sustainable fashion and i see it because all of these designers , they want to incorporate and they want to have sustainbility embedded in their design. looking at innovation. the higg index and there's an sustainable apparel coalition the represents about 85% of the world's apparel manufacturers that are all coming together to join forces and look at how can we measure those impacts in the supply chain? as marilyn spoke to, we have to use -- look at the resources we're using. whether it's cradle to cradle launching their positive project to fair trade u.s.a. or eucalyptus. it's grown without water and all the bi-products we use efficiently.

whether it's recycled poly or innovative fibers that are out there right now there are many , solutions and many more coming. when you look at bangladesh and what happened in april of 2013 of course, 1,133 pool lost their -- people lost their lives in a single day because of the working conditions in the fashion industry -- lack thereof, should say. but one of the encouraging days of consumer motivation is that this year on april 24th, 2014, 58 countries around the world came together to start fashion revolution day, that is honoring these victims. and i'll end by saying that this isn't a sign of what's to come in terms of consumer engagement. fashion as it was is not sustainable. we have to create a new fashion industry, and engage people to collaborate all over the world

to shift the paradigm. and these are all kinds of websites where you can buy sustainable legal fashion. -- ecofashion. there's more being born constantly and together we can create a new reality in fashion. so that's mine. [applause] >> no, no, i want you to go ahead. i just want to say one thing is that women in the global north command 80% of all the purchases made. so it's up to us to make the right choices or not to choose at all. eric? >> we're not going to have time for me to do slides today because i been watching the 15 minute -- i'll just pick up where my esteemed panel members left me. used all my good statistics, all my good slides, and solutions. i'll tell you a brief reason, my story. i'm an entrepreneur. i have decided to be the change as a young kid in the world and make a difference in my life.

through maybe just my very short story story you can see the , work that i'm trying to do to the overconsumption which i represent the beverage industry in the world. and we are probably one of the greatest overconsumers here in america. there's no need why people need to drink 100 million bottles of soda. there's no reason. it's actually insanity. listening to all the statistics and the data and the topics that are brought up here in this panel, it almost just seems insane that this world allows us to go along. it's just insanity. we see it in the beverage business, it's only going to change not from the people in coca-cola or pepsi that are afraid to make these decisions. it's going to change from the consumer demanding it and the retailers supporting the demand. briefly how i got into this from an authentic upbringing. i was born in a hippie organic house. we had a vegetable garden.

i learned that pesticides and herbicides are not good for your body. we were vegetarians. we did need meade, we didn't believe in factory farming. we were raised in renewable energy ecofriendly household. my dad put three solar panels on the roof. they called the police on us. the next month he showed us how we saved 30%. and everyone said we should do that to. how do we do it? as the young system, these were believe systems instilled in me, and i said some day i'm going to be in a business that makes a change in the world. i figured it could take on the coke, the pepsis and maybe be the difference taboo there's somebody should be themselves. when we started, we were the first organic soda company in america. we had great success the first for years because of that. then we became a fair trade certified company. we care about the farmers in the land.

the next big initiative was really the passion that goes back to jimmy carter. and what he did is, we work with native energy in 2007 to be the very first public company in america to offset carbon emissions. that was important because people thought that was nuts. i had people at coca-cola i would see a trade show say, kid, what are you doing? this makes no sense. who cares about that? and i would say i care about it. we can use all of our bottles to tell a story about carbon offsets. and the good we are doing in the world. i use the beverage business as of our overconsumption, i use those products to tell my story. that story is now out in the world 10 years later. we continue to tell our story of giving back and being a conscience citizen. we see oftentimes now that our consumers start making changes in their household because they like our brand. they love our brand.

the label we are doing. we start to see other young brands that are asking is how do we do it and they are learning to become a native energy type of business model organic trade. it is exciting to be here, it is an amazing room of santee and beings -- sentient beings that are based on the energy that is a part of our universe and the fact that we can set your together as balls of energy and talk about the good that we can do in the world and using renewable energy, this is an amazing time and we should be proud of ourselves. namaste, and thank you for having us. [applause] >> so we are over here but i want to close with a couple of things. one is that i think for americans, it is just say no. number two i want to give you a fact. you can't see this, but it's how many earths are needed to provide the level of consumption

where we are today. for the usa, it's five and a half earths. for the u.k., it's three in a quarters. for france, three, germany, 2.5 russia, 2.5. brazil, too, for china, it's almost one. but that is going to change. none of this is sustainable, it is only going to come from us by saying no. and we can also boycott. that's the radical position. boycott. we did that against tuna that was catching dolphins. and guess what? they changed a lot of their practices because women set of not buying them. i don't be responsible for killing dalton's -- dolphins. the deeper we go into the issues women, vote with your dollars. thank you. [applause]

