All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
All right, you guys, introducing Justin Cornett and Josh Echol from For All Tennessee.
Welcome to the show, guys.
How you doing?
Thanks for having us, Scott.
We're doing great.
Doing great, man.
Thanks for having us.
Cool.
Happy to have you here.
So I'm sorry, it was one of the other of you or another guy that works with you that I met at Freedom Fest the other day?
Yeah.
Josiah Baker.
That's great.
Josiah Baker was the guy.
Okay.
Well, so I had a very brief discussion with him and he was just telling me that you guys had not just gotten passed but gotten signed a whole bunch of police reform bills in Tennessee there.
And then with you guys, he met this group For All Tennessee, which I think he said is just a lobbying group.
So I was wondering, first of all, who it was you're representing here.
And then second of all, if you could go down the list of what it was that you got through here.
That's such a big deal.
Well, yeah, let me give you a little bit about who we are and what we are trying to do.
We are a nonprofit that lobbies state level policy here in Tennessee.
And the organization came out of an attempt to answer the question, who lobbies for everybody else?
You know, big corporations have their lobbyists, moneyed interests have their lobbyists, special interests.
Even the government has their own lobbyists.
And we see what kind of legislation gets passed by those folks.
But the question is, is who works for the little guy?
So we came up with what Josh has lovingly referred to as the democratization of a 501c4 and think that we have a vehicle that we can really facilitate some real change and real unity across the aisle here in Tennessee and hopefully spread it out to other states.
Yeah, and Scott, to build off that, the mission statement is mobilizing Tennesseans around policy that empowers people and limits government.
And Justin and I have spent about 10 years in the liberty movement.
And one thing that, you know, a quote that I feel like is extremely relevant to our organization and to just people with libertarian philosophy in general, is that libertarians understand the left in a way the right never will, and they understand the right in a way the left never will.
And so we took that and kind of baked that into our organization.
And by that, I mean, you know, we're focused completely on legislating and lobbying for issues that only empower people and limit government.
And we're doing it from a completely nonpartisan perspective.
And a very democratic perspective.
Yes.
The things that kind of make the organization a little bit different than everything else that's out there.
You know, most organizations in this space, ACLU, Americans for Prosperity, whatever, they ask you to throw money at them and then they check and see what they got in the budget and they decide what their agenda is going to be.
And you may or may not agree with what goes on.
What we are doing is we're asking the people that contribute to the organization to vote on what pieces of legislation that we actually end up going to work.
And once we have that list set, we divide all of our issues out so that if you really care about one issue and don't like anything else that we're doing, you would be able to donate to that one issue or any combination of issues, knowing that your money is only going to go toward the things that you're interested in having it go toward.
Yeah.
And one last comment on that, and then I can fill you in on our legislative agenda for 2021, but our members are made up of Democrats, Democratic socialists and Trump supporters, as well as libertarians, classical liberals and centrists.
And so we really see this as the anti-party because in 2021, we put together a legislative agenda that brought all those sides together to work for issues like police reform that we got passed.
And we think it's a very viable strategy.
And it's, you know, it's something different than what you see in the mainstream political space today.
So when you talk about lobbying, I mean, that sounds to me like just handing a check to a congressman to bribe him to do stuff for you.
So what exactly does that look like when your nonprofit does it?
It's a lot of meetings and a lot of trying to explain the minutiae of policy to legislators.
If you've ever been to your own legislature and spoken to any number of the folks that serve, I would imagine your perception is pretty much the same.
There are a lot of folks up there that are not very well informed on some of these more intricate pieces of legislation.
And then, you know, there's a small handful, of course, that are very well versed and will fight you on it.
So it's trying to find a balance in what people would like, trying to help support other good pieces of legislation in order to gain support for our legislation, things like that.
It's a compromise thing.
And tactically, Scott, we're a grassroots lobbying organization.
So Justin might undersell himself, but Justin's a former lobbyist in the Koch Network, and he's got a lot of experience working at the Tennessee State Legislature.
But we focus on raising awareness and cultivating what I like to call citizen lawmakers, or I'm sorry, citizen legislators, or lobbyists, citizen lobbyists.
And what that means is we bring, in the Tennessee State Legislature at least, it's completely open to the public.
So we bring together a community, a team of 10 or 20 people.
We put them with our seasoned lobbyists, people like Justin Cornett.
And then we hit, you know, hit the offices, and we raise awareness among the legislature and the public, and continue to engage volunteers directly.
And using kind of the public awareness campaign that we run in tandem with our lobbying efforts to put a little bit of pressure and give some teeth to our citizen lobbyists there on the ground with Justin.
Now, here's the thing is, this is a great promo for your group and everything, but we're burying the lead here terribly, which is y'all got a ban on no-knock SWAT raids and chokeholds and a pseudo ban on civil forfeiture and some other important things here.
