Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our names, been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, you guys, introducing Bruce Fine.
He is the author of The American Empire Before the Fall.
He was Associate Deputy Attorney General and General Counsel of the Federal Communications Commission under President Ronald Reagan, and Counsel to the Joint Congressional Committee on Covert Arms Sales to Iran.
He also helped write the Articles of Impeachment against Bill Clinton, which makes him an American hero.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Bruce?
I'm doing well today.
Thank you, Scott.
I like it so much when you write articles of impeachment against presidents.
Well, unfortunately, we've had impeachable offenses for the last several presidencies, and Congress turned into the invertebrate branch and decided to squint at all these violations because it doesn't want to vote on anything so-called controversial.
It's really quite remarkable that you've seen a backbone really melt and disappear right in front of your eyes.
Yeah, well, and it's not just them.
It's the courts, too, who say, ah, jeez, none of these war crimes or anything like that are in our jurisdiction.
These are political questions for the Congress to work out, even though, as you said, Congress has already abdicated.
Yes, and it's the irony, of course, is that the courts are saying, well, your real remedy is in Congress, but Congress is the problem.
So, you know, here is the chicken to go to the fox to fry, the remedy for the danger to the chicken coop, and that's kind of ridiculous.
And that's, in some sense, I think how naive and simple-minded the courts are about this kind of stuff.
The courts are supposed to be independent, and they are supposed to prohibit Congress from delegating authorities that they're not permitted to delegate.
That's what upholding separation of powers is about.
In fact, the separation of powers is in greatest danger when one branch willy-nilly throws its power to another and runs back into the kennel when danger appears.
That's when you have the combination where there isn't any recourse except to the courts.
Well, you know, politically, it makes sense, right?
If you're a congressperson, you don't want to oppose the president and his war because that's bad politics.
But then again, you don't want to take responsibility for it either because what if it goes bad?
Then you let it be his fault.
I mean, that's basically it, right?
Post-World War II?
Well, I think, Scott, you perfectly described the dynamic, the mental dynamic in the typical member of Congress's mind.
And that's why, in my judgment, unless you get a few courageous souls there, and I've worked right now with Congressman Walter Jones of North Carolina and Tulsa Gabbard of Hawaii to introduce House Resolution 922.
I call it a no presidential wars resolution that commits Congress to defining as an impeachable offense an initiation or continuation of presidential wars, which would then risk the president being ousted from office in a Senate trial.
Although we're trying to gather cosponsors now, at least at the beginning.
But I think your description of what is going on in Congress, notwithstanding their oath of office to support and defend the Constitution, they're in fact sabotaging it, underscores the urgency of having a judicial review.
I do think that if you had a declaratory judgment from the courts, and even though they're far from infallible, they have a reputation that exceeds that of Congress, that you could force the institution into voting on these questions that it's obligated if it's going to uphold the oath of office of each of the members.
In 228 years, Scott, the Congress of the United States has never once voted to initiate war.
Not once.
In the five conflicts where they voted a declaration, it was only after we had been attacked or perceived to be attacked based upon presidential lies.
And so Congress acknowledged that the country was in a state of war, for example, after Pearl Harbor.
But it has never voted to initiate war.
It will only vote for war in self-defense, which is what the framers wanted and thought would happen with the legislative branch where there's nothing in it for them to undertake gratuitous wars.
Where when the president undertakes gratuitous wars, there's everything in it for him.
You know, the heroism, footprints in the sand, the time, the appointment, the surveillance, the secrecy, the aggrandizement of power.
As James Madison said, war is the nurse of executive aggrandizement.
That's why the framers withheld the power to initiate war from the president.
And we've now turned that constitutional gospel on its head, and the presidents go to war whenever they feel it.
I mean, it's rather quite frightening when you think that under the current conventional thinking amongst both Republicans and Democrats, and I would say probably the American people, the president on his own could basically destroy the whole world by launching a massive nuclear attack and creating nuclear winter that would ultimately kill perhaps billions of people without any review, without any disclosure of the reasons that prompted such a wholesale assault on mankind.
And that's almost incredible to entertain that we would endow any individual with such staggering power, and yet that's what the orthodoxy is today.
Right.
Well, a parentheses there, as Daniel Ellsberg has explained, and Lawrence Whitner was on the show a few days ago talking about this.
In reality, that power has been delegated to hundreds of different people throughout the executive branch and throughout the military.
