it a little bit further.
And what I'm really proud of in America
is that we are always
going for more freedom.
Every generation has done more.
And so instead of criticizing
the founding generation
I wish we would just look at them and say,
thank you for running the
first leg of that race so well.
You did great.
- That is how you end an interview.
For more on Tara, follow her
on the Twitter, @taraross.
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