Low Tweets and Misdemeanors: The Impeachment Debate Through the Lens of History and the Constitution
2018-12-30 · Guest: Gene Healy (Vice President, Cato Institute) · 51:44
Constitutional history and legal standards of impeachment
Bob Zadek and Gene Healy of the Cato Institute explore the constitutional history and legal standards of impeachment. They discuss the origins of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the precedent set by early judicial impeachments, and the historical context of Andrew Johnson’s trial to provide a framework for understanding modern debates over executive removal.
Topics: Impeachment, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Executive Power, Constitutional Law, Andrew Johnson, Donald Trump, Cato Institute
Speakers: Bob Zadek - Host Gene Healy - Vice President, Cato Institute
Defining the Impeachment Power [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. Thank you so much for listening this last Sunday morning of 2018.
There’s been a lot of talk in the media—in the mass media, in the not-so-mass media, in the blogosphere, on Twitter—about the use of impeachment to help many people who are something less than Donald Trump’s greatest fans, whether impeachment is the appropriate remedy for those who are impatient for the 2020 election. And the concept of impeachment has been the subject of profound, if not overwhelming to the point of being distressing, overwhelming misunderstanding. We have only a few words in the Constitution that give us any guidance, and they give us perhaps very little guidance at that.
It is about time we set the matter straight. And those of you who defend President Trump and future presidents, and those of you who oppose President Trump or may oppose future presidents, it is important at least for healthy political discussion that you at least understand what it is you are talking about when you throw out the inflammatory and agitating phrase of impeachment. Well, when we have a subject as difficult as impeachment, the Constitution, and President Trump, we have to go to the experts.
And with that introduction, I’m happy to welcome back to the show Gene Healy. Gene is with the Cato Institute; he’s the Vice President at Cato. His research interests—and man, does he have a great job—his research interests include executive power, the role of the presidency, federalism, and over-criminalization. He’s the author of False Idol: Barack Obama and the Continuing Cult of the Presidency and The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power. Most recently, Gene has written for Cato a white paper entitled “Impeachment: The Indispensable Remedy.” And you will learn the phrase “indispensable remedy” is not Gene disclosing his own point of view, but even that phrase has a very rich constitutional history. Gene, welcome to the show this morning.
Gene Healy: Hey, thanks for having me on, Bob.
Bob Zadek: Now Gene, impeachment. Give us the very broad, 30,000-foot view of what the concept of impeachment is all about. When talking about the president or other civil federal officials, what does it mean and what is the source of all the information we have? Where does the impeachment process, the concept, start?
Gene Healy: Well, it had a 400-year history before it even made its way into the U.S. Constitution—a long history dating from the 14th century in England. It was considered by Parliament a guarantor of the rights of the people and the rights of Parliament. And that history informed the framing of the Constitution and the framing of impeachment provisions in the state constitutions.
And I think your point in the introduction to this program was really well taken—that in order to understand the important thing with impeachment, impeachment tends only to come up and to become subject of a major discussion in the United States when there’s a president in the crosshairs. But what you think of impeachment, how broad or narrowly you view the causes of impeachment and the extent of the power, shouldn’t turn on what you think of Donald Trump, because he’s not going to be the last president we have. If you raise the bar to impeachment to save a president that you love, or lower it to target a president that you hate, you may end up regretting the standard that you set when a different president comes along.
High Crimes and Misdemeanors [03:30]
Bob Zadek: So the Founders were well aware, of course, of the concept of impeachment. The Founders—there was some debate during the drafting of the Constitution. James Madison was perhaps the principal author, but other founding drafters, the 55 men who sat in Philadelphia for four and a half months and worked over the Constitution, they felt the absolute need to provide for the removal of a popularly elected official from office, to thwart, if you will, the will of the people. And how did they do it? What did they say in the Constitution about how we undo the will of the people? And the answer is, of course, not much. But what does the Constitution tell us about how we undo the will of the people?
Gene Healy: Well, it says that the House has the sole power of impeachment, that the Senate has the sole power to try impeachments and remove federal officers. And it says in Article II, Section 4, that the President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. And most of the action, most of the debate over interpretation, is on that last phrase: what does it mean, “high crimes and misdemeanors”? It’s a phrase with several centuries of history, again, before the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, but it’s also a phrase that doesn’t translate very easily into modern contemporary American English, and that’s one reason there’s so much confusion about what high crimes and misdemeanors are.
