Mike Maharrey of the Tenth Amendment Center discusses a recent U.S. Supreme Court case that overturns a Kansas Supreme Court decision concerning a potentially unconstitutional traffic stop. The police officer in the incident in question pulled a car over because his computer showed that the owner had a suspended driver’s license. This was seen as probable cause, even though it’s obviously quite possible that someone other than the owner was driving the car. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the officer’s actions did not violate the Fourth Amendment, overturning the Kansas court’s decision that the stop had been unconstitutional. Maharrey laments the tendency, even among some libertarians, to turn to the federal government as a safeguard of liberty. The pattern, he says, is clear: the more you centralize power, the more it will erode our rights.
Discussed on the show:
- “Supreme Court Rules Against Fourth Amendment” (The Libertarian Institute)
Mike Maharrey is National Communications Coordinator for the Tenth Amendment Center. He is the author of three books on nullification and hosts the Thoughts from Maharrey Head podcast. Find him on Twitter @mmaharrey10th.
This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; Listen and Think Audio; TheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com.
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The following is an automatically generated transcript.
All right, y’all welcome it’s Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. All right, you guys introducing Michael Maharrey. From the 10th amendment center. He is the National communications director there at the 10th amendment center and he also writes for us at the Institute, libertarian institute.org including one on the front page today. Supreme Court rules against Fourth Amendment? Well, I’m not sure you could be referring to a great many different cases there. So we’ll have to get into the details. Welcome back to the show, Mike. How you doing?
Mike Maharrey 1:11
Thanks, God. It’s always a pleasure to be on the show. It’s one of my favorites.
Scott Horton 1:15
Cool, man. Well, happy to have you here. So a Kansas versus Glover film in?
Mike Maharrey 1:24
Yeah. So this was a case from a couple of years back and involves search and seizure. As all these Fourth Amendment cases do, basically, the deputy pulled over a car because the driver came back as having an expired driver’s license. So he used that as probable cause and dude ended up getting arrested. And the defense was and I think this is a legitimate defense. Just because the driver of an automobile has a suspended license doesn’t mean or just because the Winter has a suspended license. That doesn’t mean the person driving has a suspended license. You know, a lot of people drive cars, you know, especially like if you’re in a family, my wife drives my car, I drive her car. And so the argument was that the police couldn’t really assume that there was a crime being committed, so therefore had no justification in pulling over the driver. And interestingly, the the states started out in state court and the state court agreed and it ended up working itself up through the system eventually got to the US Supreme Court. Now, the Kansas Supreme Court said that in an eight to one decision, said that the police were not justified in kept that protection on search and seizure in place. But the Supreme Court got the case because they made it a fourth amendment case they made it a constitutional case. So therefore, it was able to go to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled to one, that indeed, it’s perfectly legitimate for the police to pull over a car if the registered owner has a suspended driver’s license. So another chip away from the protections of illegal search and seizure under the Constitution. The only dissenter was Sonia subtle, subtle millyar. I never can say her name, right. But she said that the opinion destroys Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that requires individualized suspicion even though she’s not wrong. But she was the only one that thought that way. And so here we are, with, you know, yet another Supreme Court case that erodes away these limits that were supposed to be put on government power.
Scott Horton 3:40
But then, so in the article, you say, this is the big mistake of asking the federal government to intervene here and the incorporation in tech the entire concept of incorporation of the Bill of Rights by the Supreme Court against the state. So what the hell is all that about?
