thank you so we are here to talk a bit about the administrative State and I really like talking about the administrative state but we had some big stuff happening this weekend so I'm just curious uh if you can tell us where you were when you heard the news about what happened on Saturday and what your initial thoughts were my wife and I were at home we were preparing to meet up with our our kids to go out to dinner and my phone started blowing up my friend Jason chaitz sent me a text saying turn on the TV just turn it on now just turn it on now and that's what happened this is tragic yeah well you have been a strong Ally of President Trump but you and I both were not sure how conservative he would be and had some concerns about him when he first came on the stage what do you think he showed in that moment like did it did it what did you think that showed about his character the way he handled being shot uh and and in that moment it brought out in him uh really what is the the best of him the essence of what has made him a uh a potent messenger for reform his moral Clarity and his moral courage and his his willingness to stand up against Great odds uh that came out in Spades yeah it was really just remarkable to I mean I I keep on thinking about it and um it's just truly a stunning moment that we're living through and it was I I think we're all probably thinking a lot about how close we came to a much different scenario for the country for the Republican party for the conservative movement for everybody it's just uh we have a lot to be thankful to God for I think in this moment a lot to be thankful for and and you know we should we should continue to keep him in our in our country in our prayers because on the one hand yes they failed and on the one they they they failed to end president Trump's life now tragically uh they took the life of a of a brave heroic Soul a fire chief um who who was protecting his daughters who died um you know literally shielding others his family members from bullets yeah Cory compari which is just it's been beautiful to read the tributes to him too okay so what a couple of days we also got this news uh this morning that judge Eileen Cannon the federal judge in Florida has dismissed the classified documents case against President Trump and interestingly enough it was on the grounds I believe I haven't read I haven't gotten to read anything yet so I'm excited to read more about this but I believe it was on the grounds that the Jack Smith appointment as special prosecutor was illegal yes and this is something that just Justice Clarence Thomas had raised in his recent um was it a concurrence yeah in in in raising concerns about whether the appointment of special councils is constitutional so I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that issue did you I don't know if you got to read Justice Thomas's concurrence yeah you I I did read his concurring opinion I haven't had the chance yet to read this morning's Court ruling from Florida but I I will say this it's with good reason that the constitution uh limits who can do what in the executive branch uh pretty aggressively I mean to have a significant pivotal role in any executive branch government you normally you you need to be U operating as someone who was appointed by the president who's been confirmed by the Senate and who also serves at the pleasure of the president and it's it's with good reason that the Constitution limits that power that somebody who can take a job like that and and care out because remember the president of the United States is in effect the living embodiment of the entire executive branch and it's important to have a uh a connection of accountability because it's the president who is accountable to the people and if you don't have that you've got a problem so on that note we've heard a lot from President Biden since the assassination attempt on President Trump's life he's given speeches and and been on TV and he is calling for Unity I'm wondering what you think about his calls for Unity and how they should be interpreted this is one of my pet peeves um in in politics and you see it you see it elsewhere to to a degree but I my general rule of thumb is that when someone is speaking from a position of immense power as he certainly is a call for Unity unless it's accompanied by a description an explanation uh a formula a prescription for how you get to Unity something that actually can and does tend to unify people if you don't have that then it's manipulation it's a it's a passive aggressive uh uh backdoor wave saying uh everyone unite behind me um now if I think he had a real missed opportunity because he could have I I think this is the kind of moment where a president of the United States can and should say hey let's let's all get United at least around a couple of things uh and here's what those things are and here's what I'm going to do for my part in order to do that I think that could have helped uh now I have thought and I thought since moments after the shooting took place that one of the ways he could stuff I think everybody can agree that uh it'd be good to find ways in which we bring down the temperature a little bit I I think one way that he could have done that could have been to signal that he was directing Jack Smith to withdraw the federal prosecutions against Trump and that he was going to make requests of the governors of New York and Georgia uh for them to do the same um I think that's the kind of thing the unifying principles saying here's what we should unite behind and here's what I'm personally going to do to get there uh it's a missed opportunity that didn't go down that direction yeah I keep on thinking I mean it's we all know how politics is and all fair in politics Love and War it's all fair oh yes yeah but um you know and you definitely have like heated rhetoric from a lot of people uh you'll hear Donald Trump call Joe Biden sleepy Joe and you hear Joe Biden say that all conservatives are a threat to the republic or a threat to democracy um a genuine threat a literal threat that they are seeking to destroy America to destroy all of our freedoms and so in addition to what you suggested I think he personally should address the extremely awful and inappropriate rhetoric that has been