One of the main confusions that people have, and in a way it’s understandable, is that people believe that impeachment is a criminal process, that it requires a crime. You hear this all the time when it comes to President Trump: “Where’s the crime? What’s the crime?” There’s a notion that you need to find a technical violation of a criminal statute. That’s not really the sense in which the phrase was used. High crimes and misdemeanors in British law did not have to be, and often were not, statutory violations. And it was understood early on that that was not a requirement for impeachment in the U.S. system.
In fact, if high crimes and misdemeanors had required an actual technical violation of a federal criminal statute, then it would have been a pretty useless remedy at the outset because, as you know, Bob, there were only a handful of federal crimes mentioned in the Constitution and very few federal criminal laws on the books at the outset. So if an impeachable offense had to be a crime, they would have made impeachment a dead letter from the very start after ratification.
Bob Zadek: And Gene’s point has to be emphasized. If the Founders were saying by implication that the only way, the predicate for impeaching and convicting a president, was the commission of a crime, then—and this is a wonderful parlor game, by the way—then at the time the Constitution was ratified, there were only three federal crimes, which means a sitting president could only be impeached if he was guilty of treason, counterfeiting, or piracy. How many presidents do you think would have been found guilty of one of those three and only three federal crimes? So of course, the predicate for impeachment had to be something beyond the plain commission of a crime. And it is the “how much more than that” is the subject of endless debate, which can’t be resolved because of the history of our country. Only three presidents in our history were seriously exposed to impeachment, and none was convicted in the Senate. So if you rely upon precedent, there is a dearth of precedent on the law of impeachment.
Historical Precedents: Judges and Partisanship [07:20]
Bob Zadek: Now Gene, so we have high crimes and misdemeanors; that’s what we have to work with. But putting aside the issue of the presidency, there have been in history impeachments of federal officials, mostly, maybe exclusively, federal judges. So we have, I think, about 15 sitting judges who were impeached. And if we look at what happened at the impeachment of federal judges, implying or using the same clause, that will give us some guidance, at least as to the politicians at the time, what they thought the clause meant. So give us, if you will, some historical perspective on how that high crimes and misdemeanors clause was actually used in real impeachment trials of federal officials.
Gene Healy: Sure. I think the first place to look when you’re looking at impeachment precedent are the first three impeachment cases, which happened fairly quickly after ratification in the 15 or so years after ratification. You had three cases: Senator William Blount in 1797; after that, a federal judge, John Pickering, in 1803; and then the next year, you have Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Samuel Chase.
Now, what you see from these three cases, which involved contemporaries of actual ratifiers of the Constitution, some folks that were involved in the drafting of the Constitution—this is a time when the Constitution is recent in living memory. So I think it gives you a good idea of how high crimes and misdemeanors was interpreted. In these three cases, only one of the three involved anything that you could even arguably be called a crime.
In fact, the second of those cases, Judge John Pickering, and the first to actually result in a conviction and removal of a federal officer, the defendant, Pickering, wasn’t guilty of any crime. He was basically impeached and removed for showing up to work drunk and ranting like a maniac from the bench. So that’s some indication of how broad the interpretation of high crimes and misdemeanors was. It really indicated demonstrating unfitness for high office, and that can be demonstrated in any number of ways.
Justice Chase, impeached in 1804, tried in 1805, escapes removal by four votes. The bulk of his offenses was really being an openly partisan Federalist from the bench. He gave a charge to a grand jury where he ranted against Jeffersonian Republicans and seemed to condemn the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and in various other trials had shown real partiality against small-r Republican defendants. None of this is a crime, right? But it was thought by the Jeffersonians to have demonstrated Chase’s unfitness to be a Justice of the Supreme Court. So I think those three early cases really show you this is not a narrow technical remedy that’s directed against violations of the criminal law. Just the opposite—it can be directed against anything that arguably shows unfitness to serve.