And there are commanders, you know, out in the Pacific nobody's ever heard of who could launch a nuclear war if they wanted to.
It doesn't require the presidential football and all that.
That's just TV.
But anyway, so here's the thing about this, Bruce, is we're having this conversation far in the future.
It's 2018 and a half right now, and the Rubicon was crossed back when?
Well, it's been a slow process, Scott.
I view the very beginning of the Mexican-American War where then President James K. Polk, he lied about an American soldier being killed on American soil.
And we then proclaimed this idea of manifest destiny, whatever it was, manifest to us but not anyone else, and an obligation to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
It was the beginning of, I guess, the intellectual destruction of the understanding that our greatness was liberty, the march of the mind, not the march of the foot soldier.
And we began to celebrate and heroize all those who fought in wars and elected them president as Zachary Taylor, and that was commonplace then.
And we then abandoned the idea that we were about the march of the mind, and then we became the march of the bayonet, the march of the foot soldier.
And after the Mexican-American War, and obviously we weren't fighting in self-defense there, the whole argument for going in was a concocted one.
And indeed, at one point in the war, in 1848, the Congress, the House, voted 85 to 81 to declare the war unconstitutionally illegal based upon the false representations made by President Polk.
The war concluded shortly thereafter, and the Senate did not move forward on it.
But then we get the Spanish-American War, and so why were we fighting in Cuba and in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and we're conquering those who are seeking self-determination in the Philippines afterwards with a savage war using waterboarding and torture?
And despite the fact that there was no danger to the United States from Cuba, the USS Maine had been blown up, but it wasn't the Spanish who provoked or caused the explosion.
Spain was the last country that could have threatened our existence and sovereignty.
But again, it came amidst this idea that our role in the world was the American leader.
We had to bring civilization and our angelic genes to all the world, and the end of a bayonet if it wouldn't be accepted voluntarily.
And then you have World War I, and again, the war to end wars.
In fact, one of the ironies, Scott, of World War I, that it was proclaimed openly and in boastfully by President Wilson, we're not fighting for anything for us.
We're not threatening – there may be less than a couple hundred Americans who had been sunk by German submarines, but that was a couple hundred.
This is after the Second Battle of the Somme and the Second Battle of the Marne.
You've got millions, tens of millions dying on the continent, 116 million American soldiers – I mean 116,000 American soldiers ultimately died.
And again, not a case where we were fighting in any kind of self-defense.
We really betrayed the Germans when we promised surrender or armistice based upon 14 points and then promptly authorized violation of virtually every one of those in the Versailles Treaty.
And as the United States abandoned the idea that our reason for existence wasn't to build pyramids, go to the moon, and dominate the world.
Our reason that was unique in the world for existence as a nation was to optimize the liberty of every individual to give us all a fair opportunity to develop our faculties and achieve our ambitions.
And what we chose was up to us, not the government or anybody else.
That was our greatness.
It wasn't territorial expansion or whatever world leader or world diadem means.
That was scorn.
That was viewed as turning us back into King George III and Julius Caesar's territorial expansion and dominating others.
But there's got to be some Indians listening to this saying, hey, what about me?
And wasn't it really an empire all along?
Well, it's surely true, Scott, that at the outset, we were warped.
Surely true.
But one of the ironies about the treatment of the Indians is that before Andy Jackson came in and there were certainly efforts by some of the states to treat the Indians as simply cattle, if you will, slaves, except they facto rather than de jure like blacks.
The very first Congress enacted the Indian Non-Intercourse Act of 1790 that forbade states or anyone else from acquiring any Indian lands without the consent of Congress.
And there was, up until really Andy Jackson's Trail of Tears, substantial efforts to at least provide some sense of Indian self-determination or culture, you will.
We actually had treaties with Indian tribes.
It wasn't just statute.
You had treaties.
They were not obligated to pay taxes at that particular time.
I'm not saying that we – but it wasn't the case that we immediately herded them into reservations.
That was later on.
In fact, the maltreatment of the Indians is associated with the beginning of our empire status.
Again, I don't want to argue in some sense that we had a perfect system for the Indians.
It wasn't anything like what came later and ultimately culminated in the Black Hills and the total betrayal of our treaty obligations and duties to the Indians.
Well, it is kind of the problem then, right?
That, as Mises says, the middle of the road leads to socialism.
Well, in this case, they created this limited constitutional republic.
