Citizenship Education in Upholding American Principles – on Foundations of Freedom Thursday

Air Date: 11/16/2023

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription:

Rick Green: 0:12
Welcome to the Intersection of Faith in the Culture. It’s WallBuilders. We’re taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective and on Thursdays we let you pick the topic so you get to send those questions in and we will tackle it from that biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. The email to send those questions is radio@walboulderscom. radio@walboulderscom. I’m Rick Green, America’s Constitution Coach and a former Texas legislator, thrilled to be here with David and Tim Barton. David’s a Course, America’s Premier Historian and our founder here at WallBuilders. Tim Barton’s a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders, and you can learn more about all three of us at our websites walboulderscom, wallbuilderslive.com. So both websites. One, wallbuilderslive.com, has all the radio programs, archives, all kinds of great information there, but then at wallbuilders.com, that’s where you can really dive in. That’s where you can get a lot of the books and DVDs and videos and downloads and all of that good stuff, even apparel. So you need to be advertising for yourself, for the country, for the Constitution. Get some of those cool hats and shirts and kids books and everything else there at wallbuilders.com and come alongside us, be a part of the solution, lock shields with us and support what we’re doing here to get the truth out. You can do that one time or monthly contribution today at walboulderscom. Alright, David and Tim, here we go. We’re going to dive into those questions from the audience. Marcelo’s first up. He said hello, David, Tim and Rick. My name is Marcelo and Marcelo forgive me if I don’t say this right. I don’t know if you say it’s Sayola or Keola. I live in St Charles, missouri. St Charles is a suburb just outside of the St Louis area. My question is could Joe Biden have been impeached for incompetency from Afghanistan to the open border? Is there any way that he could have been impeached for incompetency? David and Tim, I’ve heard you guys speak at Grace Church in St Louis, missouri. Rick, I’ve heard you on Flashpoint many times. Thank you for all that you guys do, marcelo. Okay, guys, great question and a specific charge here for impeachment. My gut reaction was probably for incompetency, I would think 25th Amendment. But then the specific that he mentioned Afghanistan, the open border, might be a better way to describe that, even than just incompetency. But what do you guys think?

David Barton: 2:21
Yeah, this has turned into a partisan argument over recent years. That shouldn’t. It has, because people don’t understand the actual wording of the Constitution. And the actual wording is clear in the debates of the Constitution. Plus, if you go to early commentaries like Joseph Storys commentaries on the Constitution 1833, or William Rawls, a familiar exposition to the Constitution 1825, these are all people that talked about it and the reason that’s significant is these subjects covered most often in the Constitution is impeachment six clauses on it. So the commentaries did a lot on it. So what can you be impeached for? Well, the Constitution says high crimes and misdemeanors. But misdemeanor now we think that’s a lesser than a felony, it’s a crime. Misdemeanor in the dictionary was merely bad behavior If you do things that are considered bad behavior, something that offends the public or their upset over. I mean, if you look at all the, there have been dozens and dozens of impeachment investigations. Not that many impeachment convictions, but investigations. I mean, go back to Andrew Johnson, president of the United States in the Civil War after Abraham Lincoln. He was impeached and came within one vote of being removed from the presidency because he fired a popular cabinet member that Congress liked a lot. Now what law did he violate there? But again, it’s what a majority of the Congress is willing to say. This is unacceptable. The trick is it is now political and that on the Democrat side, they’re not going to vote to impeach any of their guys. On the Republican side, they’re not going to vote to impeach any of their guys, and so you have to have two thirds in the Senate and with a split Senate the way it is, you’re not going to get two thirds in the Senate to agree that Biden is incompetent, whatever that incompetence may be defined as what’s Afghanistan or open border, anything else that he’s doing, all the climate change stuff, all the stuff he’s doing with debt, it doesn’t matter. You’re going to have to get two thirds in the Senate to remove him, and that is not going to happen in this polarized, this weaponized climate. But can it be for incompetency? You bet, if you can get a majority of the House to do a bill of impeachment, if you can get two thirds of the Senate to agree with it, absolutely.