>> tonight on c-span, the first of three nights looking back on public figures who died in 2014. at 8:00 eastern, the funeral service for the late washington post editor ben bradley. he died in october at age 93. one of the speakers at the funeral was carl bernstein, who talked about white house efforts to get the washington post to kill one of its stories on watergate. >> on september 23, 1972, about 9:00 p.m., i reached john mitchell, president nixon's former campaign manager by phone. about a story we were running. he said he and controlled a secret fund for over cover operations such as watergate. mitchell was quite upset. he responded jesus several

times. he proceeded to threaten an important private part of captain grams anatomy, which he said would get caught in a big fat, wringer if the post printed the story. he also said we are going to do a story on all of you. and he hung up the phone. i called been at home. -- ben at home. would what i did not follow the chain of command. ben interrogated me, had mitchell been drinking? i couldn't tell. did i properly identify myself? yes. did i have good notes? yes. ok, ben said, put in all of mitchell's comments in the paper , but leave out mrs. graham's -- [laughter] tell the desk it's ok, he said. a top official of the nixon campaign called me a few minutes later to make an appeal that mitchell had been caught in an

unguarded moment. he had been a cabinet member and so forth. he doesn't want to show up in the paper like that. the official then called bradlee at home to repeat the appeal. bradlee recalled saying it just boils down to this question, mr. moore, of whether mr. mitchell said it or not and whether "the washington post" reporter identified himself as a reporter and if he did that, all my requisites have been satisfied. mitchell's comments stayed in the paper. >> you can see all of ben bradley's funeral service tonight on c-span at 8:00 eastern. in addition to carl bernstein, speakers included tom brokaw and mr. bradley's children. tonight on the communicators amy mitchell of the pew research center on political

polarization, and where people get their news. >> look at facebook in particular, they are still the largest and the outlet that has the greatest percentage of the american public using it in terms of official sites here in. about half of our respondents says they got political news from facebook in the last week. that put social media, facebook in particular, on par with local television and some of the other top outlets among 89% of the population. it clearly does play a role in people's environment, how they are learning, and who they communicate with very but we found we broke down the differences ideologically was that the conservatives were likely to have circles of friends and key political posts that are more aligned with their own political thinking. more so than those that are mixed, and more so then consistent liberals. consistent liberals are much more likely to be -- to defriend

someone because of their political views. >> tonight invaded by eastern on the communicators on c-span2. >> the new congress in january will see the largest house gop majority since the 1928 elections with 247 republicans. republicans take the senate majority with 54 seats to 44 for the democrats and two independents who caucus with the democrats. the 114th congress will have members who served in the military, six fewer than the outgoing congress. in the house, 81 veterans come in the senate, 21 veterans. in the house, 23 veterans served in the wars in iraq worth in a stem -- or afghanistan, with three incoming senators having served in iraq or afghanistan. the group connecticut like republicans and conservatives

posted a discussion on crime gun control, and race. it was cohosted by the national rifle association. this is one hour 15 minutes. >> you will need to press that button and turn the mics on, so the light turns green and you know they are on. we are going to start right away, and we are going to get in to and talk with or hear from professor ken blackwell. he is a member of the board of directors of the nra. he is going to let him tell you a little bit about himself, and explain to you where the nra is now, and a little bit about their history what they are doing. >> thank you, regina. it is my pleasure to be with you all today. and to be a member of such a distinguished panel.

i haven't a mayor of a major u.s. city, cincinnati, ohio. an undersecretary at the u.s. department of housing and urban development under the leadership of my good friend, the late jack cap. -- kemp. and i served for u.s. ambassador to the united nations a charge of the human rights portfolio and representative to the un's human rights commission. i am a sign of a veteran -- son of a veteran who defended the constitution of the united states, and brought his family up in appreciation of the united states, and in full understanding of the history of black people and exercising their right to bear arms and to defend themselves.

