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Judge Andrew Napolitano
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29 minutes and 36 seconds
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marcopolo on Aug 18, 2009
Texas Speech By Conservative Judge Andrew Napolitano
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- [EMCEE] A few of you out there might have seen a little show called Freedom Watch.
- You guys ever see that?
- [applause]
- Well, we got some big news.
- Starting September 14th, and ya'll are the first people to hear this,
- starting September 14th, Freedom Watch is gonna be on every day, 4:30 to 5:00 p.m. EST
- We all gotta tune in, give support and email Fox News
- let them know at Foxnews.com that you appreciate them having the Judge on
- because he is taking off. He is going to be all over the place.
- [APPLAUSE]
- FoxNews.com, 4:30 to 5:00, every day. You guys gotta tune in.
- And uh, I don't think our next guest needs very much introduction.
- Ladies and gentlemen, Judge Andrew Napolitano.
- [APPLAUSE]
- [NAPOLITANO] I hate to speak last. I have to follow two giants.
- Lew Rockwell has done more to cement the intellectual foundations of the movement for liberty than anybody else today.
- [APPLAUSE]
- And Tom Woods has explained in his runaway, easy to read best seller "Meltdown"
- how we got in this mess better than anybody else today
- [APPLAUSE]
- I was speaking to a group not unlike this about 7 or 8 years ago,
- and in the audience was a great man and I didn't know it.
- And in the middle of giving one of my favorite quotations by Thomas Jefferson, I looked in the third row.
- And I met this man eye-to-eye, face-to-face for the first time.
- And it was Ron Paul. And I said, and I don't know what inspired me to say this,
- but it stuck and I'm glad it has, I said, "Oh my God. Here is the modern day Thomas Jefferson."
- [APPLAUSE]
- I'll tell you a crazy story about how I got my start at Fox.
- I have not hesitated for one bit to criticize George W. Bush.
- He has shown less fidelity to constitutional government than any president since Abraham Lincoln.
- [APPLAUSE]
- But I bear a little responsibility for his election. Now here's how this happened.
- It's December of 2000. We're in the 38th day of the 42 day recount.
- All vacations at Fox are cancelled. All weekends at Fox are cancelled.
- I'm sleeping on the couch in my office. We're going 24/7 'round the clock live,
- and I'm the expert in Florida election law, and one night I'm on-air with Brit Hume
- I'm in New York and he's in D.C. Through the magic of television it looks like we're in the same room.
- And all of a sudden in the middle of he and I talking, you know one of those swoosh alerts that Fox does
- about 8 or 9 times a minute it seems, One of those alerts comes down
- and the alert is that the Florida Supreme Court has just come down with it's third ruling on the recount.
- And it has ordered that the recount resume not only in the 4 counties that Al Gore, and this will all come back to ya,
- has challenged, but in all 70 counties of the state of Florida.
- People were ready to pull their hair out. They want this thing to be over with.
- And we understand that Governor Bush's lawyers are going to appeal this decision of the Supreme Court
- of Florida to the United States Court of Appeals of the 11th Circuit in Atlanta.
- Hume says to me, "What do you think about that?"
- And I said, "Well that's wrong. The Court of Appeals, without getting too technical, in Atlanta does not have jurisdiction to hear an appeal from the Florida Supreme Court."
- And he said, "Well, what should Bush's people do?"
- I said, "They should get in their cars and drive to Georgetown, which is where Justice Anthony Kennedy lives."
- "He hears urgent appeals from the area of the United States where Florida is."
- "They should knock on the door of his house, and file an emergency appeal. "
- "With the stroke of a pen he can stop the decision of the Florida Supreme Court and then pull the other 8 justices."
- End of Hume's show. I go upstairs to take a nap because in 3 hours I'm on with O'Reilly.
- You need all the rest you can get for that!
- [LAUGHTER]
- At 7:00 my ever garrulous, ever charming, ever freedom loving colleague Shepherd Smith comes on
- and another one of those swoosh alerts!
- And the alert is this: "Lawyers for Governor Bush Have Just Been Sighted In Georgetown."
- [LAUGHTER]
- "Looking For The House Of Justice Anthony Kennedy!"
- And then as only Shep can do, he looks in the camera, and he goes, "Do you know what this means?"
- "This means that George W. Bush is watching Fox!"
- [LAUGHTER]
- "And he's getting his legal advice from Judge Napolitano."