The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson [11:10]
Bob Zadek: Now, it’s interesting, the first president to be subject to an impeachment process was President Johnson, the successor to Abraham Lincoln in 1868. And his offenses, his high crimes and misdemeanors, were strangely close to a lot of what some folks say Trump is guilty of. So tell us what President Johnson in 1868 was accused of doing. What did he really do that got everybody angry—everybody in the House angry enough to try to impeach him? Because his behavior was quite interesting as compared, if you will, in a legal analysis, to what some accuse President Trump of.
Gene Healy: Right. So the main thing we learn if we spend any time on Johnson at all in high school history, if we spend any time on the impeachment, you learn that he was basically impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act, which prevented him from firing cabinet officials without the advice and consent of the Senate. And it’s true that those were—of the 11 articles of impeachment against Johnson, the Tenure of Office Act made up most of them.
But very interesting, there is an Article X of the articles of impeachment against Johnson which isn’t focused on that statute at all. In fact, Article X basically accuses Johnson of bringing the presidency into scandal and disrepute by making a series of inflammatory harangues, a series of speeches that he had given on the campaign trail during the midterm elections in 1866.
Bob Zadek: In other words, Gene, if I can interrupt—in other words, he was doing the 1868 equivalent of sending out early morning tweets. Is that a fair summary?
Gene Healy: Yes, absolutely. And by the way, one aside: the only crime he committed—and he did violate the federal statute about firing officials without the advice and consent of the Senate—but that statute was clearly unconstitutional. It was done to limit Johnson’s ability to behave and carry out his office. So the statute he violated, everybody agrees the statute itself was unconstitutional as an intrusion into the operation of the executive. So the only crime he is alleged to have committed is violating a clearly unconstitutional law. So we can dismiss that and we can say to ourselves as political observers that in reality, that was political cover. But he was really accused of the 1868 equivalent of tweeting. And he was abusive on the stump; he was not a very pleasant fellow. But that’s what got him impeached.
Gene Healy: No, that’s right. The series of speeches he made in 1866, a lot of observers at the time thought they were pivotal to garnering support for his eventual impeachment, and they’re incorporated in that Article X. And you know, a lot of what Johnson says in those speeches, the offending passages wouldn’t really shock us today. But for the time, they were his extremely partisan bent and his denunciations of Congress. It was a real departure from presidential rhetorical traditions of the time. General Ulysses S. Grant, who had to go out as part of his entourage during this speaking tour as Chief of the Army, wrote to his wife that he’d never been more embarrassed and humiliated in his life than to have been part of this disgraceful episode. So Johnson’s behavior was really felt to be beyond the pale, and that was one of the reasons, a key reason, that he was impeached in 1868.
Bob Zadek: And what happened in the Senate?
Gene Healy: Well, he escaped conviction by one vote. One of the reasons, as you suggested, the Tenure of Office Act was felt to be constitutionally dubious. That’s something that a number of the Republicans who voted against conviction in the Senate identified when they explained their vote. The Republicans in the Senate clearly had the numbers to impeach Johnson and to remove Johnson on a party-line basis, but when it came to the actual votes, they did not have the votes because a number of Republicans thought that the case had not been made. Which I think shows you that, contrary to what—there’s the famous quote from Gerald Ford: “An impeachable offense is whatever Congress decides it is at a given moment in history.” It actually does matter what offenses you impeach the president for, because if your charges are legally dubious, then you’re much more likely to fail.
Bob Zadek: Jerry Ford regretted making that statement, of course. He felt terrible when he got to be president; he kind of saw that concept in a different light, I think, and he later apologized for making the statement. And kind of, if he would, he would invoke some—wasn’t around then—internet rule of the right to be invisible and delete that from the public conversation, but he could not. So he was terribly sorry he made that statement, and most people acknowledge he didn’t quite know what he was talking about. He may have been right politically, but not right as a matter of constitutional law.
The Indispensable Remedy [18:40]
Bob Zadek: Now Gene, “indispensable remedy.” Those aren’t your words. You sort of plagiarized those words, didn’t you? And I’m not asking for a confession, but tell us where the phrase came from, because the history of your phrase, “the indispensable remedy,” tells us a lot about this morning’s subject.