whether that was and is -- whether that was as an associate member of deacons of defense because of his colleagues who came back from world war ii who started the deacons of defense in the south or as a concerned husband and father who wanted to make sure that he was always able to protect his family against harm. well, he's a common sense fellow and he basically raised us with an appreciation of the constitution and the declaration. but he was fond of the second paragraph of the declaration of independence. as you remember, we hold these truths to be self-evident. he was fond of saying that is a very sophisticated way of saying any knucklehead should be able to get this. [laughter] we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. what he said is that we're not all equal in height, weight, and intelligence. we're not all equal in skin

color. but we're all equal in human dignity and we're all accountable to god. we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. which means that our basic most fundamental human rights are not grants from government. they're gifts from god. and that among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. he was always quick to underscore that it was very difficult to pursue happiness or to enjoy liberty if you're dead. and that the first obligation of an individual, a fundamental right was the right of self-protection and to protect your family and property. and so this was one simple man's understanding -- hard-working man and god-fearing man's understanding of natural law and natural right that were

encompassed in the declaration of independence, but also protected by the constitution of the united states. and as one who had gone to world war ii to defend that constitution and all the blessings that it bestows on those of us who were blessed to be raised and be citizens of this country, it gives me great pleasure to work with an organization that, since 1871, has defended our constitutional right to self-protection and the right to bear arms. ladies and gentlemen, as a former mayor, i know that the first obligation of elected leaders of a city is to provide a safe environment. i also know from working with budgets that what we are now experiencing in city after city, county after county, are budgets that are so tight that it has

actually reduced personnel on the street and reduced response time. and whether it's sheriff david clark in milwaukee or james craig in detroit, as police chief, they understand that when you have situations where police response time is 20, 30, 45 minutes, all harm can be done to you and your family. therefore, you have a fundamental right if you so choose to protect yourself. to protect your property and to protect your family. and no government at any level has the right to abridge that natural right that we have. and so as the chairman of the grass root development committee of the n.r.a., one of america's first civil rights organizations, and one that has

been on the frontlines in community after community, whether it is in washington, d.c., or chicago, illinois, we have been on the frontline of defending that fundamental natural right and will continue to do so as champions of freedom. and we invite neighborhood after neighborhood, family after family, individual defenders of freedom, to join us in their fight where we understand that there's no division in terms of the appreciation of that right on the basis of color or class or anything. that is your natural right. thank you. >> thank you, professor. [applause] so i want to introduce you to bishop garland hunt, former president of prison fellowship. and also a governor appointee to georgia state pardon and paroles.

and bishop, i believe you're going to give us a perspective on the community and when you deal with the experiences of the transitions of people back into community with high crime. >> well, i came into this was -- my background was in law. i graduated from howard university, undergrad in law school. and being from atlanta, georgia, that was the hub of the civil rights movement and i lived through the end as a young boy watching what was taking place in terms of dr. king's death and my heart to see change. but as i came into the -- my understanding of law and how things were coming about concerned about justice, and as i came closer to the things and my experiences of god, i started asking questions about what really is a good, fair approach to justice? so i went on later on and ran for office. and i didn't win that particular position but the governor appointed me to the parole board for the state of georgia.

and what i didn't know about parole is that it is very interesting as you look at each individual case to determine what -- how long they stay in prison and it might be five years, it could be three but you have to make a decision based on what crime they committed and what the potential is for them to recommit. but when we looked at this these determinations, a large part of it was -- was there a weapon involved in the crime? so it could be a simple drug case that may have been a situation where someone was actually not actually involved in a violent offense. but they happened to have a weapon in the car. or during the process of a -- -- drug exchange, whether they had a concealed weapon with them. so therefore, immediately the crime itself escalated in terms of what the penalty would be. and so even in our determinations for a person for

parole, we had to look at very clearly whether or not there was weapons. as a matter of fact, we -- because we have such a large prison population, we even had examiners that would look over the case and we made our decisions initially by file. and if there was a weapon, it was clearly -- there was a star, an asterisk, and a circle, that says that there was a weapon involved. so at that point, we determined that that was a question about how long they would stay in prison and usually they would stay in a little longer. the point i'm making when you start looking at this, and this is how i like to frame it, it brought me to the place that i realized that what -- we don't need gun control. we need self-control. because the question centers around what people do with the guns. and so i'm looking across the table when a person is on parole, and i find out that we did give them an opportunity to get freedom. and then of course they go out and then they still get themselves involved in some type of melee or something they break conditions of their parole. but then of course they have a weapon. well, you're sure you're going to go right back to prison.