- [APPLAUSE]
- And the rest is history.
- I have a couple of beliefs, firm beliefs which Jefferson called truisms.
- A truism is something that is so obvious that it doesn't have to be proven.
- And here they are. The first of my truisms is
- that God created every human being on the planet in His own image and likeness.
- [APPLAUSE]
- And because He is perfectly free, He has created us in a state of perfect freedom.
- [APPLAUSE]
- And that in order to protect those freedoms, and for no other purpose, we have established a government.
- And the only legitimate role of the government is to protect human freedom.
- [APPLAUSE]
- Every individual has an immortal soul capable of glorifying God infinitely and eternally.
- The government is just an artificial organization based on fear and force.
- [APPLAUSE]
- If you don't believe me you can take the words of the first two American presidents.
- George Washington said it was based on force and John Adams said it was based on fear.
- I think they knew what they were talking about.
- Now, there was a time when everybody in America believed all this.
- Tom Woods has just given us a brilliant and succinct analysis of how we lost these beliefs.
- and consequently lost the freedoms that the beliefs animated.
- I'm going to tell you some stories that are even gloomier.
- There is a happy ending but the stories are gloomy.
- You know all these things.
- We start out as colonists.
- We start out with a king and a parliment that wants money from us.
- What else do governments want, besides power and money?
- And our children.
- The parliment enacts the stamp act and the stamp act requires that every piece of paper in your possession
- every book, every deed, every mortgage, every lease, every poster you're going to nail to a tree has to have a stamp on it.
- You had to go to a British government office in the colonies and buy the King's stamp.
- Question: How did the king know if every piece of paper in your possession had the king's image on it?
- Answer: The parliment enacted the Writs of Assistance Act. What the heck did that do?
- That let British soldiers write their own search warrants.
- It authorized them to authorize themselves to enter any home, any building, any dwelling
- obstensibly for the purpose of looking for the stamps.
- Of course while they were there
- they frequently helped themselves to what they wanted
- including the home itself.
- We fought a revolution.
- We won the revolution.
- [APPLAUSE]
- We wrote a constitution.
- But before we wrote it, we had an argument.
- The argument was in Philadelphia in 1787
- where it was hotter than it is here in Galveston today.
- And the argument was this.
- Where do our freedoms come from?
- There was, even in Philadelphia in 1787, a big government crowd.
- You know their names.
- Alexander Hamilton.
- John Adams.
- These guys argued that our freedoms come from the government.
- That the government is the one who says we can speak freely
- and travel freely and worship as we wish
- and as long as the government says that
- and the government is compelled to say that, we're safe.
- Jefferson, who wasn't there, but Madison who was
- made the argument that our freedoms come from our humanity.
- Not from the government.
- That as God created us in His image and likeness
- freedom is our birthright.
- It is as natural to us as the fingers on the ends of our hands
- or the nose in the middle of our face.
- [APPLAUSE]
- The argument that freedom is our birthright was not a new one.
- Jefferson had made the same argument 12 years earlier
- when he wrote in The Declaration of Independence
- that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.
- And among these is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
- When he wrote that,
- and when every single delegate to the Constitutional Congress pledged their lives, fortunes,
- and sacred honors to support that,
- he wedded the American soul to the concept of natural rights.
- That our right to think as we wish,
- to say what we think,
- to publish what we say.
- The right to worship as we see fit.
- The right to protect ourselves, even against the government.
- [APPLAUSE]
- Just as an aside, do you know what that means?
- That means if the state of Texas
- or the state of New Hampshire
- authorizes you to carry a gun,
- you can carry that gun no matter who walks into that room.
- [APPLAUSE]
- I don't even know that kid's name but he's a new American hero.
- Back to the litany of rights.
- The most unique American right after the right to life
- is the right to be left alone.
- [APPLAUSE]
- Thus the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution says
- the government can't write it's own search warrants
- Can't knock on your door.
- Can't break it down.
- Can't arrest you.
- Can't take your property.
- Can't look at your personal papers, effects or things,
- unless they present real evidence of real crime to a judge.
- So the constitution puts a neutral judge between the government and the government's target,
- no matter how guilty is the target.
- No matter how threatening is the target.
- No matter how feared is the target.
- No matter how widespread is the belief of the guilt of the target.