Mike Maharrey 3:57
Yeah, so this is where I am I tend to make a lot of libertarians angry. And I you know, I’m almost almost feel the Oh yeah, I almost feel like I’m, I feel like I’m spitting into the wind saying this. But there is this this impulse to use the Supreme Court to use the bill of rights to use the Federal Constitution to basically police the states and ensure that the states don’t violate our rights. And I get the impulse because obviously, we don’t want governments violating our rights. And the reality is, all governments at every level are going to violate our rights, that is the nature of government, governments are, are, by their very nature and typical antithetical, I should say, to individual liberty and freedom. So there’s this impulse like I said, the problem is, it is a misplaced impulse because it places too much authority in the central power it centralizes a monopolizes power at the federal level. And this was never intended, the first thing that people need to understand is that the Bill of Rights, as written and ratified was never intended to apply to state governments. And this is not debatable. People will try to debate me but I simply say find me any place during the ratification of the Bill of Rights during the creation of the Bill of Rights. Even when the Bill of Rights was being conceived that it was intended to apply to the States. It doesn’t exist, you can’t find it. People try this legal reasoning and whatnot. But the fact of the matter is, they did not want the federal government having that much power over the states, James Madison, during the drafting of the Constitution actually tried to put in a provision that would have allowed the federal government to veto any state law. And that was rejected. It was rejected resoundingly, because the biggest fear at the time was that the centralized power would be too big and strong, and it would overwhelm the individual states. And so the Bill of Rights was crucial. To limit federal authority,
Scott Horton 6:02
and I don’t want to be too much of a technicality terian about it or anything. But it says in the preamble to the Bill of Rights, that this is a list of declaratory and restrictive clauses. In other words, it’s not a bill of rights at all. It’s a bill of restrictions by free people against the new government that they had created.
Mike Maharrey 6:21
I am so glad you said that actually did a little short video yesterday for the 10th amendment center that we put up on our Instagram and maybe on Twitter. And I said that exact same thing the Bill of Rights was Miss named it should have been called the bill of restrictions. It does not give you any rights. It doesn’t even really, you know, it’s not giving the government permission to protect our rights. It’s restraining the actions of government. And in this case, the federal government’s
Scott Horton 6:45
You know, I’m glad you said that because, um, you know, I know much more about the Texas constitution than the other state governments constitutions, but I’m pretty sure they’re all like this are much more along these lines. Is that Texas Bill of Rights says the Texas government must protect your right to go to whatever church you want, carrying a gun, whatever it is free speech, etc. It’s not just a list of restrictions. It’s a mandate to the state governments, which makes their bills of rights actual bills of rights in that sense. And sort of the opposite take then the national one, right.
Mike Maharrey 7:23
I did not know that about the Texas Bill of Rights. That’s interesting. So the bar is set even higher for the state of Texas. I’m more familiar with the Kentucky Bill of Rights and it is more it’s written more along the lines of the Federal Bill of Rights. It’s it’s more framed as restrictions. But interestingly, a lot of the restrictions are actually better than what you find in the federal Bill of Rights. For instance, I was just looking at the Kentucky bill of rights on the freedom of religion. And this has been an issue up there because the governor has shut down churches with Coronavirus lockdown. And interestingly one of the phrases that’s in the Kentucky Bill of Rights I’m kind of paraphrasing here, but it basically says the the right of conscience will not be infringed. That’s pretty broad. You know, basically it’s saying that that your your right to act in a way that that corresponds with your religious beliefs. And of course, religious beliefs can also be non religious, that the government cannot infringe upon that so even stronger than the First Amendment. But like I said, the libertarian impulse and the conservative impulse is to use the federal government to us this incorporation doctrine. I don’t know if you want to get into the nitty gritty details of the incorporation.