Tim Barton: 4:31
Well, and Dad too. I think that we could probably look back and say impeachment was always a political tool because it’s part of how government works. But it was probably a little different when people had a better constitutional understanding, when we had congressional leaders that understood more the role of the federal government, the reality of the jurisdiction of the three branches of government. Then it wasn’t used as much as do we like somebody or do we dislike somebody. Right, when Democrats wanted to impeach Trump because they didn’t like him, I mean, certainly we could argue that they had their quote unquote reasons. But the Russia collusion that that was very clear from the very beginning with the intelligence that many members of Congress had, including Democrats had, who were sitting in some of those intelligence briefings where stuff was classified. So they knew from the very beginning who some of the major players were and they would have known this wasn’t Trump. They just were because of whenever maybe classified information. Until they had, they probably couldn’t say some of it. Nonetheless, there were then Republicans that when Biden became president, republicans now have to control the House. There’s Republicans saying, hey, we need to do with them what they did to us, and so what we are seeing is not that it’s now becoming more political than it was, but it’s now being used in a more frivolous way, based on how somebody feels than is someone actually competent? Is what they’re doing constitutional? Does there need to be accountability for violating jurisdictions, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s your point. If you look back at the nearly impeachment from Johnson with one vote or whatever you said it was short I mean certainly that would have been political, although they might have argued that for him to fire someone for what he might have viewed as a political reason or part of the reason, that’s not the role of what the president should be, et cetera. They might have had arguments. I just think it’s we’re getting into the territory where George Washington warned in his farewell address that we should not be overwhelmed with the love of party, that the love of party would be the bane for the existence of America, that America wouldn’t survive if people cared more about their party than about the philosophy or the principles upon which America was governed. And I think this is a bigger danger now is we certainly are seeing people that care way more about their side winning than they do about what is right or moral or ethical or even constitutional.

Rick Green: 7:05
And so many of those things, David, that you were saying earlier in terms of specific examples are essentially policy positions. Right, it’s like, even though we think they’re really dangerous and horrible policy positions, they are policy positions. That’s the things that he ran on for president, and so it’s very difficult to do an impeachment based on a policy decision. You really. One of the things that, of course, has been talked about now is the bribery, which is specifically listed in the Constitution as a reason to impeach. And so if he’s admitting to the whole he got that the Ukraine folks to fire that prosecutor by withholding the billion dollars, and if he really did get paid through some hunter stuff as a result of all that, then you do have a case for impeachment based on bribery. But, man, when we do it just because, like you’re saying to him, we don’t like him or it’s just really things are heated and all of that man that creates just complete chaos on an ongoing basis, Kind of like I remember years ago people were always wanting us to support these recall efforts in elections and all three of us would say, if you keep doing that, then you’re just going to have constant elections and instead of recall elections, make sure you get it right in the election. So yeah, interesting.