Gene Healy: Sure. Well, there are at least two Framers at the Constitutional Convention who used the adjective “indispensable” to refer to impeachment. One was James Madison. He said some mode of displacing the Chief Magistrate is rendered indispensable by the powers of the office. And he says—I’m paraphrasing here—but he does say that the incapacity, negligence, or perfidy of the Chief Magistrate would be things that would make impeachment necessary. And you notice from those three categories—incapacity, negligence, and perfidy—only one of the three really covers what we typically think of today as impeachable offenses: perfidy, being crimes or abhorrent behavior. But Madison says it extends to incapacity and negligence as well.
The other Framer who used the phrase “indispensable” at the Constitutional Convention was George Mason. So this is a remedy that other participants used similar adjectives for. It’s something that the bulk of the consensus at the time was that this tool was absolutely necessary for constitutional government. You needed to have some way of removing a misbehaving or malperforming Chief Executive.
Bob Zadek: So, and the phrase “Chief Magistrate” is the constitutional-era phrase that the Founders used to describe the president. The president was the “Chief Magistrate.” Now, one thing that’s interesting, as Gene pointed out, Madison used the phrase “negligence,” a sort of everyday phrase. Everybody is more or less negligent in carrying on the duties of their life, their activities. So negligence seems like a very low bar, and whether it had a different meaning then in the constitutional era, I’m not sure; I didn’t look that up.
But certainly, it is far less than a crime. Now, also, there was also another dialogue—George Mason, whom you referred to, who by the way is one of my favorite Founders—George Mason suggested that among the reasons to impeach the president could be maladministration, which means doing a crappy job. And Madison rejected this. Tell us a bit about that exchange and the suggested use but rejection of maladministration as a basis for impeachment.
Gene Healy: Sure. Towards the end of the convention, the Committee of Style has narrowed the causes of impeachment to treason, bribery, and corruption, I think. And Mason protests and says this should be broader, and he proposes maladministration. Madison objects; he thinks maladministration is too—even though he had earlier said negligence could in some cases be impeachable—he thinks maladministration is too broad and amorphous. Mason suggests, “Okay, high crimes and misdemeanors” as the catch-all phrase, and that’s the language the convention approved.
Now, people have made a lot out of, particularly during the Clinton experience, you had folks like Laurence Tribe, who now seems to be more gung-ho about impeachment than he was 20 years ago, you had people like him and like Cass Sunstein making a lot out of this exchange. It shows that maladministration, no matter how bad, cannot be part of an impeachable offense. Well, that’s just not right. In fairly short order, you have Madison, when he’s in Congress, saying that some forms of maladministration would be an impeachable offense—for example, if the president engaged in what Madison called the “wanton removal of meritorious officers,” if he fired people who really should keep their job. Madison said you could be impeached for that act of maladministration. So the backstory, the legislative history on that, suggests that perhaps not all forms of negligence and malperformance are impeachable, but extremely bad and partially willful examples of maladministration can be.
Pre-Presidency Crimes and Impeachment [24:40]
Bob Zadek: So now we get to the fun part of the conversation on impeachment, where we get to learn about Gene’s intensely informed opinions on how to apply high crimes and misdemeanors to the current political climate. So first of all, as Gene has said earlier, clearly the constitutional basis for impeachment is not limited to crimes, and although it does include crimes, it doesn’t include every crime.
So Gene, let’s divide—well, first of all, before we get into discussion of crimes, does in your opinion—because it’s an opinion question—would it be a constitutionally sound basis for impeachment if the alleged crime was committed prior to the president becoming president? And when you answer that, I’ll ask whether or not the public generally knew at the time of the election that these alleged crimes were out there, were being discussed, although no conviction. So is high crimes and misdemeanors limited to those committed while in office, or does it capture pre-election misbehavior?
Gene Healy: Sure. Well, let me say just to preface that, the paper doesn’t take any position on whether Donald Trump should be impeached for any particular charge. It’s really not the purpose of it. And to a certain extent, impeachment, constitutional analysis of impeachment, offers fewer clear answers than, say, the constitutional analysis of the First Amendment. So it gives you a range of possible outcomes. And impeachment is part legal and part political, and the political parts—whether it’s a good idea, whether it’s necessary—is something that legal analysis can’t lead you to.
However, I think that the better view on whether crimes or offenses committed before the person assumes office are impeachable, the better view is yes. We have had some precedent for that in American impeachment history, and there is also some discussion of it at the Constitutional Convention. Several of the delegates—Madison, Gouverneur Morris, and others—said that, for example, if the president had corrupted his electors, if he gained the office by means of bribery or subterfuge, that was a potentially impeachable offense. Mason says that as well.
