What To Expect In 2020 “€“ With David Barton, Part 1: Today we share a special session from the ProFamily Legislators Conference to find out the three most important issues we must deal with in the year to come. Tune in to listen to an important message for this time!

Air Date: 12/31/2019

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

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

Faith And The Culture

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders Live, we’re talking about today’s hottest topics on policy, faith, the culture all from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective and we’re actually going to start very quick today because we’ve got a special series by David Barton on “€œWhat to expect in 2020.”€ It’s going to be a very important year.

Here’s David Barton speaking at the ProFamily Legislators Conference. We’re going to do this over three programs, so today, tomorrow and the next day. As we enter into the new year, here’s a great way to be thinking about how you can have an impact on what’s going to happen to our nation in 2020. Here’s David Barton you’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

David:

What I want to see if I can do in this session is maybe act like a prophet and tell you what I think is coming. At least, I’ll tell you what I”€¦ I can’t act like a prophet, because a brutal prophet tell you for sure what’s coming. I’ll tell you what I think is coming. And over the next three to five years, and if this model is right of what we think is coming and you get it in your head now, it will change the way you go at, what you’re doing legislation for the next three to five years.

Three Areas that Must Return to the States

I’m going to encourage you to be aggressive in some areas we’ve not been able to touch in 50 to 60 years. I think there are some areas that are going to be returned to the states and I think if we wait till they get there, it’s going to be too late to be prepared for them. So literally right now, if we see these areas coming back at the States, you start taking some action right now. Sometimes it takes two to three sessions to get legislation passed, sometimes longer than that as you well know. But it’s just thinking ahead, thinking down the road.

What we deal with would be called Vertical Separation of Powers. In the Vertical Separation of Powers, we’re literally talking about what we’re known by the founding fathers as enumerated powers. These are the specific things that the federal government is allowed to do. They’re enumerated. There are 17 of those powers.

So the Constitution says, hey feds, listen up, here’s 17 things you can do and then the rest of it is what is reckon in the 10th amendment. The 10th amendment is the other end of the enumerated powers, it says we’re the enumerated powers and enumerate powers are like the right to coin money, the right to punish bankruptcy, the right to punish piracy, issue letters of marque and reprisal. So there’s 17 things the Constitution says that the federal government can do.

The 10th Amendment

Passed that, the 10th Amendment says this the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, that’s the enumerated powers. If the Constitution doesn’t give it to the United States nor prohibited to the states and that’s of 17 powers, if it’s not in these 17 powers, then it says the reserved to the States respectively or to the people.

Now the problem we’ve had is since about 1923, the courts have used what’s called the Selective Incorporation of the Bill of Rights. Selective Incorporation of the Bill of Rights means that they have federalized what used to be state issues. So starting back in the 1920s, the feds started taking on more and more power. We saw that before FDR got in office, we saw when FDR was in office, it continued on through and as more and more issues have arisen, the feds have put themselves in the middle of it. So that’s a century-old trend that we’re fighting.

I think Thomas Jefferson who was a great limited government guy with a founder of the anti-federalists party which kind of tells you what his position is on federal powers. Thomas Jefferson said it this way. He says, “€œI consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that all powers not delegated the United States by the Constitution, no prohibit to it by the states are reserved to the States to the people.”€ He just quoted the 10th Amendment. He said, “€œI think the 10th Amendment is the foundation in the Constitution. I think the foundation in the Constitution is laid on the 10th Amendment.”€

Vertical Separation of Powers

So this is where you get a vertical separation in powers. He continued, “€œTo take a single step beyond the boundaries that’s specifically drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of federal power no longer susceptible of any definition.”€ This is where we are today. How far did the feds go? As far as they want to or as far as they can get away with or as far as we allow them, whatever you want to say, it’s not susceptible, any definition any longer. Thousands of [inaudible 04:23] in which are involved.

Jefferson continued, “€œI believe the States can best govern our home concerns and the federal government our foreign ones. “€œ Now notice where he kind of drew the line on the 17 Powers. He said, generally, these 17 Powers over here deal with foreign concerns, everything else belongs to the states. So if it’s a, as he said, a home issue, if it”€™s home concern, then that’s what the States are going to take care of. If it’s a foreign concern, what happens with State Department, our borders and our boundaries, that’s a federal issue. He also said it this way, “€œTaking from the state’s the moral rule of their citizens and subordinating it to the federal government would break up the foundations of the Union.”€

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Moral Issues Belong to the States

David:

The other phrase he uses not only our home concerns, he said moral issues belong to the states and the feds get everything else. LGBTQ, rights of conscience, everything, that’s a moral issue. That has no business in the federal government at all under original understanding the Constitution. Feds can do 17 things, they generally are related to those things that are foreign in nature, whether it be the US military which is to defend us from foreign invasion, etc.