coming from him you might remember that red wedding speech that he gave where he said that all Republicans were a threat to the Republic um you know this is very serious stuff that's uncoming of a president and I understand that they insult and certainly you know certainly Donald Trump insults but there's a there's a manner in how you insult too that is really important uh the red wedding speech okay I just cut that yeah do you remember with the Marines on his side and it was red in the back and he was saying that we needed to do whatever it took to destroy um half the country so nothing says I'm not a fascist quite like uh speaking against a backdrop like that and threatening to imprison your political opponents but just speaking completely apolitically I just want to put an exclamation point on what you just said Senator Lee because the use of our courts to go after political opponents yes that that has political ramifications it might be helping the Democrat Party or hurting the Democrat Party but what it does to the country is in it's just it's it there's no way you can defend using courts to go after political opponents it's what we associate with the Soviet Union with Venezuela with third world countries not our country and it's not just Jack Smith who is under Joe Biden's Authority who is doing this but really there are municipalities and places throughout the country that are using courts to settle political differences and I do think that if people truly want to preserve the Republic and tone down you know lower the temperature they would immediately as in by the end of today stop all of those cases immediately immediately and in fact um just a few weeks ago uh my wife Sharon and I were in um a couple of uh Latin American countries and in both countries we heard um from their leaders uh this is not the sort of thing we expect from the United States right and it's the sort of thing that if we did uh uh we would expect to be sanctioned by the United States for for doing what was just done to president Trump and the other thing they said one of the uh head of state this is private conversation so I'm not going to communicate you know exactly who it was but he said um look we are supposed to be following your lead not you following our lead and that's what's happening amen okay so we're here to talk about the administrative State we're a very educated group here I'm certainly you know I know everything there is about the administrative state but could you give us an what is the administrative state for dummies you know in case in case anyone doesn't know exactly what's going on there yeah here here's the simplest way of thinking of it um in your Junior High civics class you you learned about the three branches of government you've got the legislative branch which in our federal system is congress makes the laws you got the executive branch headed by the president enforces the laws or it's supposed to uh and you've got the judicial branch that interprets the laws where people disagree about what it means you've got to go to somebody who can say U yeah this is what that means and then you can move forward by far the most dangerous of those three powers and of those three branches is the legislative branch we know that for a number of reasons both because it's the most critical in terms of government deciding what government is going going to do but you also know because the founding fathers put the most guard rails around that they gave that lawmaking power only to elected lawmakers the branch of government most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals you can fire all 435 members of the house every two years you can fire a third of the members of the Senate every two years that's why it's there the administrative state is a type of Quasi fourth branch that exists technically within the executive branch but it functions almost as a super legislative branch and here's how it works starting in the late 1930s when Congress got a whole lot of additional power in part because the Supreme Court reimagined uh what regulating interstate commerce consists of Congress found itself newly possessed of power to regulate labor manufacturing agriculture mining health safety and Welfare and a bunch of other stuff that they had never had before you know untethered from military or you know District of Colombia or something like that US Government didn't touch those things all of a sudden it could so Congress started passing platitudes instead of laws we shall have good law in area X and we hereby delegate to commission or department or agency y the power to make and interpret and enforce good laws in area X so uh think of it this way we shall have Fair Trade Practices in the United States Congress passes a law that says that we hereby give the Federal Trade Commission the power to make and interpret and enforce their own law so little by little this uh move forward some more familiar examples we shall have clean air and we hereby give the EPA the power to decide what clean air is what pollution is how much you can pollute before we find you and throw you in prison uh and what kind of pollution is more tolerable or less tolerable than others you've got the law being made by unelected unaccountable bureaucrats who work in these executive branch agencies now to put it in perspective mly I've got these two monuments to law in my office anytime you're in Washington come by room 361a of the Senate Russell office building uh I've got a short stack of documents which consists of the laws passed by Congress last year usually a few hundred to a few thousand Pages the other stack is about 100,000 pages and it consists of the executive branch agency the administrative state laws what we call the Federal Register the cumulative annual index of all these laws that come up up about 100,000 Pages now those laws could put you in prison if you don't obey them they can find you millions of dollars they can shut down your business and yet they're written not by elected lawmakers but by men and women not of your own choosing that's a a problem that's the administrative State that's why it's so dangerous and that's why I've made it my life's mission to dismantle it it seems when people are very frustrated by the government that it is in