And going beyond just securing an election by corrupt means, which is something the Framers discussed, this is something a number of scholars have put forward. You find out that the president wasn’t convicted, but 10, 15 years before assuming office had participated in a contract killing, hired somebody to kill somebody. If the purpose of impeachment is to prevent the exercise of power by people who cannot be trusted with power, I think you can factor something like that in. If it wasn’t known, there’s no reason why that could not be an impeachable offense. And in fact, we have at least one example of a federal judge who was impeached for, in large part, for behavior that occurred prior to his assuming office. That’s G. Thomas Porteous.
Bob Zadek: Yeah, but he lied to Congress about that conviction.
Gene Healy: But he wasn’t convicted of the underlying offenses. Yes, it’s true that the article for that impeachment is sort of “acquiring office by corrupt means” because he concealed this misbehavior from the Senate. But that would apply to the hypothetical of a president who engaged in a contract killing. The point is, if the offense is grave enough to raise serious doubts about whether a person could be trusted with power and the offense was not known prior to their assuming office, I don’t see any bar constitutionally to it being a potentially impeachable offense.
Partisanship and the Senate Trial [29:40]
Bob Zadek: So now, what would be—give us the range. I’m going to ask you two easy questions and then the juicy, delicious hard question. The two easy questions are: what are the kind of high crimes and misdemeanors that in your scholarly opinion, as somebody who has studied the issue, would be a clear, on-all-fours, constitutionally sound basis for impeachment? Bearing in mind it doesn’t mean a president must be impeached and must be convicted, but rather Congress would be on a sound footing if they did so. Give us just one or two examples, and then give us one or two examples of where it would be constitutionally dubious for Congress to act on alleged misbehavior, and help us understand the difference between those two classifications.
Gene Healy: So like I said, the legal part of impeachment gives you a broad range, but it excludes a lot of things. So for example, starting with clearly not impeachable offenses: if you wanted to impeach Donald Trump for eating well-done steak with ketchup, that’s beyond the pale. I think some of the things that have been suggested by various academics—there’s a guy, Allan Lichtman, who wrote a book called The Case for Impeachment where he suggests that Donald Trump could be impeached for ignoring the “crime against humanity” of global warming. I think that’s nonsense. I think simply disagreeing with a president’s policies—say you didn’t like Trump’s coal subsidies or even his trade policy—I don’t think that sort of thing was considered to be impeachable.
Things that would clearly be impeachable: assassination of a political enemy, using the IRS or the Justice Department against political enemies, in some cases starting a war without congressional authorization. It seems to be something that presidents get away with quite a bit, but it’s clearly an impeachable offense. Now, in the middle, you have a broad range of potentially impeachable offenses. But what the legal analysis, the constitutional analysis of high crimes and misdemeanors doesn’t do for you is tell you when it’s a good idea or when it’s risen to the level that it’s necessary. That’s a political and prudential question that constitutional analysis can’t answer. So for example, I can tell you that in the abstract, obstruction of justice is a clearly impeachable offense. It’s something the Framers discussed; it’s something two presidents have been actually impeached for. But I can’t tell you—the legal analysis can’t tell you—whether a particular case of obstruction is serious enough to merit the use of that remedy.
Bob Zadek: Now, a lot is focused on crimes, where of course it’s generally understood that certain crimes are the basis for impeachment. And one of Clinton’s impeachable offenses was his lying under oath about sex with Monica Lewinsky. So it was the crime of perjury that was one of the articles of impeachment. So certainly criminal law does have an important role to play, although not an exclusive role to play.
But what strikes me, Gene, as being so interesting is we have—let’s assume the president is suspected of committing a crime, or generally accused in the media and elsewhere of committing a crime, but there is no conviction. Now the articles of impeachment are voted out by the House, a simple majority, and now it goes to the Senate for the impeachment trial. And it seems to me, Gene, that the Senate is sitting in part—they have to find he committed the crime in order to impeach, at least have a constitutional basis. But that makes the Senate trial into a criminal trial, but without all of the criminal law protections: no Mirandaizing, no rules against self-incrimination unless the Senate votes them in, no rules of procedure, no hearsay rule, nothing of the kind.