David Barton: 8:14
Well, to add to that, Rick, I think what we’re talking about here with Biden is we’re really talking about how do we fix the problem now that the cow is out of the barn? We’re not preventing the bad from happening. The bad has happened, and what do we do to fix it? You can’t fix it after the cow is out of the barn. She’s out of the barn. Maybe you can get her back later, but that’s not what this is. So I would back up and say, okay, what role do the people have in impeaching a president? And the answer is it’s who they choose for the house, it’s who they choose for the Senate and it’s who they choose for the president. Did the people exercise a very good role in their choice of house and Senate and president? And we know, by the way, from the polling that came out immediately after Biden was elected, that had the public known about the Hunter Biden laptop, trump would have won that election. Even Democrat polling showed that. So do we blame that on the media? No, you mean to tell me you can’t spend two minutes on some type of social media somewhere and find out if there’s stuff out there that you ought to know about either candidate? That’s a failure of the people to wait only on who’s going to spoon feed me their whatever line it is. So you gotta go back to the people and say, okay, let’s go further than that. What role did the public schools play in training the citizens? We now have to vote the way they did. So I look back a whole lot of what’s going on here. I’m going to lay at the doors of public schools for what they’ve been doing the last 15 years Really liberal, really progressive. Even the rural areas. They think they’re conservative or not. We talked in a previous program. It’s worth mentioning now. In Texas, 81% of Texas rural communities vote Republican. So if you’re in a rural community, 81% of the votes going to be Republican. And yet when teachers in rural communities give to candidates, 92% of contributions from teachers in rural communities go to Democrat candidates. Don’t tell me those teachers are all conservative. And yes, there are conservative teachers there. But don’t tell me, just because you’re a rural district, that we got a conservative school district. You don’t. And so part of the thing we’re facing with Biden started 15 to 20 years ago with what we’re doing in civics and the lack of civics, the lack of government, the lack of training students to think, the indoctrination toward liberalism, progressive of them, et cetera, and then having citizens who are not very engaged in doing the research necessary to find out about the candidates they’re electing to office. They’re voting for a party more than anything else and that leads to the results we have. So, while there are constitutional means, I would back up and say, hey, let’s fix the barn so that the cow can’t get out. Instead of worrying about how to get the cow back in once it’s out, let’s just fix the barn, and that would go back to citizen education, citizen involvement.

Rick Green: 10:54
So let me ask you guys, before we go to our next question from the audience, almost a strategy or maybe even perception question. So if you know the votes aren’t there in the Senate or you assume they aren’t right because you gotta get to two thirds to convict and obviously even there’s going to be a handful of Republicans that probably won’t but you also know that, let’s say, you’re doing the investigation and you are very, very confident that he took a bribe, do you still impeach on the House side because it’s just the right thing to do and it’s your responsibility and you can’t control what happens on the Senate, even though you know they’re most likely not going to convict it? And maybe it turns into a Howard Baker situation where he goes over to Nixon and says you know, as the leader of the Republicans, we’re just done, we’re not going to defend you anymore and you’re just going to have to resign. Or maybe it turns into a knockdown, drag out and it hurts the Republicans in the election of 2024. I mean, what would you guys? I know we’re not there and they got a lot more inside baseball than we do, but we also talk to a lot of the members too. I mean, what do y’all recommend that the House does with this. You know what seems to be an obvious pay to play bribery situation with the Biden family.

David Barton: 11:57
I think you have to pursue truth and you have to pursue justice, regardless of what the outcome is. You go back to what John Quincy Adams said duty is ours, results are God’s. You took an oath to uphold the Constitution. Follow the rule of law. You have to pursue that, even if people say, hey, this is political persecution. Now this is where the media comes in, because if the media were actually reporting things rather than just kind of the alternative of conservative media, there would be a lot more outrage at what’s going on. But we have yet to see articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post or all these other places about what is apparently a very serious investigation, not based on partisanship or retaliation, but actually based on what is genuine bribery. Now, if it turns out to be the case, you got to pursue truth. You got to pursue upholding your oath. You got to do what’s right, regardless of the outcome. And I know that’s hard for political people to get into and the consultants are going to tell them hey, the people have had enough of this, you need to let this go and get away. You won’t win the next election. You got to do what’s right. At some point you have to draw that line.

Rick Green: 12:59
Well, I wonder, because sometimes I’m too easily. I got a little too much Peter in me. I want to chop off the year way too quickly. So I wanted to you notice I didn’t give away where I was on it, or at least I tried not to sound too biased in there, because I really genuinely wanted to know what y’all thought about it. I was going to say I tend to want to fight too easily because I watch UFC every weekend, but knowing that Tim actually does Jiu Jitsu and does the actual fighting well, all I do is watch it I didn’t think that would be the best analogy. So I don’t know, Tim, what do you think, man?