So that’s where Jefferson kind of draws the line and that’s what we’re after, is that separation of powers vertically, federalism is what other people call it, whether you have the States doing everything except the 17 powers. So that’s the way it’s supposed to be by original design. So what do we do?

We want to see three particular types of issues go back to the States. We want to see a lot more, but have specific targets. Let’s focus on some things, put those back to the states. Those three issues involve school prayer, public religious expressions. Prior to the 6263 decisions, three Supreme Court decisions, it was up to the states what happened with religious expression. The courts federalized that as part of, again what’s called the selective incorporation of the Bill of Rights. In addition to that abortion, that was always a state issue was never a federal issue.

And the same way with marriage. We had 32 States who had voted on it. The Supreme Court said you’re all wrong. Justice Kennedy said, I’m the deciding vote, you’ll now have bearings by my definition, not what you guys voted on.

Original Intent Areas

So in all of these areas, these are three areas that are very easy to defend as being original intent areas have belonged to the state vertical separation powers. This is not foreign concerns. This is not border concerns. These are internal home concerns. So our objective for all three of these issues, just to move all three of these issues back to the States.

Now for me, personally, I don’t want to say you go back to the States, I want to say go back to God. I don’t think New York should have the right to take an unborn life of the child because that’s an inalienable right. I say that but simply getting it back to the States changes the landscape dramatically. Think how many pro-life states we already have and if we can stop that many abortions, that is a huge win.

So moving this into rights, I think all of those issues are inalienable rights. I don’t think a state should have a right to tell a kid he can’t pray if he wants to pray. That’s a God-given right. That’s a First Amendment right. That’s a Bill of Rights right. That’s not federal or State. That doesn’t matter. What we do is we get this back to the State level. It’s easier to fight and win at the State level than it is to fight the whole nation. So you can take it on at a State local level and have more success in your fighting. So that’s what we do now.

The Hurdles

What are the hurdles to what we have to do? Okay, hurdles, pretty simple. When you’re going to change abortion and get it back to the States, you’re going to have to get the Supreme Court to turn loose of it somehow. For the Supreme Court to turn loose of this, there are two decisions that the court will have to reverse in some way. Reverse modify change.

The first obviously, is Roe v. Wade. But in addition to that, is Planned Parenthood case in 92 and you may know we came within one vote of overturning Roe v. Wade. And on that morning Justice Kennedy decided to change his mind and what had been a 5-4, they were about to read the decision of the five that were [inaudible 09:57] Roe v. Wade. And as it turned out, that turned into the minority opinion and the minority opinion became the majority opinion, only morning they read the decision. So on that morning and if you don’t know, the Supreme Court, after you argue a case of the court, the cases are argued, three days later, the Justices of vote on which side wins the case.

They spend the next several weeks writing in the decision and deciding to publish it. When they’re going to do it, all the other Justices read the decision. They come up with their own descending or concurring opinions, but within three days of the time you argue the case, the court has decided. So the fact that months later, Justice Kennedy changed his vote on that morning, is really significant and is just nearly never ever happens. It did. So those are the two cases that have to come down before abortion goes back to the States.

First Amendment Issues

When you look at public religious expression, this is a First Amendment issue. The First Amendment concerning religion has two particular clauses: the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. Both of those we’ve got to get back from the federal government and get back into the state hands.

To get the Establishment Clause banned, this is what can government’s do in expressing faith. What can a public body, what can a City Council, what can a mayor, what can the State rep, State senator, what can the governor do in expressing faith? That’s Establishment Clause. Much of that is guided by the case that’s known as Lemon v. Kurtzman, we’ll talk more about that later. It’s a 1971 case I think it is that gave the standard. The courts had so many cases in the early years because we had never limited religious expression till 1962-63. In 12 months, three decisions, the court said we’re now taking control of religious expression, we’ll tell you when and where and how you can express yourself.

So over the next 10 years, they had so many cases that came to the court, where the court is now trying to decide we’ve been doing this for 200 years, are you going to strike this down too? That they came up with what’s called a Lemon Test, based on the Lemon v. Kurtzman case.

The Lemon Test

So the Lemon Test, I’ll tell you about in a little bit, but if we don’t get rid of the Lemon Test, you really don’t get the Establishment Clause back out of the hands at the federal government. The second area with Free Exercise Clause deals with Employment Division Smith. This is a case from 1980 where that the Supreme Court said actually we do have the right to regulate your personal religious expression if it occurs in public.

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David:

But the kid prays over a meal. If you have a prayer at a graduation, even though those are done by individuals and they may be in government settings, it’s individuals. So the court said, we have a right to tell you it’s an individual, how, when and where you can express your faith.