So let's talk about that.
Yeah, we got what is arguably the strongest police reform bill that's been passed in the wake of all the mess that was going on last summer.
This bill prohibits the issuance of a no-knock raid warrant.
It teaches chokeholds, but only allows chokeholds to be used in a situation where the officer is in fear of his own life.
It addresses shooting at moving vehicles.
It requires de-escalation training.
Arguably, most importantly, it includes a duty to intervene in any excessive use of excessive force by a fellow officer or report on excessive use of excessive force by a police officer.
And now what about qualified immunity?
Were you guys able to get that through?
We weren't.
That is something that we're hoping our membership will allow us to take up this year.
We're very interested in that policy and at least limiting it at the state level.
Again, we would like to make this organization work here and bring it to other states and hopefully even federally.
Same mission statement, doing the same thing, trying to shrink the size and scope of government.
How thorough is this ban on no-knock SWAT raids?
No-knock SWAT.
It's currently against the law for a judge to issue a warrant for a no-knock raid.
Period.
That's it.
Full stop.
Those are gone.
That's the dream.
It really is the dream legislation that we'd like to see passed in other states.
There are common law exceptions to no-knocks.
If there's hostage situations or threat of loss of life in an imminent way, things like that, that have been around for hundreds of years, that would still apply, but a judge can no longer issue a warrant for a no-knock.
Hey, y'all, check out our great stuff at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
First of all, we've published no quarter the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our Institute's late and great co-founder.
He was the very best one of us.
Our whole movement, I mean.
And no quarter will leave his mark on you, no question.
Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder, the legendary libertarian thinker and writer Sheldon Richman.
We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
Both are instant classics.
I'm proud to say that Coming to Palestine is surely the definitive libertarian take on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians.
And Social Animals certainly ranks with the very best writings on libertarian ethics, economics, and everything else.
You'll absolutely love it.
Then there's me.
I've written two books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I've also published a collection of the transcripts of all of my interviews of the heroic Dr. Ron Paul, 29 of them, plus a speech by me about how much I love the guy.
It's called The Great Ron Paul.
You can find all of these at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
And another, there were two other bills that we got passed this year, Scott.
I'll let Justin talk about civil forfeiture, but one that I'm pretty passionate about was a restriction on county and city executives to label businesses as essential or nonessential.
And we know in 2020 that the shutdowns were probably the largest wealth transfer from small business owners to multinationals in the history of the world, not only the country.
And so we got that bill passed as well, which we hope are going to protect small business owners across the state from unreasonable shutdowns and restrictions on their ability to engage in commerce.
And then there was also a bill on civil forfeiture.
Yeah.
And the bill that Josh was talking about, it did apply to the governor at one point, but it had to be amended because the governor wouldn't sign it when it applied to him.
But neither here nor there.
Although, you know, that really does raise the important question of whether any of the state constitutions actually authorized their governor to do any of these things in the first place.
I mean, he's sort of treating it like it's a default that he can, but says who, you know, back in 2019, who said that they could do this if they want?
Yeah.
No, I mean, it's definitely up for interpretation.
I mean, I've read that piece of the code and, you know, it leaves the door open for action to be taken and then argued about on the back end.
And that's, you know, and that's what we see here in Tennessee.
They did a big summer study last year to address the governor's powers, emergency powers.
And it went absolutely nowhere, absolutely nowhere at all, which I was kind of surprised about because there was a lot of irritation among a lot of the members of the House.
It just wasn't the ones that had the power, I guess, because that's that's a real thing.
And by the way, you know, for any IRS agents listening to this later, this is not partisan politics at all.
This is just issue oriented stuff and nothing to do with supporting a party here now.
So your friend that I met there in South Dakota was saying it's kind of a backdoor ban on civil forfeiture, because if someone sues and wins their property back, the cops then have to pay the first ten thousand dollars of their court costs.
Is that it?
Yeah, that's correct.
Prior to this law being passed, the agency that sees the property, whatever law enforcement agency it was, was responsible for reimbursing attorneys fees up to three thousand dollars or twenty five percent of the property value.
In Tennessee, the average seizure was about twenty six hundred dollars, twenty four hundred dollars, somewhere around in that neighborhood.
So at twenty five percent, you're looking at six hundred bucks for a lawyer and that gets you literally nowhere in a legal proceeding.
So the bill that we got removed the twenty five percent language and changed the cap to ten thousand dollars.
So now we think that changes the calculus for these agencies on what they seize.
It doesn't seem like it's any longer worth taking a twenty five hundred dollar seizure if they may end up having to pay ten thousand dollars on the back end for legal fees.
You know what I mean?
So we think that this is going to greatly increase the dollar value for civil forfeitures at the very least, which, you know, the only reason we have civil asset forfeiture the way it is in this country is because the Democrats teamed up with Nixon in the 70s to start the drug war.