Scott Horton 8:42
Yeah, go ahead, though. Okay, well, we got time let’s,
Mike Maharrey 8:45
let’s do it. incorporation doctrine was a basically a legal principle that was, in essence created out of thin air based on the 14th amendment. It was some 50 plus years after the 14th amendment was ratified, and it actually kind of goes against what the Supreme Court said the Fourth Amendment was intended to do when the Fourth Amendment was originally was originally ratified. And what that was the fourth amendment 14th amendment, when it talks about, you know, the privileges and immunities and the right to due process, basically what it was doing, it was ensuring that the freed slaves would be recognized as citizens, and that they would have the same basic fundamental rights, such as being able to enter into contracts, being able to travel, those types of things. And they were actually specific things that were laid out in a civil rights act before the 14th amendment was even ratified. Those things were specified, it was never intended to apply the bill of rights to the States. And yet 50 years later, the Supreme Court comes up with this incorporation doctrine using quote unquote due process to in effect allow the federal government to police states and to say, you know, even though the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law, it now means no state No local government shall make no law. According to the Supreme Court, a lot of libertarians, a lot of conservatives, a lot of people who care about Liberty like this because they think the federal government is going to clamp down on the states, and they’re going to keep us free. They’re going to police the states. My objection to this is number one, it never works. As we see with this case, I shouldn’t say never. But very rarely does the federal court limit government power most of the time, it erodes away those restrictions on government power. And when that happens in a Supreme Court case, it applies to the entire United States. So let’s think about this Kansas vs. Glover case had it stayed in the state as it was supposed to? Well, in this case, it actually would have been good because the state Supreme Court ruled in a way that was favorable toward liberty, you restricted the activities of the police. What we got instead when it went federal is now we have a chipping away of the right to protect are persons places and papers and and vehicles. Now that applies to the whole United States that decision is going to be viewed by every police department in every county in every state in this country. As we can now stop people, if we see that the owner of the cars driver’s license is suspended.
Scott Horton 11:18
So what we’ve done course they can program their computer like that to to read license plates and just say, any car that’s connected to somebody who’s licensed and suspended Litem, right.
Mike Maharrey 11:29
So my point is that, in some few cases, if we use the federal government as the I call it, the Liberty enforcement squad, if we use it that way, every once in a while we’ll get some some crumbs of liberty, that will be good, but in most cases, we’re going to get this kind of garbage that’s going to be imposed on every state in the union. And I think we’re better off keeping it decentralized, keeping things within a state work under your state constitutions in your state Bill of Rights. Instead of making everything into a federal case, I scream this until I’m red in my in the face, but then people yell at me and say, Well, what happens if the states violate our rights? Well, what happens when the federal government violates all right? I say just pretend like the state is the upper highest level, and then do whatever you would have done when the federal government have violated your rights, but just do it at the state level instead of taking it and centralizing power at the top.
Scott Horton 12:24
Yeah. It’s like trying to go to your boss’s boss to get him in trouble. It’s usually not going to work for him.
Mike Maharrey 12:30
But exactly, it’s a good analogy. Actually. I’m gonna steal that.
Scott Horton 12:34
Yeah, I’ve been using that one for a while. In fact, you reminded me of it. It’s been a while since I used it. But you know, so here’s the thing, though, is you have Brady and Miranda and all of these great decisions enforcing the Bill of Rights on the states where the police department’s before used to get away with a hell of a lot more blue bloody murder than they even get away with now, and the people did not say hey, we have an ideology of freedom and We demand that our local prosecutors are accountable to the law. They don’t, you know, all this stuff about you have the right to remain silent and all of that that never came from the bottom up. And so, and especially for the poor and minorities, you know, it’s easy to be a middle class white guy, and think that, you know, maybe the good old days were better for somebody like me, but and, of course, you know, poor minorities still are getting the shaft. I’m not saying that, but but, you know, there’s the exclusionary rule on the Fourth Amendment. I mean, that was the federal government that made that up. Right.