Instead of being ordained by God, it was ordained by this written charter, the law.
And it had to stay within these limits and this and that and the other thing.
And yet, immediately, America buys half of the central part of North America from the French, who didn't really own it, and expanded, as you said, went to war against Mexico.
They tried to steal Canada in 1812.
It's kind of hard to figure out.
This is actually one of the things that kind of made me a libertarian when I was young, was figuring out, okay, World War I was a really cynical, bad thing.
Kind of skip World War II for a minute because everyone knows that was the greatest thing that ever happened or something.
But you kind of go back in time and look at when exactly did the republic become the empire?
And the more you learn, the further and further back into history you go, where you're looking for the time when it really was a limited constitutional republic, and it's kind of hard to nail down.
Well, you're right.
I mean, everything moves.
I think in just trying to organize it intellectually, Scott, we make these artificial divisions.
This is where it began.
This is where it ended.
And it matters of degree, and it's really just a pedagogical tool to help us think.
But as I say, even though I last went to defend the perfection, even the Constitution, it's not only Indians, blacks, women, Catholics.
Many were left out, Jews as well.
And that it did put in process the most important element was the separation of powers, which now has disintegrated.
And I do think, however, that what you've described in terms of the deviations that have come about from the Constitution, not through constitutional amendments like the Bill of Rights or the Civil War amendments, but just ignoring what the clear purpose of these provisions were.
The deviations came because the intellectual, what I call the intellectual infrastructure, decayed from one that celebrated liberty to one that celebrated power and tribalism.
And there's only so much that words can do.
I mean, despite the fact we had the Civil War amendments, we had 100 years of Jim Crow because white supremacy was so powerfully ingrained into our culture.
The idea of separate but equal with even people with IQs that were above 90 accepted that idea.
I mean, even people like Brandeis and Holmes were not protesting separate but equal, and they were sitting on the court.
And as we have moved away from thinking about the United States as a liberty-centered universe into thinking about the United States as a power-centered universe, we just ignore separation of powers because you can't have empires without Caesars.
You've got to have unity of command.
As Napoleon said, and I've written, you're better at one bad general than two great ones.
And as a consequence, both the courts and the Congress and the American people, to be candid, have just permitted the executive branch slowly but surely to expand and expand and expand, and we now have a national security garrison state.
And the law, heck with the law, that just goes out the board because in times of war, as Cicero said, the law is silent.
It was true 2,000 years ago.
True today.
I think in part even the decision of the Supreme Court yesterday, the travel ban case, Trump v.
Hawaii, is based upon this idea, well, we've got to give deference to the president.
He's doing X, Y, Z.
It doesn't matter how counterfactual it is.
The things that he's doing, in fact, are making us more endangered rather than less by provoking enmities and hatreds and viciousness and not understanding that peace and goodwill and mutual respect is the way in which you diminish threats.
To do the opposite is to augment the threat.
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Yeah, you know, I'm sorry I didn't mention the article at the beginning.
It's two interviews in a row.
I forgot to do that.
American Empire Demands a Caesar.
And this is at the American Conservative magazine, theamericanconservative.com.
And I actually had this article open and was reading it, and in my other eye was Twitter, and there was Max Boot complaining that Donald Trump is acting like an emperor.
And this is the author of the article, The Case for American Empire, in the Weekly Standard, who says that, as you referred to earlier, America's special, so we have the right to tell everybody else what to do and to force them to be better.
This is one of the worst warmongers of our generation, and saying he can't believe that he has a president who acts like everybody ought to better do what he says.
This is the leading advocate in our society for a one-world empire based out of Washington, D.C.
Oh, yeah, and he has a podium at the Washington Post, which is one of the, he's turned into William Randolph Hearst of modern times, is in favor of every war that's ever been conceived, and even those who haven't been conceived.
But you're right.
I mean, Max Boot, why are you complaining, Max?
Be careful what you wish for.
You might get it.
It's exactly what you asked for.
Limitless power in the presidency.
And really, when you think about it, I think, Scott, when you talk about American exceptionalism, it is just a different word, terminology for the chosen people or a master race.
There isn't any difference between the two.
It's tribalism.
There isn't any proof of that.
How do we know we're exceptional?
Is the DNA different?
Chromosome pairs different?
Do we breathe different kinds of air?
Of course not.
It's what I call species or national narcissism that thinks we can make no errors, which is clearly wrong.