- Any government and every government that wants to get to that target
- must first go to a judge and present evidence of probable cause.
- [APPLAUSE]
- That's what the law used to be.
- Until a president from the Lone Star State
- persuaded the supposedly freedom loving Republican party
- that it could do away with the 4th Amendment.
- Remember the Writs of Assistance Act?
- We fought against a king when his soldiers knocked on our doors
- with self-written search warrants.
- The most abomidable piece of legislation since the Alien and Sedition Act,
- which made it a crime to criticize everybody in the government but the Vice President
- because the Vice President was Thomas Jefferson who welcomed their criticism,
- but the most abomidable piece of contempory legislation is the Patriot Act.
- [APPLAUSE]
- You think that the 4th Amendment protects you? Look again.
- The Patriot Act lets federal agents write their own search warrants.
- And the Patriot Act makes it a felony for the recipient of those search warrants to tell anyone.
- Let me get this straight.
- What part of "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,"
- What part of "The People shall be secure in their persons, places, houses and things," does Congress not understand?
- [APPLAUSE]
- The Bush administration prosecuted an 86 year old librarian
- because the FBI served her with a self-written search warrant
- to find out who had borrowed books from a public library,
- and she told her 74 year old assistant.
- So they prosecuted her for speaking.
- They have made it a crime to tell the truth.
- Question in an open courtroom to the 86 year old lady under oath:
- "Did you receive a self-written search warrant?
- If she answers yes and tells the truth she goes to jail for 5 years for speaking the truth.
- That's the nature, the incidious nature, the damnable nature of this piece of legislation
- that the Congress has imposed on us
- and which regretably, my dear friends, is still the law today.
- None of them read it.
- I spoke to a group of members of Congress in another state
- not far from here. I don't even want to tell you who it is.
- And some of them came up to me afterwards and said, "Well, we voted for this thing,
- but we didn't know that it let federal agents write their own search warrants,
- or that it made it a crime for people to tell anyone."
- So I asked the question that you all know the answer to.
- "Did you read it?" "No, of course not."
- In the case of the Patriot Act, they actually have an excuse for not reading it.
- Because the Republican leadership in the House took this 315 page piece of legislation
- which I have read 3 times and which takes 20 hours to read
- and put it on the House intranet,
- the internal internet for House members and their senior staff, for 15 minutes before it was time to vote.
- The attorney general told the House of Representatives
- that there was a terrorist behind every bedbug and under every tree
- and next to every toilet, and we have to sort of,
- can't worry about these fine points of the Constitution.
- We need these powers to go after these people now!
- There have been 6 prosecutions under the Patriot Act.
- 3 have been for pornography, 2 have been for corruption
- and 1 was the old librarian from Bridgeport.
- Has any of that made you safe?
- Of course not!
- But it has made you less free.
- Now this did not start with George W. Bush.
- It started with John Adams.
- The Alien and Sedition Act. Think about it.
- The very same generation and in many cases the very same human beings
- that wrote, "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,"
- just 9 years later enacted legislation that authorized the punishment of speech.
- Jefferson allowed the statute to expire.
- But human beings were put in real jails
- hotter than this room we're in today
- because they dared to criticize the president.
- And several of them were put in jails for criticizing the President's enormous waistline.
- When Jefferson was president,
- he caused the Congress to enact legislation which proported to pay them back for their time in jail.
- That's how odious he found it.
- But this idea that the American republic,
- the American constitutional form of government
- is the greatest force for good in the Western world
- only makes sense if the guarantees in the constitution are real guarantees.
- And if the people we elect to the government really believe this,
- When I was on the bench and lawyers would come before me from the government,
- whether they were prosecutors in criminal cases or whether it was a civil case where somebody sued the government
- because a policeman ran them over or they fell on the sidewalk
- I can't remember the government asking me to enforce the Constitution.
- The government asks judges to avoid and evade the Constitution
- because the government hates freedom.
- Freedom is an obstacle to the government's aquisition of power.
- And that's all the government wants.
- [APPLAUSE]
- I look around this room and I see so many bright and happy faces
- that are happy that we are part of this crusade.
- In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its maximum hour of danger.
- YOU ARE THAT GENERATION!
- THIS IS THAT HOUR!
- NOW IS THAT TIME!
- [APPLAUSE]
- Whenever you deal with the government,
- whenever you deal with the government, take your cell phone.