Mike Maharrey 13:38
Right. And like I said, you will get you will get good outcomes from time to time. And and and I guess that’s the temptation of it, because it’s easier to try to do it all at the centralized authority, but there’s no reason every single state has a an equivalent to the Fourth Amendment. So there’s absolutely no reason that those legal cases that went to the Supreme Court and made that change. There’s no reason that those couldn’t have happened at each state level. Granted, it’s, you know, it’s more difficult because you’ve got 50 states. But I think you could have had the same outcome without centralizing authority at the top, my position is that liberty is going to be threatened the most when power is centralized the most. And I always try to remind people that any power that you give any government is ultimately going to be used against you. So when you’re giving the the federal government the power to police, the states, you’re also giving them the power to basically determine what those rights are going to be. And you’re going to have an unequal outcomes. There’s some states that are absolutely going to suck. But I think it’s worth taking that risk rather than taking the risk of centralizing power, monopolizing power and giving the federal government that kind of domination, where essentially you have five government lawyers who are determining what your rights are going to be? That just doesn’t seem like a wise system to me. So I think we could do it in a more decentralized way, get the same outcomes, maybe better outcomes in a lot of cases and not risk this centralization of authority that we have going on today. I could name all kinds of horrible cases, you know, you can pick out a few good things, but you know, just for an example, the, the the gun cases like Heller that everybody thinks are great, there are all kinds of holes in that that are going to allow the right to keep and bear arms to be eroded away because of the way that decision was written everything. Oh, it’s great, because we have an individual right to keep and bear arms. It’s not as good as it looks, because there are all kinds of holes in it.
Scott Horton 15:40
Yeah, well, you know, it’s the Supreme Court that invented and you know, conservatives pay attention judicial activism here. The Supreme Court invented qualified immunity. That right essentially gives a license to kill to any cop to murder whoever they want, as long as they’re on the clock and maybe even if they beat their wife to death on a Saturday. Night.
Mike Maharrey 16:00
Yeah. Well, and, you know, the Supreme Court’s also the Augusta body that decided that it’s perfectly acceptable to lock, you know, 100,000 Japanese Americans behind barbed wire for years for no reason. You know, if you want to go back farther, it’s the Supreme Court that decided the black people essentially weren’t humans. So, you know, the Supreme Court doesn’t have a great track record in terms of protecting our liberty. And again, there are certain things that I think that they have gotten right. But by and large, they erode away our liberties. And again, I think we could do this and approach it at a centralized level. It requires more work by more people. But you know, freedom requires work. It’s not just gonna happen, because because we sit back and hope for some new president to appoint the right supreme court justices
Scott Horton 16:49
Hold on just one second Be right back. So you’re constantly buying things from amazon.com. Well, that makes sense. They bring it right to your house. So what you do though, is click through from the link in the right Hand margin at Scott Horton. org and I’ll get a little bit of a kickback from Amazon’s into the sale won’t cost you a thing. Nice little way to help support the show. Again, that’s right there in the margin at Scott Horton. org. Hey, I’ll check it out the libertarian Institute. That’s me and my friends have published three great books this year. First is no quarter, the ravings of William Norman Greg. He was the best one of us. Now he’s gone. But this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom. I know you’ll love it. Then there’s coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richmond. It’s a collection of 40 important essays. He’s written over the years about the truth behind the Israel Palestine conflict. You’ll learn so much and highly valued this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation. And last but not least, is the great Ron Paul. The Scott Horton show interviews 2004 through 2019 interview transcripts Have all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money taxes, the police state and more. So how do you like that? Pretty good, right? Find them all at libertarian Institute. org slash books. You need stickers for your band your business will Rick and the guys over at the bumper sticker comm have got you covered great work, Greg prices, sticky things with things printed on them. Whatever you need, the bumper sticker comm we’ll get it done right for you. The bumper sticker.com Well, you know, I’m on the issue of cops killing people. I think it’s important that to point out that activists a lot of times on the local level, you know, you’ll have people who are, you know, interested parties, say NAACP offices and whatever organizations have activists in certain cities, that when there’s a bad police shooting a certain percentage, maybe a plurality or a majority of their effort gets expended asking the federal government Justice Department to come in and review it as a civil rights case. But that seems to me like most of the time, it’s expended effort, you know, wasted effort, because what happens is, and I don’t know if they realize this or what but the Supreme, the the civil rights jurisdiction of the federal government is extremely narrow, like, essentially, the cop would have to go ahead and put his Klan hood on in the middle of beating a black guy to death or shooting them to death. And and say, I’m doing this because I hate people of your race as he does it, for them to have the jurisdiction to prosecute him for that. And so what happens is they end up asking the boss’s boss to come in and review the case and the whatever you 99 times out of 100, or whatever the number is, the Justice Department says, Well, yeah, he didn’t go that far and use the N word during the crime. So he’s okay to escape. But meanwhile if they take in all of that same effort, and just be seized the DHS house or something like that, then probably they could get a lot more bang for their buck.