The wise nation knows what they don't know, and they know that they make errors.
That's why you celebrate due process.
I could be wrong.
Let's be hesitant here.
Now, if we can't convince people that they want to do something voluntarily, maybe it's because we're wrong, not because of them.
It's the kind of intellectual humility, again, that celebrates liberty and diversity, rather than the bayonet to cram down what our view of the good life is other people's throats.
I mean, that's the thing that's always really bothered me about all of this, all the ironies about America's special because we put liberty first.
That's the one thing we all agree on.
We all have different religions and different backgrounds and different this and different that, but we have the same paper money.
We more or less all speak English, and we believe that you got the right to live your own way, too, and just leave me alone, too, and this kind of thing.
That's what made America special in the first place.
That was what was so great about it.
But then people forgot about that part and just said, yeah, we're great.
So now American exceptionalism doesn't mean that we're exceptional because have you ever heard of a society that really organized itself around the principle of liberty before?
That's pretty cool.
Instead, it's just we're exceptional, so now laws and rules and morality don't apply to us.
Now we can murder you, and no one has a right to tell us it's wrong because we're exceptional.
But then, like you're saying, what's so exceptional?
We're between Canada and Mexico?
Or I know it ain't the chromosome thing because we all got all different mixed up chromosomes around here, so that ain't it.
And it ain't liberty.
That's all flushed down the toilet.
So what is it that's so exceptional anyway?
Did we listen to Max Boot?
I think you're absolutely right, Scott.
I've given so much thought to this over about 40 years and written millions of words, and I do think it isn't unique to the United States.
Nothing is more common in history than the oppressed becoming the oppressors.
As soon as you give them limitless power, they use it to abuse it and to promote their tribalistic ambitions.
But I do think maybe it's a bleak outlook.
I think it's built into our DNA.
If you look at what I call – we're largely still a hormonal species, not a cerebral one.
And power, money, sex, creature comforts, fame, ulterior motives are what drive the species, and it's not unique to the United States.
In the United States, for example, we have 4,000 military museums and not a single museum for philosophers.
The Armored Knight moves across the pages of romance and poetry, not the philosopher.
It's Lancelot, not King Arthur, who gets Guinevere.
And that's not just United States or English culture.
It's everywhere you go.
It's always the person on the statute is what?
A warrior who excels in killing other members of the species.
Do the monuments get built there?
Where do you even go to Paris?
Even the biggest monument is the Mausoleum of Napoleon.
It's not Voltaire.
It's not Rousseau.
It's Napoleon, who's the biggest hero there.
And that's the whole reason why, or the major reason why, in order to blunt this, what I call, very degraded tropism of the species, you've got to have the separation of powers.
You have to pit ambition against ambition.
You can't believe that wisdom and magnanimity is going to drive those who occupy positions of political authority.
And that's what we've totally forgotten, where it's all just about the person rather than the institutions.
No, you give any person limitless power, and you know what?
There'll be an emperor.
Max Boot doesn't understand that.
Yeah.
Well, and the other weird perversion of all of this is all this emphasis on liberty for Americans.
And you've got to admit, for a lot of Americans, a lot of the time we've had a lot more liberty than a lot of other people in history and all that.
There's a lot to it.
The Bill of Rights somewhat applies and has applied in some circumstances, at least.
Certainly better than not having one, as we can see in a lot of the rest of the world, including in the Western world.
But part of the entire brainwash about America and liberty and this and that and the other thing is, certainly the impression, I don't know if they ever say this exactly outright, Bruce, but certainly the impression you get in public school and elementary and junior high school-type civics is that liberty is something that Americans have because of our Constitution, because of our Bill of Rights, because of the benevolence of our wonderful democratic government.
And then it's at least implied, then, that other humans don't have rights.
If their governments don't give them rights, if they don't have a charter like our charter that has rights this and rights that all in it, then that also means it's okay for us to kill them.
Because it's not that they're lesser humans, necessarily, it's just that they don't have rights.
Because that's the way we learn in school.
We do.
That's what's special about us.
So they don't.
And so that makes it not a crime to kill them.
And we've got to be honest about this.
Just in the case of the Iraqis, if you look at Ronald Reagan helping Saddam and, for that matter, the Ayatollah in the Iran-Iraq War, you look at Iraq War I and Bill Clinton's blockade, and George Bush's invasion and aftermath, and then Barack Obama's support for the jihadists and the rise of ISIS, and then Iraq War III to destroy them, we're talking, just in the Iraqis, we're talking at least a couple of million people killed here.