fact this administrative state that is the focus of their IR even if they don't understand that um and Congress willingly handing over this Authority and Congress is the article one branch it is supposed to be Supreme willingly hand handing over its authority to these unaccountable regulatory regimes is really something that has caused a lot of problems for Americans it was supercharged this ability of this unconstitutional fourth branch of government to destroy Americans lives was supercharged in part through Supreme Court jurist prudence and what is you know when people talk about the administrative State and this Authority that they have that they shouldn't have they frequently talk about Chevron Defence what is that Chevron Defence is a term drawn from a 1984 Supreme Court ruling called Chevron versus natural resources defense Council in a nutshell what it said is we the courts will defer to a federal agency's interpretation of the laws it's charged with administering we will defer to those we will allow those to stand even if it's not the best interpretation of the law if it's as long as it's not unreasonable we will defer to it and then they they developed a set of uh loose standards to determine uh What uh a a reasonable interpretation was but even in that it was a very differentially appli so basically the it's heads we win tails you lose the the executive branch agency always won they always won in how they interpreted the statute so Federal Trade Commission for example U or EPA um if there was doubt as to what clean air meant as used in the Clean Air Act it would always go to the government and so what happened this year to the Chevron difference in the ler brigh uh ruling it came out about 10 days ago the Supreme Court said no more they said this is ridiculous we don't U courts have tools um that they use to interpret law uh we call those Cannons of statutory construction different formulas is our laws consist of words our words have meaning and we have rules that judges are trained in using to figure out what they mean where there are ambiguities in the law and they said we there's just not a good reason for us to just defer to the government uh uh on its own interpretation when we are the interpreters that is our job to do and that's what we're going to do so does this mean the battle against the administrative state is over and that people who care about Constitution governance one and we can all go home now I'm so glad you asked that question Molly because the answer is emphatically no there is a a grave Temptation on the part of all of us you remember that great scene in The Lion King uh where they're saying you know no King no King there was a grave Temptation we can fall into uh to say oh chevron's gone that means we're all free um but that's not at all the case Chevron is not the end it's not even the beginning of the end it is only the end of the beginning and it's the the end of the beginning only if we make sure that it is in other words we have to take the next step all this does is it says that the administrative State when it makes laws laws that can throw you in prison laws that can get you fined that can shut down your business uh they actually Define crimes all the time um if if all we do is say the courts are now going to interpret whether they are correctly inter interpreting federal law we haven't really gained that much the underlying injury to the Constitutional structure is the delegation in the first instance to the executive branch agency of the lawmaking power the the lawmaking power so that the um the political philosophers and the legal philosophers that inspired the founding generation including uh um for example monc they were very very um firm on this principle which is that the lawmaking power is not something that can be delegated the lawmaker's job once the lawmaker has chosen to make laws the lawmaker's job is to make law not other lawmakers so that's what we have to T tackle next we have to get Congress to make law and to stop delegating now there is a it's a complicated problem because again we're producing a 100,000 pages of new law every single year by the way quick anecdote and then I'll get back uh to the main question a few years ago we tried to figure out how many crimes are on the books how many federal crimes you can commit we asked the Congressional research service whose job it is to tell us that they took them a while they got back to us and they said okay the U the answer is unknown and unknowable but it's at least 300,000 the reason it was that many but unknown and unknowable was because of these administratively created crimes that's spooky anyway so very complicated problem there is an elegant almost perfect solution that would deal with most of the problem and it's uh one legislative proposal called The reigns act it's re NS uh regulations from the executive in need of scrutiny in one Fell Swoop it would reinvigorate Article 1 Section 1 and Article 1 Section 7 7 which are the ones that tell us how you make a federal law but only Congress can make federal law and it it says that these executive branch agency rules the major rules imposing legal obligations on the part of the public uh that that are are are U significant in the way they regulate could take effect only after they've been enacted by Congress if a genie appeared to me and said you can pass any bill that's been introduced in Congress in the last 15 years it would be the Reigns Act 100 times uh 100 times out of a 100 that would do more to reinvigorate American freedom and our constitutional form of government than anything else I can think of and I I think it needs to be item number one for the Trump Administration to tackle legislatively next year I saw some of your colleagues after the the uh ler brigh decision came out they were freaking out and saying you don't understand we haven't been getting into the nitty-gritty of what laws are for a very long time we defer to these experts in the bureaucracy uh to to handle everything first of I love the faith that Democrat Senators have in the experts in the bureaucracy something not shared by many Americans um but it was just kind of funny to watch them say no no no we don't want to do our jobs here we've been not doing our jobs for a very long