Tim Barton: 13:27
Well, at least you could probably accurately critique what I’m doing wrong when I’m trying to take down and get some submissions along the way. You know, I really I think it’s something that, as we are finding out more and more information right, one of the things we’ve talked about, even with when we look back to the elections and we had questions about, was there election fraud and the idea where we said, if there’s that much smoke, you just feel like there has to be fire somewhere, when it seems like there was so much illegal activity and fraudulent ballots and stopping the voting count up in Michigan at whatever was 2 am and they pick it back up two hours later and all of a sudden, they magically found 250,000 ballots for Joe Biden and there were so many things that it seems like if there’s that much there, maybe somebody should investigate it. And what we said back then was what we care about is having transparency and honesty, and I think if we look at the Joe Biden scenario, one of the reasons that there shouldn’t be a lot of question marks is there’s such a lack of transparency, and what we’re finding out more and more is that they set up all these alternate business accounts and he was using alternate fake names. And then, right, maybe If you were a vice president, maybe that’s quite normal for vice presidents to use alter names, alter egos, like maybe it is. But what we’re really looking for is what is transparency, what is true, what is honest? And the more we are seeing, the more it certainly does seem like there’s been a lot of wrong activity. Now, this should not be surprising, coming from the Biden family, and not just because it’s the Biden family, because this is what we see. When you have people that have been involved at the federal government level for that long, the amount of corruption that you know has to be there. How does Nancy Pelosi have a net worth of over $200 million when she’s made roughly below $200,000 a year old life? That’s a really nice salary. That doesn’t get you to $200 million net worth. Or Mitch McConnell how does he get somewhere between $40 to $50 million net worth? It seems like there’s something more going on, and especially now, if we can track and not we as an us, but as people are identifying and the government is tracking that there was millions, tens of millions, $20 million coming from foreign nationals into some of the Biden family accounts. It just seems like there’s a lot of stuff that’s not good there. And so, Dad, to your point, I think that you should pursue truth and you land where truth lands. And if somebody’s done a lot of illegal things, they should be held accountable for doing illegal things, and that should be the way it is, regardless of who it is. They used to be the old adders that no one is above the law. That’s the way it should be. We should prosecute the criminals that are doing criminal behavior, regardless of who they are. But what it seems is more and more is, if you are number one, a Democrat, or number two, if you are an elected official who has a lot of power, it seems that you have some kind of unnatural immunity from whatever bad behavior, bad choices, bad decisions, illegal things that you have engaged in. Hopefully that’s not where this finishes with Biden, but certainly that’s a precedent we’ve seen for decades that I’m not sure right now that we see a Congress that has the will or the courage to change that Alright, guys, good stuff.

Rick Green: 16:57
We’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back with more of your questions. Please send them in to [email protected]. Stay with us. You’re listening to WallBuilders. [“wall Builders”]. [“wall Builders”].

Tim Barton: 17:12
Hey, this is Tim Barton, with WallBuilders, and, as you’ve had the opportunity to listen to WallBuilders Live, you’ve probably heard the wealth of information about our nation, about our spiritual heritage, about the religious liberties, about all the things that makes America exceptional, and you might be thinking, as incredible as this information is, I wish there was a way that I could get one of the WallBuilders guys to come to my area and share with my group whether it be a church, whether it be a Christian school or public school or some political event or activity. If you’re interested in having a WallBuilders speaker come to your area, you can get on our website at www.WallBuilders.com and there’s a tab for scheduling and if you’ll click on that tab, you’ll notice there’s a list of information from speakers bios to events that are already going on, and there’s a section where you can request an event to bring this information about who we are, where we came from, our religious liberties and freedoms. Go to the WallBuilders website and bring a speaker to your area.

Rick Green: 18:12
We’re back here on WallBuilders. Thanks for staying with us. It’s Foundations of Freedom Thursday. Send those questions into radio@WallBuilderscom. And about to dive into those additional questions, but on the break.

