Randy Barnett on Trump, the Supreme Court, and the Future of the Republican Party

Is the GOP becoming the party of European-style nationalism?

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Randy Barnett on Trump, the Supreme Court, and the Future of the Republican Party

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"If Trump takes over the Republican Party it's likely to become a right-wing nationalist party of the kind you see in Europe," says Randy Barnett, who's a law professor at Georgetown and the author most recently of Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People.

Barnett wrote a column for USA Today last March calling for disaffected Republicans to consider a third-party candidate in the event that Donald Trump becomes the party nominee. Reason TV's Nick Gillespie sat down with Barnett to discuss the GOP's future, what the 2016 election portends, and why Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was right to apologize for her critical remarks about Trump.

"Judges have to at least act like they are above that sort of thing," Barnett explains. "It's certainly foreseeable that a case involving the Trump campaign could come before the Court in the next few months [and]…she couldn't possibly sit on that case now."

Approximately 8 minutes.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Austin Bragg. Shot by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, and Justin Monticello.

Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube Channel to receive notification when new material goes live.

Comments

[bacon-magic]

European-style Nationalism? Are you saying they are Nazis? Way to troll, I will offer you a goat to cross this bridge.

[AliceHarvey]

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[Domestic Dissident]

Yes. If you have the unmitigated nerve to so much as even question whether it's a good idea for America to bring huge numbers of Muslims we know nothing about into the country at this time, you're the precise equivalent to someone who wants to indiscriminately murder millions of people, and possibly you even want to wipe an entire group of people off the face of the earth.

At least, that's what "Reason" would like us to believe.

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[kokoy]

sangat tidak yakin agen pipa besi agen plate hardox

[HollieGordon]

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[R.U. Got Silk-Roaded]

Way to go Randy for giving Trump the official rating of ID-10-T

[mememine69]

CNN;
'Trump Fart$ and Spoils the Environment."
FOX;
"Clinton's Health Condition Revealed; Hillary Has Heart Worm."

Since none of us here have even watched an entire Hillary speech from beginning to end , I therefore tried watching a few of Trump's speeches and I will say this for certain; if anything the video is very entertaining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBdBSXKTL88
Check it out.

[Drake]

Trump's speeches are fun stream of consciousness shows.

I'm sure Hillary's handlers have told her repeatedly not to break into the screech voice. Her speech today was interesting in 2 ways. 28:20 Hillary talks about hiring "organizers" everywhere. Is this the same woman who wants to take money out of politics?

29:00 - Biden catches Hillary who was trying to take a header off the platform. Then she sits behind Joe and makes faces for the rest of his speech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7VSycMWG_E

[Mickey Rat]

Is "organizer" a synonym for "commissar"?

[Rhywun]

Obama used to be an "organizer". I hear he'll be looking for work soon.

[Fryingpants]

I like the part where she spells "join" for the audience. Truly knows her audience & voter base.

[TheZenomeProject]

I'm going to keep saying it until I'm blue in the face, but I believe that trying to associate Trump with right-wing nationalism and other extremist agendas is inaccurate because of how his campaign is run. Trump's message has very little to do with any party-line ideas or even politics at all; he's just campaigning towards the anxieties of the average Republican or blue-collar Democrat voter, the vast majority of whom lack the level of research that even the average Tea Party voter possesses. Opportunism through and through.

[toolkien]

Haven't read much about Hitler and his methods, I take it?

Brownshirts ring a bell? Horst Wessel? The existing establishment coming to terms with Hitler (Junkers and Military) if only he "dealt with" the crudest elements, leading to Night Of The Long Knives?

But I agree it's not completely accurate, but not for the reasons you cite. As I said below, the country isn't going to descend into a hell on the German-Nazi model, it's going to hell via the French-Jacobins model, complete with the sans-culottes.

[Drake]

I'm familiar. Somebody needs to tell people they have things backwards. If Trump supporters are Brownshirts, shouldn't they be showing up at Hillary rallies and beating people up instead of the other way around?

[TheZenomeProject]

I was about to say this. Say what you want about the Trump base, but they're not going into the DNC and creating violence and chaos.

[Domestic Dissident]

The Obama supporters are America's true brownshirts, and they were on the rampage in Milwaukee this weekend, screaming "kill whitey" and all that kind of shit.

[toolkien]

As I've said here for months, Trump is a mile marker on the road toward populists on the Right. As the establishment Republicans gravitated past center to being to the left of JFK, and got the warning shot from the stable, middles class that galvanized into the Tea Party, which they pompously ignored, a loud mouth New York Democrat has taken the Party's nomination from the "cruder" end of the Right side of the spectrum. For all the Dem's problems, at least they were able to keep their populists a little more under control, at least for one more cycle. It won't last.

The two parties have gravitated closer together, with the Republicans moving at about twice the rate, so they are meeting - again - in the region to the left of JFK. It is out of the void on the Right that the populists don't have any containment. As the two parties have moved together, so I predict the populists of the Left and Right will move into some agreement on certain principles and we're in for a 1790's France for a future. The Unifying Establishment is going to get swept under a populist wave of ignorance and violence. Think college professors getting attacked by the little shits they bore and bred until they quit, times a million.

