administration, to the people of the uae, the people of bahrain, the people of israel. may this be a long-lasting peace on which the whole region can build. thank you for taking the time, sir. >> thank you. have a good day. >> thank you. you're watching c-span3. your un filtered view of government created by america's cable television companies as a public service and brought to you today by your television provider. coming up this afternoon a senate panel will examine whether google search engine favors certain groups while censoring others. we'll have live coverage of this hearing starting at 2:30 eastern. joining us from his home in northern virginia is rick tyler,

longtime republican strategist and msnbc political analyst and out with new book "still right." thank you for being with us. >> it's an honor to be with you. thank you for having me. >> what's the message in the book? >> i think i wrote it for two reasons and two different audiences. let's say to left and right audience, i wrote it for the left because i often hear conservativism denigrated as a philosophy. and part of that is -- or a large part is a misunderstanding of what conservativism is. i want to create a rational defense of conservatism as a

philosophy. because progressivism as progressive forms of government is a rationing governing philosophy. my philosophy is conservatism. and i guess if i think about it, i wrote it for the right -- for the exact same reasons because i hear a lot of people pronouncing policies often repeated by the president and it gets labeled as conservatism. trade is one of the most profound ones to look at. to me it's like watching somebody tear into raw flesh and

eat it and declare themselves a vegan. it doesn't make sense. and so i think there's -- both on the left and the right, a misunderstanding about what a conservative philosophy is and that's why i wrote the book. >> to that point, let me begin our conversation where you actually conclude in the book that i think kind of frames your point. you say the following quote, conservatives were once the unwanted foster children of the republican party that eventually gained a seat at the table under reagan. after reagan, conservatives sat alone in the far corner in campaigns. today you write we're no longer invited to family dinners. our chairs are occupied by imposters posing as conservatives. clearly you're talking about the trump administration. so explain. >> i'm also talking about ideology because i've been beat up a little bit about the foster children. my heart goes out to foster children. i'm not talking about them.

let me set that aside. con v conservatism has been the stepchild ideology of political parties. and conservatism was not welcome for a long time. all the people who often today declare ronald reagan as a great president and wonderful conservative are the same people who tried to run him out of the party and wanted gerald ford to be the president, which he was in '76. and reagan wins in 1980 and brings conservatism to the table. at the time it would still exist, the heritage foundation. the heritage foundation was really the first conservative think tank in washington and it began to feed ideas into the reagan campaign. when reagan got elected, all of the scholars in the heritage foundation and many more were probably moved into the administration. so they weren't just on the

sidelines and saying, could you consider, they were setting policy. and reagan gave conservatism a happy face in contrast to the barry goldwater who gave conservatism an unhappy face. and i think in order to track people to your philosophy, your governing philosophy, it ought to come from a happy place, right? and reagan did that. and i point out reagan far too much in the book, i'll admit, because, steve, i wanted to point to anybody else, but i really couldn't. because i don't think anybody encapsulated what a conservative philosophy was and what its attitude was better than reagan. did reagan have flaws? sure. every leader does. now conservatism is just absent from the discussion. and worse to me is the people at

the table, meaning those in power, are not conservative yet they call themselves conservative and the people who adhere to their policies and adhere to them simply because they're pronounced by this current administration as opposed to testing it against philosophy. >> you also discuss some of the big issues that have shaped the conservative movement over the last 50 to 60 years. first on trade, you write the following, the response of the trump administration has been to impose tariffs and plenty of them. their ultimate goal is not free trade but protectionism. why must the stupidity of one nation become our own stupidity? can you elaborate? >> sure. let me start with the biggest aspect which is the human being

is created to be creative. that's what -- at our core, to be human is to be creative. and means -- many people think it's creative and he's talking about art and music and, yes, i am. but i'm also talking about companies, products and services that people provide. through their own, you know, passion, blood, sweat and tears to create. and they have a right, human beings do, to take their talent and to try to sell it or market it to as many people as possible. when the government says, oh, that's wonderful that you created a company and you want to sell your products but we're not going to buy your products because we have, you know, a political agenda or we're trying to, you know, protect our own companies here in our country. i'll give you a few examples. in the 1970s we had severe restrictions on auto imports and

if anybody can remember what the 1970s vehicles were, they were great cars like the gremlin or the pacer, or the ford pinto. these were embarrassing vehicles. when the japanese got a foothold in america, people started buying their cars because they wanted to. in the same way, protectionism works by for instance the gm bailout. and the reason i was against the gm bailout, did it save jobs? temporarily? but the plant in ohio didn't close because of unfair trade practices and labor laws, prime primarily it closed because americans stopped by the chevy cruze. it's billions and millions of personal, individual consumer transactions that are done volunteerly. nobody forces anybody to buy anything. you go and say i want to go out

and buy a pickup truck. well, president trump just -- one of his trade agreements was with south korea. the kours agreement. it continued one thing, which i found was interesting, americans are not allowed to buy south korean pickup trucks. you won't see any south korean pickup trucks on the roads in america because they're essentially banned until 2032. and i thought, what if i wanted to buy a pickup truck? what if it's that the one truck i need but i'm not allowed to buy it because the government said you can't buy that truck because we're trying to protect the auto industry. instead of everybody trying to protect which leads to fewer choices, higher prices, shortages, let the free market work and let individuals have