Mike Maharrey 20:21
Right. And that’s generally my my philosophy when it comes to activism to begin with, that you’re much better off focusing efforts on a local level, or you know, even a state level than you are the federal level because you have more push as an individual or as a as a activism group, with your state and local officials than you do trying to, you know, get some congressmen to pay attention to you unless you have big lobbying money. Your congressman didn’t give two craps about you. Now, you know, granted your state rep doesn’t either but it’s far more likely that you’re going to run into your state rep at the grocery store and make them uncomfortable in you are your representative just popped into my head. Are judges in Texas elected? Yes. Okay. So it’s it’s also true in Kentucky, I believe in Florida. I think a lot of states have elected judges. So you do have some as as a population. Now, I’m not big on electoral politics. But, you know, theoretically, if a judge makes a really crappy decision, you can get them out of office through the electoral process in a lot of states. So once you get these supreme court justices, they’re there forever. I saw I saw on the other day that they were going to put Ruth Bader Bader Ginsburg on, like, they’re going to use the Han Solo with that genic stuff so they can keep her on ice. Carbonite.
Scott Horton 21:39
Yeah.
Mike Maharrey 21:41
Yeah, but I mean, that, you know, I still feel like, you know, people say, what do you do if your state violates your rights? And that’s certainly a legitimate question. States violate rights. And I don’t want anybody to say Mike Maharrey doesn’t think states are going to violate your rights because I absolutely know that they do. But I think there are remedies at the state level. Just Like that go beyond what you have at the federal level. And, you know, I don’t think anybody would accept that. Let’s have the world court, you know, make sure that the Supreme Court in the United States protects our liberty. I don’t think anybody would go for that. So why do we count on the Supreme Court? Let’s take it down another level. And let’s let’s focus in in our states and not break up the decentralization. What little decentralization we have left because I think think decentralization protects literally.
Scott Horton 22:29
Yeah, well, and you know, you look at the history these guys too, and the way that the liberal justices might be a little bit better on some civil liberties issues, right. They usually are the dissenters who lose when they are very rarely their victory there and the right wingers on the court are 100% Law and Order full till I mean, Scalia even wanted to get rid of the exclusionary rule because Come on, cops are so professional these days, we hardly even need it anymore. This kind of thing right? And then but at the same time where the right wingers are better on some economic Issues maybe? Or on guns at least. You know, mostly that’s not what rules mostly it’s the liberals interpretation of the vaster, even more vast powers of the federal government to regulate every little thing that ends up winning the day. And so it’s, you know, essentially what they can compromise on. in the worst way. Instead of protecting our liberty, it’s almost always enhancing the power of the state at our expense, like in the case we brought up here at the beginning, right, where it would have been just as easy for them to say no, actually, it does say particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. And so yeah, if soda Meyer had a good point here, how come the other eight just couldn’t get it? And it’s because they love the state more. They don’t have an ideology of freedom at all. Yeah, and in fact that they’re Americans not withstanding,
Mike Maharrey 23:54
right. And when you get to the big things, you know, when you get to things like war powers or emergency power, In those type of things, you know, emergency measures to spy or emergency measures to lock people up without due process. It’s almost always 100% behind the government, because these are extraordinary times that we have to, you know, allow the government to do its thing. So anytime that there’s an emergency or a war, you can count on your liberties being eroded by anybody who’s who’s in any judicial position in the federal government, because that’s just how they operate. You know, I’ve actually read a couple of times this in the last couple of weeks, these these statements that, you know, your rights are not absolute. And I, you know, I guess when the government’s interpreting them, they’re not, but the interesting