So that’s the case you have to get rid of to get the Free Exercise back which goes to the individual. Establishment goes to what official entities can do. Free Exercise goes to what we as people can do. So those do have to go away.

Justice Kennedy on Marriage

On marriage, here Berger felt decision is what has to go. This is one from five years ago in 2014. This is the one where Justice Kennedy said, I’m casting my vote to redefine marriage and here’s how we’re going to do it. So to preserve marriage as a man and a woman, however, is not just what we’re stuck with now because look how far we’ve come in five years. Since we lost State control, the ability to define marriage, we can’t define gender anymore, we can’t define sexuality, we can’t define anything.

So in order if you’re going to keep marriage as a man and a woman, which is what traditional definition was, you’ve got to keep a man and a woman. And that’s where now you’re into gender identity type stuff. There are three cases at the US Supreme Court this year that will deal with this issue. If we can’t win those cases, then the chances of getting back to being able to have traditional marriage become slim to none if you can’t even define what a male and a female. So if you can’t define what a male and a female is, then you can’t keep marriage as a man and a female. So those are the three issues that we deal with, those are the hurdles that we face.

Now, if I can take you back to D-day. At the time, we got hit at Pearl Harbor. We were not prepared for anything militarily, we were trying to stay out of the war. We had had a World War One, which is the war to end all war, so we’re not going to get in another war.

World War II

We were still flying World War One biplanes and still had World War One naval vessels when Pearl Harbor got hit because we didn’t want to get involved in another war.

It took us a while to get things moving. I loved American ingenuity. By the time we get in the 1942-43, we are turning out a B-24 Liberator every 55 minutes off the assembly line. We’re turning out a Liberty Ship every four days out of the naval ports. It takes us five years to build up a stupid website for health care, but we can get a plane turned out in 55 minutes, I mean just.

So we got geared up. And as a result, when D-day came, we had all of our forces brought to bear, all the planes we’d created, the p-38s and the p-51s and all these great, the p40 tigers, all these planes we had, all the ships, everything else, there were about 5,800 ships involved in D-day. Tens of thousands of troops, 3,000 these guys lost their lives on D-day.

But as these guys came ashore into withering fire from the Germans and by the way, we’ve done such a great job with intelligence that we had to convince the Germans that we really weren’t going to attack where everybody knew we were going to attack, we’re actually going to come around and come through Spain because German will never expect it. So we had so many fake things that we put out to the Germans.

Maps

They took half of the German troops and distributed them all along the Mediterranean because they weren’t sure where we’re going to come. So had it not been for that, we would have had twice as many Germans facing our guys when they got off. It would have been an absolute slaughter. It was a bloodbath anyway, but it would have been a different outcome.

So as these guys come ashore, they carry with them these maps. When that door came down in front, they’ve got this map in front of them and this map they’ve got in front of them shows all the emplacements of all the weapons. If you see here, this they would come into the shore and these 700 yards are so long there, they say”€¦ when we jump off this machine gun to expect over here, there’ll be two mortars over there. We got tank trap”€¦ they knew where everything.

Now this is 60 miles of landing beach we had. We didn”€™t have satellite, so the human intelligence it takes to find out where every single German and placement is along 60 miles. Think how many partisans you had from France, the underground in France, walking those beaches saying ten steps here there’s and memorizing all that, then they send it back to America. Then we build these maps, we haven’t been there, we haven’t landed. But we’ve got all this intelligence, human intelligence was just unbelievable back then.

And so every one of those ships that came down. This is what they’re looking at. It tells them where everything is, the medium coast batteries, the anti-aircraft guns, the tank guns, the concrete strong points, the mined areas, the torpedo area, everything was there.

General Keyes Actual Battle Maps

And so they’re coming ashore with these maps. Now these maps are really intriguing. Let me introduce you to Lieutenant General Geoffrey Keyes. Three-star general. He’s very much associated with Patton. He was actually for a while, he was the executive officer, the [inaudible 18:7] for General Patton. But it was General Keyes who was in charge of the Italian campaign. The Italian, the fascist and in Italy, Mussolini, those guys, they surrendered to General Keyes. He’s the guy who took their surrender from the Italians. So he’s a very significant force in World War Two and what happened in getting the Nazis back into Germany.

So actually had opportunity to purchase General Keyes actual battle maps. His battle maps are pretty interesting. These are his World War Two maps right here. As it turned out, we weren’t able to be the ones to buy the maps. Sure, wish we had been able to do that, we just didn’t win them, but these were the maps of General Keyes.