the freedom to both buy and to sell. by the way, on the consumer side, it doesn't get talked about very often, but the reason so many products are so readily available and affordable, i'm talking about the products you find on the shelves of walmart or target, all those products are available because of free trade. they're cheap. like the rich, they fly first class, sometimes private jets. they have four ktbs, we'll have to wait, but you can buy these huge television screens for relatively very little. they have cell phones. our standard of living is so much better than so many other countries because we're able to buy products that are on the free market a lot less expensively than we otherwise would and they're higher quality because people compete with each

other to try to outdo their competitors. >> let me go to the other issue that you frame with regard to the u.s. supreme court. robert bork was nominated ronald reagan. you say on the supreme court, quote, robert bork was not on trial. it was a referendum on constitutional original. two reasons account for the supreme court amassing its power, its legislation powers to itself and second congress's unwillingness to check it. there are two separate points but i wonder if you can connect the two. what's interesting about robert bork. i'm sure you remember who were the chairman of the judiciary committee at that time. it was our vice president biden who is now the democratic nominee for president. he's was on that committee.

about a year earlier they had confirmed ant thony scalia. he sailed through. but they both came from the d.c. circuit court and bork and scalia. and if you look at their judicial temperament and the way they thought, they were originalists. there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between them. yet one got through, almost virtually unanimously, and the other one was defeated. bork was defeated. and if you fast forward to today, barack obama had nominated judge garland and the democrats -- the republicans refused to even give him hearings. and so he was never appointed to the court. he did not become a supreme court justice. and then donald trump had put gorsuch up. if you listen to all of the

rhetoric, depending on which side you're on. garland was horrible, terrible justice. the devil incarnated. when it got to gorsuch, the two sides flipped and i looked at the candidates for the supreme court, they both served in the d.c. circuit, just like bork and scalia. and you know what, other than one decision, they had virtually the same record. if you read their decisions, their temperament, their philosophy, almost identical. there's not a dime's worth of difference between them. he's the devil, he's the devil. he's the greatest thing. it's all nonsense. they're almost the same person. you know, i think garland should have been given a hearing and should have been on the court. but he wasn't. but there really is no difference between them. and what i suggest in the book, actually, is to move to a

ten-person court. just added justice. or take one away. i don't care which. you really want to go to ten. the reason is -- then it would be an even number and it would be a tie. and we always think of, someone has to win. someone has to win so i can't be a tie. what happens to ties? well here's what happens to ties. ties go back to the lower court. and there's standing -- whatever they had ruled previously would stand. and the reason i think that's important is because it -- i think it diminishes the power of the court. because i think the court has gotten too powerful. as i say, because congress has given a lot of its power way to not only the executive branch, for political cover, but they've done it for the court too. and i think the court would be much more careful to take cases if they had to get 6-4 decisions

all the time as opposed to 5-4 decisions. and you wouldn't have one judge deciding obamacare and all these other decisions that are coming down to one judge. i don't like that. i want it to be two judges. i think they'll be more careful about taking cases from lower courts where they couldn't get 6-4 decisions. there would be a lot more persuasiveness on the court. you had a second part of the question, steve, and it's escaped me. >> you answered it, in terms of the role of the court and what congress -- the authority congress has given to the supreme court. we're dividing our phone lines between those who support the biden/harris ticket and those who support the trump/pence

ticket. today we welcome cole. is conservatism good for america, do you think? >> is conservatism good for america? >> yeah, that's -- >> i think so. although we say conservatism, but i don't think there's been a lot of -- we have conservative philosophies when reagan was in there, but before reagan, you know, democrats and -- there wasn't a lot of -- there weren't a lot of conservatives in power. there still aren't. people say, i'll give you health care as a reason they say, people on the progressive side will say we need -- you know, we need single payer. we need a government-run or based health care system, much like the uk has and other countries in europe. and because they relate it to

profit, these corporations they have terrible profit. and i explained in the book that conservatism is not corporatism. it gets mixed up. it isn't the idea that congress passed laws that favor one company over the other. that's called the picking the winners and losers. conservatism doesn't solve every problem. if we went -- for instance in areas of health care, you can't have a totally free market system. it has to be regulation. and that's what conservatism is. it's ordered liberty. if you take away the order, you get liberty which is great. but that -- that's more like -- >> i want to thank ranking member klobuchar and her staff for working closely with me and my office as we prepared for today and i also want to thank

our chairman, the chairman of the full senate judiciary committee, senator graham, for his support of this hearing. after i and then senator klobuchar giving our opening remarks, we'll hear from two panels of witnesses with questions from members of the subcommittee. we have something interesting to deal with in the senate and every time they call votes, when they call votes during a subcommittee hearing, we're at their mercy. senator klobuchar and i have both cast our votes on the first of a series of three or four. at some point, we're going to have to pause or tag team as we allow other members to sit in for us, just don't be alarmed if that happens. the focus of today's hearing is google's online advertising business. whether it's a monopolyist and

whether it might have engaged in any conduct that harms competition and harms consumers. but before we go into that, i want to say just a few things about antitrust policy more broadly. i've been a member of the subcommittee ever since 2011 when i first arrived in the senate and i've chaired the subcommittee for almost six years. over that time as the public debate surrounding antitrust policy and enforcement has grown and in some cases evolved, so too has the gulf between the opposing sides. at one extreme are those who would rather that we have no antitrust laws at all. and the alternative, they advocate for an enforcement policy that is overly differential, speculative efficiencies and quick to dismiss evidence of competitive harm whenever it might conflict with unpro