So it’s kind of a very—I’ll use the phrase “unfair” under criminal law analysis—it’s an unfair criminal trial. Of course, the result of the trial is not incarceration, and the president can be later tried criminally. But if the impeachment process and the trial is to be sound, it is in effect a criminal trial, and that’s kind of strange because you have 100 jurors who are the senators, who by the way, jurors are supposed to be independent—we know about excluding jurors who have a bias—here you have the most biased of anybody on the planet as the jury, and 100 of them. So the whole concept of a criminal trial determining who gets to be the most important elected official on earth, it’s kind of strange to me.
Gene Healy: Well, it’s not really a criminal trial. I think what you said a moment ago is one of the key points: it doesn’t, as in a criminal trial, put somebody’s life or liberty at risk. The ultimate remedy for a conviction in the Senate is removal from office. So the person’s out of a job. And it makes sense that perhaps there’s no prescribed burden of proof. When you put somebody at risk of imprisonment or even execution, it makes sense that you want evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. When you’re talking about an official in a position of power, a position where that person can do a great deal of damage to ordinary citizens’ rights, it makes sense that the burden of showing that danger is lower than it should be in a criminal trial.
So it is not a criminal trial, and it would be interesting if a president is impeached and thrown out of office for allegedly committing a crime and then is subsequently acquitted in a criminal trial. That is a bit strange, but it doesn’t impact on the constitutional soundness of the trial in the Senate. It just is a bit of an anomaly. It’s also happened the other way. You’ve had federal officials who have been acquitted in criminal trials who are impeached and removed for the same behavior. One of them was federal judge Alcee Hastings from Florida, who is now in Congress. He was acquitted in a bribery trial, but the House and the Senate and his colleagues on the federal bench thought that the behavior and the accusations were serious enough that he should be disciplined, and he was ultimately impeached and removed. And then won election to Congress. But it does show that these are two different procedures: the criminal process, where a jury of his peers didn’t find the evidence clear enough to convict him, and in the impeachment process, the Senate found the evidence at least compelling enough to remove him from the federal bench. And I think that difference in burdens of proof and criminal protections makes sense because you’re talking about two different things with different consequences.
Bob Zadek: Gene, we have only a minute or two left. A topic I’d like your opinion on: it seems to me that an impeachment in the House and perhaps conviction in the Senate is constitutionally suspect and, to use an everyday phrase, really bad for the country unless it is bipartisan. That partisan activities along these lines, whatever the basis, leaves a terrible constitutional scar on our country. Would you agree?
Gene Healy: No. Every impeachment at a presidential level is going to be partisan. That’s just what we’ve seen from the three serious attempts. I mean, even in the case of Richard Nixon, most Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, a majority of them, voted against all three articles of impeachment. So if you are setting up the standard that everything has to be bipartisan, perfectly bipartisan, then you’re setting up a standard that would say we’re going to have even fewer impeachments at the presidential level than we’ve had so far. I do think there needs to be some buy-in, not majority buy-in, but some buy-in from the president’s party to demonstrate some fairness. But I think imagining a world in which presidential impeachments are going to be by consensus or perfectly bipartisan, I think sets too high a standard, particularly now.
Bob Zadek: Gene, tell our friends out there how they can follow your work and the work of Cato, and what you and Cato are working on of interest to our audience. We have about a minute left.
Gene Healy: Sure. Well, of course, the first place to go is www.cato.org. And you can find my paper there, “Indispensable Remedy,” on the broad constitutional power of impeachment. And you know, these have been interesting times for everybody at Cato. Our trade guys and our foreign policy guys are quite busy. If nothing else, you can say about this presidency is it’s been tremendously interesting and it gives us plenty to work with on a daily basis.
Bob Zadek: It sends you back to the books. A year ago, you didn’t think you’d be studying articles of impeachment and the constitutional provisions. Gene, thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time this morning. We sure did appreciate it. What a fascinating topic you are so lucky to have been commissioned to write. So thanks a lot to Gene Healy, a special thanks to my dear friends at Cato. Please support the Cato organization; they are doing truly God’s work. This is Bob Zadek saying so long for now, I’ll happily be back again next Sunday.