Scott Horton 24:42
I thought that’s what a right was, but Okay,
Mike Maharrey 24:44
anyway. Exactly. And that’s the problem with looking at the Constitution in the bill of rights as a protection of rights as opposed to a restriction on government because restrictions are absolute. You know, there’s no buck clauses in any of those, any of those restrictions on government, you find In the Bill of Rights, right, it can’t be interpreted away. But when you start interpreting things like rights, which are vague and ambiguous to begin with, then sure, you know, some guy can come up with some some reason that well, we need to whittle away at it here because we have this emergency or we have this war or, you know, we have
Scott Horton 25:16
it’s defining rights down in a really important way. We see this with free speech, right, where, you know, someone will say, I guess, you know, advocates for censorship on things like Twitter or Facebook, they’re used to people saying, hey, you’re, you’re violating the First Amendment, which is a red herring, right? No, they’re not. It’s not a you know, Twitter is not a public Commons owned by the state. And it ain’t your private property. And so, you, you know, they have every right to censor you as far as that goes. But then when people say, listen, the way Twitter censors things, it’s really a violation of free speech. And then people say no They have every right to do it and that kind of thing, where even if you don’t mention the First Amendment at all, people will say the first amendment is only about government action. But meanwhile, you’re trying to talk about a principle of free speech, where, you know, Twitter and Facebook and YouTube I mean, look at what’s going on with the virus stuff. They take, you know, these kind of cranky documentaries, and they just 86 of them so you can’t even look at them anymore. You know? And, and which is a severe violation of the principle of free speech forget the First Amendment has nothing to do with it, but then people hide behind the first amendment to say any censorship short of Congress outright outlawing this or that kind of speech is perfectly acceptable and in fact, even Haha, how do you like it? right wingers who say that, you know, private property owners have the right to choose what to do with their property. You hit the nail on the head, man And I said this the other day, I was telling my wife that the this taking stuff down office total social media platforms and granted a lot of this stuff like you said, it’s cranky, and and a lot of it’s just stupid. But the fact of the matter is taking it down is the modern day equivalent of burning a book. And, you know, everybody gets all bent out of shape about book burning. Well, you know, when you start when you start picking and choosing what ideas are allowed to float around out there and the land of ideas, that’s a problem. And, you know, it’s not long before somebody starts deciding what you think and what you you believe is not worthy of being out there too. So that’s a slippery slope.
Yeah, yeah. They don’t have to burn the books. They just remove them. Yeah, right. So hey, listen, now I one time, oh, 12 years ago now. I went to a future Freedom Foundation conference in Virginia, where Jonathan Turley, the famous lawyer gave a big speech and he went on and on for like, an hour. Doing case after case after case after case where the Fourth Amendment was eroded just on the question of what are your rights as an automobile traveler on the American public roadways, and it was like case after case after case where it was actually in a way, it was instructive that they really only whittled it away a little bit at a time. But you had things like the big example was, they said, Well, what are we going to do? send another deputy out to the judge’s house in the middle of the night and wake him up so that we can get a warrant to look in your suspicious trunk? So come on, let’s Yeah, but then once everybody got cell phones, then did they go back and revisit that decision? and say, well, the justification has been changed by modern technology. And now that the deputy sheriff can just call the judge at home, no problem from the side of the road. Then I guess we’ll have to go back to the Bill of Rights. Again, no They, of course kept that and just like Higgs ratchet effect, you know, these, cumulatively, you know, these 10 or 20 decisions, however they are and up to and including this latest one, it’s just completely eviscerated. What previous generations would have considered their fourth amendment rights as they’re traveling.