- and make sure it has a camera,
- because the camera is the new gun.
- The same government that fears freedom fears the disinfectant of the light of day.
- And that's what the camera does to them!
- [APPLAUSE]
- Occasionally there are some of my former colleagues
- who wear black robes who have done the right thing.
- When the Bush administration said we can take people to Cuba
- because we don't have to obey the constitution or the treaties
- or the laws. We can torture them and best of all we don't have to worry about those pesky federal judges
- The Supreme Court said by a vote of 8 to 1 that you can't.
- When the Congress enacted legislation that said if the president declares you an enemy combatant
- you don't have the right to habeas corpus, meaning you can't force the government to come before a neutral judge
- and justify its unlawful confinement of you and the Supreme Court by a vote of 5 to 4 said, "You can't."
- When the president said he could lock up Americans and throw away the key,
- because they were too dangerous to talk to their parents or spouses, their lawyers, or other prisoners,
- but he could keep them in jail for as long as he wanted
- without even charging them with a crime, by a vote of 6-3 the Supreme Court said, "You can't."
- In fact, every single time that people took the Bush administration
- to the Supreme Court over its so-called War on Terror, the government lost and freedom won.
- [APPLAUSE]
- I remember having a debate with one of my more....
- irritable colleagues, and he said to me, "What is your problem with this, uh Patriot Act?
- "And what's your problem with Gitmo?"
- I looked at him and I said, "You know, you like all this stuff."
- Bush was president at the time.
- "You like all this stuff because you trust the president."
- "What happens when these powers are passed on to a President that you don't trust?"
- And he looked at me and he said "Well, when I am sent to Gitmo, will you come to visit me?"
- And I said, "Bill," [LAUGHTER]
- And I said, "Bill, no!" [LAUGHTER]
- Thomas Moore, one of my heroes, my personal patron saint, the patron saint of lawyers,
- was arguing on his own behalf in his own trial, which we all know he lost, for treason.
- The act of treason, the alleged act of treason,
- was the refusal to agree that the king is the head of the church on earth.
- That was the act of treason.
- And Moore, in presenting his closing argument to the jury, said to them, "Some men say
- the earth is flat, and some men say it is round. But if it is flat, can the king's command make it round?"
- "And if it is round, can a law of parliment make it flat?"
- He was of course, appealing to the common sense of his jurors.
- He was also appealing to their understanding of the natural law.
- That our rights are ours, by virtue of our humanity.
- That God has given order to certain events in the world and there are things that the government can't change.
- And if our rights come from our humanity, then no law, no proclamation no executive order,
- no command, no piece of legislation that no one has read but the printer who put it on paper,
- can take those rights away.
- [APPLAUSE]
- In World War I Woodrow Wilson and the progressives arrested people that they called anarchists.
- They were mostly Eastern European Jews from Boston to Baltimore
- who spoke...spoke against the war.
- And they enacted legislation which is still called law today called The Espionage Act of 1917
- which makes it a crime to speak against the government's war effort.
- When the New York Times, of which I'm not particulary fond but never the less
- revealed the government was spying on people without warrants
- something that the Attorney General under oath a year before had denied they were doing,
- he threatened them. He threatened to prosecute them under the Espionage Act.
- Imagine that! The government was going to prosecute some newspaper for speaking the truth
- on the basis of a 1917 law written in an era of hysteria against Eastern European Jews.
- FDR locked up 150,000 Japanese-Americans
- and in New Jersey 10,000 Italian-Americans,
- not because they did or said anything but because they belonged to a racial or ethnic group that he feared.
- That he feared that they might not be loyal.
- They were as American as he was. In fact, they were more American than he was!
- [APPLAUSE]
- And of course we know that Abraham Lincoln slaughtered 600,000 Americans.
- His troops raped women, and robbed banks,
- Destroyed courthouses. Burnt towns.
- And they all got away with it.
- All in the name of big government. Of order. Of safety.
- I hear the devil coming from around the tree,
- And the Devil stopped to talk to me.
- And the devil said, "Give me your liberty, and I'll keep you safe."
- Don't ever let anyone make that diabolical bargain in your behalf.
- [APPLAUSE]
- There is one fear, there is one fear that is a good fear.
- And Jefferson reminded us of it.
- When the people fear the government, that is tyranny.
- When the government fears the people, that is liberty!
- God bless you! [APPLAUSE]


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