And it was part of the initial drug war bill.
And if they want to stop drugs, their average seizure should probably be more like twenty five, fifty, one hundred thousand.
Right.
So if we're pushing that number higher, I feel like at the very least, it's going in the right direction.
In other words, they have to go down to HSBC and do their drug war there.
Less lower income people will be caught in the crossfire.
At least that's what we're hoping for.
So listen, I mean, to zoom out here a little bit, it sounds a little bit like a dream come true for, you know, criminal justice reformers across the country.
It's a pretty impressive battery of things.
Oh, you did mention the chokehold thing there.
So now what exactly was the secret sauce here that got this thing done other than just you guys are really good at your job?
How did you do this?
Oh, yeah.
No, I don't get me wrong.
We worked our butts off on this, but there's definitely a stroke of luck involved in this particular situation.
The iron was hot on the issue, obviously.
What's funny about it is this language was brought in that summer study last year when they were talking about the emergency powers for the governor.
And it was brought by Democrats, and it was murdered immediately in that summer study.
And then two Republicans brought the exact same language back.
And the bill didn't just pass.
Out of 132 possible votes in the House and Senate, it got 123 yes votes and zero no votes.
Truly bipartisan.
Yeah, it was.
The governor was on board with it.
We didn't know that the governor was on board with it.
The Police Chiefs Association helped write the language.
We didn't know about that.
So there was a little bit of luck involved in it.
But essentially, this was a perfect storm.
All the law enforcement agencies and the governor took part in drafting the language.
And it just sailed straight through, man.
That's awesome.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
No, I was just saying, I'm agreeing.
It really was.
It didn't get run until the very last opportunity for it to be run in the session.
It was on the very last calendar.
And we didn't think the sponsor was excited about it.
We had picked up a second no-knock raid bill that just ended no-knock raids.
And we were going to run that one if we couldn't get the better one through.
And as soon as this one started going, man, it just picked up nothing but momentum at every step it took.
Hey, listen.
I mean, that is so important.
You just could not embellish how important that is to ban the SWAT raids.
I mean, this is how the Navy SEALs and the Delta Force fought the war in Afghanistan, kicking in people's doors in the middle of the night down there in the Helmand province and stuff.
This is crazy to have Americans treated this way, especially when it's almost always over just some contraband possession charge or some nonsense.
Well said.
Well said.
There were a lot of things in that initial drug war bill that got turned on Americans that were intended for the war zone.
Civil asset forfeiture being another one.
Historically, that had only applied to piracy in this country.
And in the 70s, that was the first time we turned it on American citizens.
All right.
Well, listen.
So, now, what if people wanted to replicate your success in their states?
I mean, obviously, if they want to support you, they go to what's the web address?
But what if they wanted your guidance in trying to copy what you're doing?
You help them out?
Yes.
Call us.
Yeah.
It's 4LTN.org is the web address.
You know, I'll tell you, I think the secret sauce to this is getting away from partisan labels, getting away from associating with any political campaign, focusing on the issues and focusing on reaching people where they're at.
You know, talking to people and trying to build consensus is really the root of this.
And not coming at them with dogma or ideology in the forefront, just simply trying to find consensus.
Give you a good anecdote on what victory looks like with us.
One of the bills that we ran was on ballot access reform for minor parties.
In Tennessee, if you want to run as a Democrat, Republican, or independent, you need 25 signatures from registered voters in your district to get on the ballot.
If you want to run as any other party, Green, Constitution, Libertarian, Kanye West, Patriot Party, doesn't matter.
You need 56,082 signatures.
Right.
So this isn't a controversial thing.
Most people across all aisles think that elections should be participatory and that maybe we should have more competition than just two parties.
Most people think that way.
So when we were lobbying this bill, I had a regional coordinator for the Democratic Socialists in Tennessee calling Democrats and lobbying them on this piece of legislation.
And I had somebody that was elected to serve inside the Republican Party lobbying Republicans on the same piece of legislation.
That's what we think most of our issues are going to be like.
Ballot access isn't controversial.
Everybody should be able to have pretty easy access to the ballot.
Civil asset forfeiture isn't controversial.
Police should have to have a charge or a conviction before they can take your stuff.
We ran a bill on blighted properties, and it doesn't seem like it's controversial that you shouldn't be able to take a house that is not blighted, period.
So we think that these issues stand on their own merit.
All we got to do is make the argument and let people know where people stand on or where their representatives stand on these issues.
Great.
All right.
Well, thank you both for your time.
I really appreciate it.
And congratulations on getting such great work done there.
Thanks for all you do, Scott.
Thank you, Mr. Horton.
All right, you guys.
That's Justin Cornett and Josh Echol from For All Tennessee, and they're at foralltn.org.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