And if you look at the map to General Keyes and actually, here is using these maps that were put up for sale, you see a map right there? That’s his D-day map. You see the landing beach right there? Compare that to what you’ve got with these guys. Now, what’s the difference? Well, when you look at his map, it goes for 700 miles. Because even though the guys at the beach say, this is what we got to have right here right now. He says, yeah, I know you need that, but if I pull all those tanks from over here to do that and I’ve opened up the way for the Germans get complete and so he’s having to look at 700 miles rather than 700 yards and so he’s taking a much more strategic approach.

Front Sight Firearms Training

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Big-Picture View

David:

Even though the guys on the beach, they know what, they need he also knows that we can’t afford to do that without losing the whole war. And so you got somebody that’s kind of sitting up looking at all the things that are going on, all the battles. And that’s why his maps are so interesting. Look how little detail there is, but the overview is great. The wide verse and the ability to see the big picture is what’s so significant with these maps.

So when you look at his map, he’s got 700 miles on it and you look at these and you’re talking 700 yards. See the difference is he was looking at things with a 30,000 foot view. He’s looking not where the battle is hottest, but what’s going on with the entire campaign. So that’s what’s considered to be a strategic view, whereas there’s also tactical views.

We tend to have a tactical view. From a national standpoint, we got 50 battlegrounds, those are the State legislatures. And so from a national view that’s strategic, each State legislature is more tactical. But within the State legislature, you’ve also got a strategic view of everything in the State but you’ve also got individual battles. And you’ve got an overall theme you’re trying to get, but you may have 5,000-10,000 bills introduced in the course of the year, each one of those becomes a tactical battle.

Strategic State Legislation

Then once you get the bill, there’s a strategic look at the bill and then there’s a tactical look at it. So if that kind of makes sense, I hope that makes sense? We try to look overview federally, how’s this whole thing going and what are we going to have to do to be able to get this whole issue back to the states, back to the 50. Where do you have to fight the battles?

So that’s the how of what we got. And how do we do that? We do a lot of that through reconnaissance. We watch all 50 states. As you may know, there’s up to 120,000 state pieces of legislation every year introduced, trying to monitor that, trying to monitor what the courts are doing. There’s nearly 750 federal courts. Trying to monitor what State courts are doing, trying to watch all that and see what are the trends. Where”€™re the holes, where can you make greatest inroads?

You also have what happens with polling. We do a lot of polling on issues that media really doesn’t pull about because we want to know how to win these battles. This is kind of like intelligence work. We can figure out where the polling is, where the people’s heart and mind is on this, then we better know how to approach them. So if we get the right polling, we can work on messaging now.

Polling

George Barna is the guy we use most often for polling. Done a lot of political stuff in my lifetime, held a political office in Texas partisan office for nine years, here helped run the state party here, did lots of polling and that was just standard for every campaign, ran that super PAC for Ted Cruz, did polling with that.

I like George better than any pollster we’ve had, because what George does is he digs in much deeper. He gives you the motivation and the whys and what people are thinking, not just where they are, but why they’re where they are. And so give you an example, that if you take the issue of socialism, you may have seen polls over the last two to three years that as you look at college students, 75% of college students say that they support socialism, 69% of Millennials say that they support socialism. 41% of the whole nation says that it supports socialism. Those are disturbing numbers.

Barna says that may not be the whole story. So what Barna did was he said, okay, 41% of the nation says to support socialism. Wonder if they know what they’re talking about. And so what he does, so he goes back with the poll that asked several dozen questions that doesn’t call itself socialism, but it asked, do you support greater government ownership of private property? That’s key to socialism. Didn’t call social”€¦ I”€™ve just asked the question. Do you support greater government regulation of private business? Went through dozens of questions, describing what socialism does.

Defining Socialism

At the end of the poll, he found that only 2% of Americans actually supported socialism. The problem was they didn’t know what it was. And when you ask them what is socialism, it comes two words. It means sharing. Who’s not a sharing, I’m a socialist. If sharing means socialism, I’m a socialist. But that’s not the definition, but that’s what they’re told it is. It means sharing with others. And the other things that means being social. I like Facebook. I like social media. I’m a socialist. No, that’s not what it is.

Rick:

Well, friends we are out of time for today. You’re listening to WallBuilders Live. That’s David Barton, he’s been speaking at the ProFamily Legislators Conference on “€œwhat to expect in 2020″€ and we’re going to get the conclusion of that in a couple of days, tomorrow, I should it’s a three-part program. So got a beginning today, we”€™ll continue tomorrow and the conclusion, two days from now, all of it will be available at our website: wallBuilderslive.com. Which by the way, while you’re there, this is a great day, last day of the year to make your last end of your contribution.

ProFamily Legislators Conference – Looking At 2020

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Tune in tomorrow, we’ll pick up with David Barton at the ProFamily Legislators Conference, speaking on “€œWhat to expect in 2020″€. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.