David Barton: 18:23
David said more to cover.

Rick Green: 18:25
I get to interrupt. He’s ready to impeach somebody. I don’t know, it might be me.

David Barton: 18:29
Rick, you are all the time on every one of these programs and very rarely are you the target of a question so I’ve got a question for you this comes in my phone, a friend I’m going to call Tim Barton.

Rick Green: 18:41
Let’s see I’m ready.

David Barton: 18:43
This is from SC in Arizona. It says Hi, Rick, Tim and David. I’m so very thankful to our Lord, jesus Christ, for all you do for our biblical constitutional republic Question. It is my understanding that in California, colorado, minnesota, new Jersey, new Hampshire and Arizona, trump has been removed from the ballot. I’m not sure who I’ll vote for, but I’m incensed by what appears to be a clear and intentional election tampering. Am I seeing this correctly? I reside in Arizona. If this is election tampering, what is the right course of action a citizen can take to counter this egregious infringement on citizens’ rights to choose who they want? Rick, what do you got?

Rick Green: 19:23
Well, first of all, just to correct our listener, none of those states have actually removed him from the ballot. There are suits that are asking, I think Michigan even just a couple of days ago, the judge threw it out and said no, you can’t take him off the ballot. They’re trying to use this. David, you used to always say this way you got to stand on one leg, you got to turn your head, stick your tongue out a certain way and then maybe you might see some weird thing in the Constitution. They’re trying to use this weird thing out of the 14th Amendment that, specifically, was dealing with somebody that had literally been involved in trying to take over the government and an insurrection, but they’re trying to say that Trump did that by giving a speech that says Be peaceful, respect our police officers, but we don’t need to relitigate all of that. So no, I don’t think. So. I don’t think they’re going to win this in any of these states. Now I say that, and then we have the president getting indicted in Fulton County for simply questioning the election. So I guess nothing’s off the table, but so far they haven’t been able to keep him off the ballot.

David Barton: 20:17
Alright, I got one more for you, bro, you don’t get out that easy. That was a short answer. You want to elaborate on that? I mean, you had all these years of sitting behind the mic and not getting to say all that much. This is your chance, bro. You know what?

Rick Green: 20:29
I’m literally sweating. I’m like nervous. I feel like this is like when we did those shows like 10 years ago, and you would pull out the second grade reading test and try to get me to even pronounce L’acouacius or some weird word like that, and then have to spell it, and did I even say that right? I don’t even know, but yeah, so now I’m nervous. Go ahead, man.

David Barton: 20:49
Okay, this is from Leanne, from Pennsylvania. She says Rick, I’m writing to inquire if there is any organization you’re aware of that might be starting citizenship classes in American history for illegal aliens or newly immigrated persons to try and counter any political narrative they may have been indoctrinated with Now you got Constitution Alive Biblical Citizenship. This is Leanne from Pennsylvania. What do you think for immigrants? What can be done?

Rick Green: 21:17
I got to tell you. I want to applaud Leanne, because I did not think this strategically or even this compassionately, until a friend of mine had gone down to the border, actually across the border, and visited a lot of these camps where they were waiting to come over, and this friend just basically she said listen, Rick, a lot of these people are just families looking for freedom or whatever, and once they get in even though we all agree that shouldn’t be happening they should come in legally, not illegally. But once they’re here, we’re not going to deport them and so then they’re going to be in our society. Shouldn’t we ask churches and other ministries to reach out to them and teach them the principles of liberty, teach them biblical worldview, so that they can assimilate and actually live the American dream instead of turning us into a communist or socialist country like they probably came from? So I think Leanne’s right on in thinking about this. We actually just finished creating Biblical Citizenship in Modern America workbook in Spanish, and we’ve got Spanish subtitles that have been on that for a little while. So I’ve become very, very in favor of doing exactly what she’s saying, and I don’t know of a lot of other good sources out there. I think ministries like ours and will begin to do more of that, but for right now, wall Builders and Patriot Academy does offer Biblical Citizenship in Spanish, and we’re encouraging churches to offer Spanish version.