Mike Maharrey 29:21
Yeah, I mean, you can look at the same thing. And in terms of the way the the protections of, you know, personal papers and effects, you know, your email is every bit a paper, even though it’s an electronic form, as a piece of mail in your mailbox, and everybody would throw a fit if some FBI agent showed up at their house and got their mail out and started scanning their mail and putting it in a big database. And yet, nobody blinks an eye when, you know, they grab up emails or web browsing histories, or location data, all of this stuff. And a lot of this has been, you know, well, you know, because it’s electric. It’s different. So, you You see it on both sides of it, the old established things. They say, well, technology’s changed. So the limits of government are expanded now. And so you know, you get it coming and going, basically.
Scott Horton 30:12
Yeah. Oh, there’s the third party doctrine is a huge one, right? Where, hey, as long as you’re doing business with another private party, then hey, those are public records in the NSA, and the FBI have every right to all of them.
Mike Maharrey 30:29
Yeah, you know, who’s a big fan of that Trumps Neil Gorsuch. He’s a big third party doctrine, guy.
Scott Horton 30:34
Yeah, there you go. And, I mean, that thing is a loophole. You could drive a Mack truck through, you could drive an entire FBI through.
Mike Maharrey 30:41
and they do on a regular basis. I mean, that’s, that’s part of the justification they use for snapping up all of your phone, phone data, because it all goes through at&t or Verizon or sprint or whoever. It’s a it’s it’s a big mess. And here’s, here’s the thing that I would, I would ask them libertarians to to consider. Because the notion is is that we can we can finally get control of this government. If we can do that, then we can impose Liberty from the top down. Do you really believe that libertarians are ever going to control the apparatus of the federal government, our true libertarians ever going to control the supreme court? I mean, conservatives can’t even get control of it. Or, you know, there’s always that swing vote, like you said, Where, where it shifts back and forth. I think it’s a fool’s errand to steal the title of a really good book on the Afghanistan war. It’s a fool’s errand to think that you’re going to take over the federal government and use that power to impose Liberty it’s never ever going to work.
Scott Horton 31:44
Yeah, no, that’s totally true. Although, you know, I think the real role of the libertarians should be to set the agenda and the the list of priorities for the left and the right. And so that we don’t have to, we shouldn’t have to convince them to really be libertarians and change their identity from one thing to another. That’s a fool’s errand itself. But if we just say, Hey, listen, saving the Bill of Rights, such as it is, for the future generations, that is our responsibility. We have to care about this stuff. And we have to insist that these are the most important things. And, you know, we live in a society where people by and large agree with you and me, then we’ll be a lot better off when it comes out in practice, even at the hands of the nine Kooks and robes up there,
Mike Maharrey 32:35
I think, Hey, I think that’s a good point. It’s, it’s about, you know, taking over the narrative and, and helping people to realize the libertarian tendencies that they have, that have been buried under the mantle of statism all of their lives, because I think a lot of people do when you really boil it down. They do care about civil liberties, and they do care about you know, they don’t With the police being able to bust into their house in the middle of the night and shoot you in your bed is just happened in Louisville, Kentucky, because somebody messed up a warrant address. So, yeah, I think that I think you’re right when it comes to overall libertarian strategy. Unfortunately, libertarians oftentimes don’t do a very good job of articulating their own ideals. Yeah, well, and that includes Me too. And I’m sorry that we don’t have time to talk about that case that you just brought up because it’s so important. I want to do a show on it, but I can tell people that they can read all about it. The Free Thought Project is empty. That was shot by the cops, you know, after midnight, in this horrible rate. But anyway, I’m sorry, I’m so late. I gotta go. But I appreciate you so much coming back on the show, Michael.
It’s always a pleasure, Scott and appreciate everything you’re doing, and Just keep it up.
Scott Horton 33:47
Aren’t you guys that is the great Michael Maharrey. He is at the 10th amendment center over there with Michael Bolden. And that is 10th amendment center.com and this one is at the libertarian Institute Supreme Court. rules against Fourth Amendment. The Scott Horton show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com antiwar.com ScottHorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org
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