[TheZenomeProject]

That's giving much of the Trump voting base too much credit IMO; the initial Tea Party was a huge success among the types of voters that did their research and revolted against the establishment for very clear cut, well laid out motives that we all know about at this point. Trump found an opportunity among the types of voters that couldn't care less about any particular political and economic complexities, and just wanted to hear how all of their (mostly) personal problems could be blamed on others.

[toolkien]

Yet the Tea Party is a stage, a stage that was rebuffed by both parties. It was the establishment last chance to deal with reasonable people. Now they're grinding right up against the masses, the masses who are soon going to learn they are half was well off as they thought they were, and they're about to receive much less on the promises they think they have coming to them. Any last chance for the country to work its way out of the mess it has created for itself is gone. We have a clueless establishment that has run out of smoke and mirrors and a mass of people who are about to get it good and hard. I suppose the upside is a bunch of fops are going to the proverbial guillotine, which would be amusing if - as a libertarian - it didn't put me on the wrong side of the razor wire regardless if it's fascists, communists, or "republicans" in the French citoyen sense of the word. I lose whichever hardline emerges, but the hardline is emerging one way or another. It's part of what makes reading 90% of the content of Reason so hard these, days. So much piffle as the shit storm descends.

[Fryingpants]

The establishment has been intentionally harming the country for decades. If all Trump does is deport illegals, he'll have been a beneficial force.

However deporting illegals and fixing a broken immigration system is just the tip of the ice berg. He will also purge politics of the shills, people who bought influence, incompetents, and traitors.

You seem to define libertarianism as being weak & impotent. No doubt that is why the Tea party was a failure, and why the ideology is filled with closet leftists.

[Guy Behind the Guy, Jr.]

"If Trump takes over the Republican Party it's likely to become a right-wing nationalist party of the kind you see in Europe," says Randy Barnett, who's a law professor at Georgetown and a hyperventilating, pearl-clutching, pants-shitting grade-2 TDS sufferer.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

"If Trump takes over the Republican Party it's likely to become a right-wing nationalist party of the kind you see in Europe," says Randy Barnett,

The republican party has been leaning this way for a few years. And it's actually a natural fallout of where our country has been going in general-- the European direction. And by 'European', I mean the government is little more than a pan-welfare state where... what... 84% of what the federal government does is wealth transfer payments? As Americans have come to accept this structure-- and by accept I mean surrender to it, they take the same attitude towards the government as Swedes, Danes and other European countries do: This is our welfare system and to benefit from it, you need to put something into it.

This came up more directly when Bernie Sanders was running orange-hot in the primaries. He kept talking about Danish socialism, and I read a long article about how the Danes bristled at the word 'socialism'. Say what you will about their system, the Danes take a certain localized pride in it, and they also believe that if you benefit from it, you need to be Danish, and not some recent interloper who just got off the boat.

As our country has gone this direction, those with Xenophobic tendencies are going to get louder in their grumbling.

[TheZenomeProject]

The more that I have thought about it, the more that I've realized that looser immigration and large welfare states cannot go together, and that you have to eliminate one or the other for your society to function. I wish it was the welfare state, but too many people have "fairly" benefited from it to ever touch it anytime soon.

[Rhywun]

Germany has had a Grand Coalition for two out of Merkel's three cabinets. There was only one other since WWII.

We're seeing the same thing here; only the two TEAMS are joined de facto rather than de jure.

[Fryingpants]

Universal Suffrage democracy will always inevitably turn into a kleptocracy. How can anyone remove welfare or reduce public sector employees when a large voting majority benefits from it ?

At the end of the day, Reason & other libertarians who support mass migration from South America are doing their part to enable it.

[Greg F]

He kept talking about Danish socialism, and I read a long article about how the Danes bristled at the word 'socialism'.

Well maybe this is the reason:

http://punditokraterne.dk/2015.....s-at-home/

Denmark has a long tradition for free trade with the outside World (nowadays the trade regime is to a high degree decided by the EU). Also when it comes to regulation, Denmark scores quite well. Credit markets are among the less regulated internationally. During the recent financial crisis, tax payers did not have to subsidize banks, and some banks were allowed to fail. The Danish labor market is very flexible: There is no legislated minimum wage, and there are few restrictions on hiring and firing.

[DarrenM]

Too bad we can't emulate Denmark. If we're going to have Welfare, we can at least avoid kneecapping the producers and workers that provide the funds for it.

[ranrod]

If you are one that believes the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what is lawful and constitutional, then you have believed a lie and a myth that Jefferson warned about. The States still retain their rights to this day to defy the federal judiciary, which has become an oligarcy. We just need strong statesmen as governors and legislatures to make that stand!

In writing to William Jarvis, Jefferson said, "You seem . . . to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."

The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary; an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped."

[Joe_in_Indiana]

Bravo Randy! Clear and Concise!

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[jackrose]

nice post thanks admin