David Barton: 22:38
Hey, I would add to that, Rick, that WallBuilders also has in Spanish things like America’s Godly Heritage, things that give some of the early background yeah, government, the keys to good government, things like that that are in Spanish and that was specifically for Spanish speakers coming in to understand how American government actually works. We are not Venezuela, we are not Mexico, we’re not Sweden or anywhere else. We’re different, and so that’s another resource that would be out there. And Leanne’s got a great question. I love it.

Tim Barton: 23:07
And I would point out, if anybody is looking for some of those Spanish resources on the WallBuilders website, you might have a hard time finding some of them. Some of them we have pulled down. However, we do have a lot of the saved versions in PDF, some of those that are printable still, and so if you’re looking for some Spanish resources, definitely you can email us, contact WallBuilders and we can try to connect you with those if you don’t see those directly on the website. But back even Rick, to your point with Biblical Citizenship, there really are some great resources available in Spanish right now.

David Barton: 23:42
And Rick, going back to really some of the early questions we had about Biden’s impeachment and even the question I asked you about. They’re trying to keep Biden off the ballots in so many of these states. There was a teaching that we heard recently at the legislators conference from a federal congressman who did what I considered to be a really Seminal teaching. He kind of laid out a guideline in that that I had never thought about before, and he was talking about the difference between populism and constitutionalism. He said look, I’ve taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, even if all the population is going the opposite direction the Constitution. I have to uphold the Constitution. And he said I’m surrounded by members in my own party in Congress that are into populism. And he said one of the best ways you can tell is if you’re motivated by well, they did it to us, let’s do it to them. If that is the cause of your motivation hey, they did a Trump, let’s do it to Biden. That’s not constitutional, that’s not constitutional thinking, that’s populism. And that’s the kind of stuff you find with democracies. Founding fathers are so open about how democracies are so bad. You see them in the Bible and the Gospels with the way the Romans treated Jesus, that the masses and the crowds of there were so flip flop. They’d hate him, did love him and and this this coming back consistently to what does the Constitution say? Not, what did my enemies do not? What are they trying to do to me? What does the Constitution say? And every one of us, as citizens, have to come back to that. We have to get back to that measure and, whether it deals with immigration or impeachment or anything else, we’ve got to be principle driven people that are not into retaliation for the sake of retaliation. You do what the Constitution says. You follow truth wherever it leads. That is our responsibility and that’s. I was really struck with the fact that I cannot be drawn into populism. I can’t let my feelings get the best of me, as I am so tired of them, of them beating up on us. It’s time for us to beat up on them. Can’t do that in any way. Shape, fashion and form, and I think that’s a good word from the congressman to every one of our listeners judge where we are, judge our motives. Go back to biblical and constitutional principles. Let that drive what we do, not what they did to us or trying to do to us, let’s, let’s do it the right way right spirit, right attitude.

Rick Green: 25:52
Yeah, man, really, really good stuff. And it’s a good reason for people to share the WallBuilders program, because there’s a lot of people out there that are very frustrated, their emotions are high and one of the things I think we do pretty well here on the program it’s help redirect that frustration and give people a you know, proper outlet for those things and and and how to do this effectively. And and it goes back to what Tim was saying about Washington’s speech. You know it’s very well addressed, where he talked about partisanship and you know he says in that thing is like when you get so bad that you can’t even sit down with the other side. Basically and it’s not exactly how he said it but when you can’t have the conversations and have civil discourse, that’s when you love party more than you love the principles and more than you love the country, and we don’t ever want to be in that, in that situation. Great program to gate today. Guys. Thanks for all the questions out there. Folks send them in to radio. WallBuilders.com. Thanks so much for listening to WallBuilders.