period of time so this would help them actually do their jobs it's exactly it's the new idolatry and this by the way way is the secret to Trump's sols this is the secret to why Trump has been successful it's also the secret to why we need Trump so much today and the secret to why they're doing everything they can why they tried to imprison him why somebody tried to kill them why they're uh pushing back as hard as they could look Donald Trump is an anomaly to say the least he's an enigma especially to the left he came along as someone who entered the scene at the top level ran for president was elected president from completely outside of the political Universe the only modern president you can think of who who fits that description he came along and identified a whole bunch of problems with government problems that he had had no role in creating unlike pretty much anybody else in the political system and so when that happened and he showed up with all this moral courage and Clarity uh they rebelled against him they said we we cannot have this we cannot have it now the other side does everything they can this also explains the laware they do everything they can to denigrate that to demonize it because the left remember believes that first of all they are the rule of law when they talk about the rule of law they don't think about it in terms of it's all better if we follow the law even if we disagree with it for the left the progressive is the law so whatever the the law is is in their mind the rule of law they will then denigrate and demonize anyone who comes along who pushes back on that who challenges those assumptions anyone who is against them and their policy agenda is against the rule of law by the same token any Supreme Court Justice who refuses to recuse from a case where they don't think they will like the ruling uh uh they will push back on them and try to demain their credibility pushing so far as even to delegitimize the court as a whole so they can pack the Supreme Court and change its composition at the end of the day these guys uh bastardize the concept of the rule of law uh to the point that it's it's really aggressive it's it's kind of a fascist approach to governance but that's why they're pushing back so hard against Donald Trump and by the way it also ties into the administrative State uh one of my First Reactions after I got the news the other night uh and I commented uh this evening on it is that things like this would not happen we wouldn't have violence erupt violent protests and rallies as often as we do surrounding presidential elections if we didn't put so many eggs in that basket if we hadn't made the federal government far more powerful than it was ever intended to be and if we hadn't made the president uh the presidency itself uh more powerful than it was intended and I think that is the hatred against Trump is that unlike every single president president for Generations he fought the administrative State more than anyone else and you might remember that the first impeachment against President Trump was because he disagreed with the inter agency consensus on foreign policy as my husband likes to say I don't remember voting for The Inter agency consensus at any point but that is how seriously they view it as a threat they view themselves as the permanent ruling class of Washington DC and anyone who thinks that the Constitution which sets out actual elected positions to oversee the executive branch or to make our laws anyone who views it that way that's the actual threat so final question was a perfect perf just real quick final question is there anything that the executive should do to reign in the exe to reign in the administrative State yes all right so look first and foremost the the uh the chief executive the president of the United States as Chief Executive Officer of the US government first thing he can do uh is is to put the right Personnel in place so that we stop getting these ridiculous expansions of federal regulatory power look at how many aspects of your life are micromanaged uh in ways that they shouldn't be who misses real light bulbs by the way I'm sick and tired of the light bulbs that are terrible and me very much who misses showerheads that can do the job washing machines dishwashers I mean everything all this minutia in in your life that's micromanaged by executive branch pin heads and I I say that with all due respect to pin heads um Trump gets in there and that's part of why project 2025 is so important IT personnel is policy and so if he starts on day one with the right Personnel in charge you're going to have better policy but the other main thing that he can do and this is the far more important thing that Trump can do as president I hope uh and I'm going to continue to ask him to make passage of The reigns act uh not just a top legislative priority but something that he will uh attach to his agenda to such a degree that he's willing to say uh I will not sign must pass legislative vehicle a b or c unless you attach the re act to it uh one good opportunity for that might well be the next debt sealing increase package which will come due shortly after he becomes president we actually had a great chance I worked with the house Freedom caucus and to work this in there in limit save grow last year we got it right to that point we had something Democrats wanted Wall Street wanted meaning to raise the debt ceiling we said okay if you're going to do that there needs to be some uh economically stimulative uh uh measures and some uh fiscally restrained measures and the Reigns act got put in there we could have gotten that past even with the Democratic controlled Senate and white house uh had certain certain legislative leaders not decided to punt on second down uh but I if under the leadership of President Trump if he were to say I'm going to VTO Bill X unless it has the Reigns act in there uh we'll get it passed and remember this if he does that that's worth everything else that is the reform in the administrative State because at that moment forward it's not the administrative State it's legislators elected to make law who are making law and we've achieved a lot of the victory at that point thank you very much Senator Mike Lee keep up the great work thanks so much thanks and