And we act like, meh.
Even John McCain came out and said, oh, I'm on my deathbed.
I guess Iraq was a mistake after all.
Shrug.
And no one even cares.
Yeah, well, listen, you remember the famous or infamous Madeleine Albright interview on CBS 60 Minutes?
500,000 Iraqis, she's told, children have died because of the boycott, because of the embargo.
It was that, was it?
And she says, oh, it was worth it.
Really?
500,000 children under five, and that was how callous she responded.
Any impeachment, any denunciation ever?
Nope.
Nothing whatsoever.
But you're right.
We dehumanize, and I think dehumanization is even fostered by their predator drones, so you don't actually see the people you're killing, and you're not even flying the Enola Gay to drop a nuclear weapon on Japan.
You're just thousands of miles away, and you just press the button, and people get vaporized, and that's the end of the matter.
And you're exactly right that we have forgotten perhaps the wonderful words and understanding of the Declaration, that it wasn't just Americans.
Thomas Jefferson was writing that endowed by their crater with the unalienable rights, it says everyone is endowed by their crater with the rights, among others, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And he was speaking not just for Americans, but obviously we are justifying our revolt against King George III, but the principle of natural rights.
Everybody is born with natural rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and governments are formed to preserve and protect the rights, not to destroy them.
So we don't teach any civics anymore, Scott.
And it's just truly appalling how little Americans know, even when they attend the best schools, about the philosophical underpinnings of our origins.
Yeah.
You know, one thing is the counterfactual here, right?
Because people might be saying, oh yeah, you're so smart, well, how would an American republic look right now?
And it's pretty easy to imagine, right?
Ron Paul ran for president in 88.
Harry Brown ran in 96.
What if it had been Ron Paul at the fall of the Soviet Union had been the one in the chair, not George Bush?
And then what if he had been followed into power by Harry Brown, who, his whole thing, I mean, he sounds just like you.
Let me tell you about the Statue of Liberty and what liberty means.
And he would have, in almost a George Bush-ian violent way, he would have rhetorically beat the entire world over the head about how they're not free enough.
All day, every day.
And he would have been, of course, trying at the same time to do his best for American liberty here, to really lead by example, to really show what it's like to have a Bill of Rights and to really enforce it.
And just, you know, I don't mean to sound too silly and utopian and the new communist man or whatever kind of thing, but just compared to what the Bushes and Clintons have wrought, I mean, man.
No, well, that's true, and it's hardly – I don't think it's difficult to conceive if you had someone – if you ran for president today, Ron Paul or Harry Brown.
I just read an article called Invincible Self-Defense and Make America Great Again with Invincible Self-Defense and Abandon Our Empire, dedicated and committed to defending the borders of at least 70 countries no matter what our national interests require.
And it obviously takes transitions because we – in promoting liberty, we're undoing virtually more than a century of excesses of the federal government.
And so people who have relied upon them have to be transitioned or grandfathered in, but the new generation needs to accept the responsibilities and the opportunities of liberty as was true at the founding.
And it can be done again, but I think – I don't think, God, it can be done with just one individual.
One individual needs to ignite it, but ultimately it's got to be taught in the schools and preached in the pulpits and talked around at the dinner table.
So we have a new culture that gives a new birth to our philosophical foundations of liberty and the march of the mind.
It is not going to happen overnight, and you get despairing when you think of the preoccupation that all the young people have with just looking at their cell phones or apps or whatever and being preoccupied with drivel and impurities.
But that has – if that doesn't change, there's no hope.
We're just – we're running against a thousand-mile-an-hour headwind.
That's right.
Well, we've just got to get your interview on their app and make this work.
All right, well, listen, thanks for coming back on the show to talk about this stuff with us.
I really appreciate it, Bruce.
Okay.
Have a wonderful day, Scott.
You too.
Talk to you.
All right, you guys, that's Bruce Fine.
He was associate deputy attorney general and general counsel of the FCC under Reagan and counsel to the Joint Congressional Committee on Covert Arms Sales to Iran.
Oh, man, I should have asked about that maybe next time.
I just mentioned it, and yeah, Reagan double-dealing.
Hey, listen, his article at the American Conservative Magazine is called American Empire Demands a Caesar.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
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