in this particular case here we have another dichotomy. because a parolee or probation -- is even in the vicinity of a gun. you're going back. here you have a different perspective for it. and in a case where we have the families in totally disarray where you have -- in this particular case only one in three black children have a father or two-parent home. where over 70% of those that are born in a black community are born out of wedlock. now we're talking about a problem, of dysfunctionality within the community, about what even life and human life. so with that being the situation, then it's hard for you to have self-respect of your own life. and very difficult to respect the life of other people. and so as a -- as a point of pride and as a point of sometimes turf protection, whatever it might be, bearing a weapon becomes a part of the hip-hop culture. it became a part of the drug

culture. it became a part of violent culture. and even in some cases nonviolent culture. but to have that weapon was not used for a sport or protection. it was used to force their will on somebody else. that's the issue. that we have to face or in this particular talk, we're going to talk a little bit more about this but when you start looking at the inner cities and urban areas, how do we get the weapons -- and in many cases, illegal weapons, out of the hands of those that are not mature enough to handle it and don't respect life enough to handle it? and then make sure the ones that do have the maturity and are the ones that want to, have the right perspective about the right to bear arms. so that they can do so and they also have the proper education. so those are some of the questions that we raise and one last thing i'll say. one thing that's most important to realize and work with prison fellowship i was not sitting behind a desk. i went before numbers and numbers of inmates to talk with them. and let me tell you something. they look like me and you. they had something in their

life, it may have been a lifestyle. but what i realize is that the prison is not just punitive. but it's also -- should be some rehabilitation. and i'm telling you it's not there. so therefore there has to be some measure of intervention for those guys not to come out and just reoffend. because the best thing they know is when i come out, how can i get a hold of something that's going to help me out? and usually they want to be connected to the same group. and we want to keep them out of what forced them into the same crime that put them back in prison. so in that regard we could talk further about that. >> i'm going to introduce reverend dean nelson. and there are two mics at the table. reverend dean nelson, he is one of the co-founders of the frederick douglass foundation. and so reverend nelson, i'm going to ask you to speak to the faith community.

and when we talk about how we want to have a conversation about crime and guns, is there a push and a pull within the faith community as to whether it should be second amendment rights enforced or should it be something that we are trying to get as many guns as we possibly can off the streets? >> thank you, regina. and again, i'm here. particularly as a chairman for the frederick douglass foundation which i would like to affirm is an organization that believes in righteousness and justice, liberty and virtue. and i'm a licensed minister so talking about this is important. i would appreciate it so much from professor johnson when he talked a little bit about even the civil rights movement and particularly the nonviolent approach that the -- that characterized the civil rights struggle. while you had leaders like dr. king, fred shellsworth and ralph abernathy and men who understand

practicing nonviolence in their public demonstration, you would be hard pressed to find any of them, particularly most of them being from the south, that had an understanding that guns or weapons somehow did not play an important part of the equation for protection of property and protection of family. i grew up in a small town about 60 miles west of washington, d.c. my dad, who was former military, did not have guns in our home growing up. however, my grandfather had enough guns for the whole family and neighbors as well. it wasn't until i was in my 20's, late 20's, that i began to understand a little bit better why my grandfather actually had all of the guns. he wasn't particularly a known hunter in the community.

but as a black man, in rural virginia, who purchased 70 acres of property in the late 1940's, there was no guarantee that the "law" was going to be on his side. by the time -- in our county that there was an incident that had occurred, number one, you couldn't be guaranteed that if that incident occurred on your property, that the person who was the sheriff or part of the law enforcement might not have been the one perpetrating the crime. secondly, even if it wasn't, there was no guarantee in this rural area that the authorities would be there in any time close to helping to protect you. so there was a clear understanding that you needed to protect yourself. that you needed to protect your family. and you needed to protect those 70 acres that he spent a lot of money, time paying for.

i do want to address part of this from -- even from a theological standpoint. because when we typically think about the church, and i'll interrupt myself by saying this, i grew up in the washington, d.c. area and i can say just in d.c. and just outside of d.c. i have ministry friends who will be on a sunday morning in their booth will have a pistol. they'll have a gun on sunday morning. and if you are pastoring in southeast d.c., you might understand why somebody might need that. but at the same time i have well meaning, committed pastors who are in the same area, just outside of baltimore, who are vigorously involved in gun buyback programs. because they feel like that they somehow want to do something within their community to make a difference.

and i think that from a biblical standpoint we understand that number one, government is instituted by god. we are not anarchists, we believe that. that's a biblical principle. we also understand that even from a new testament context, it is important. to protect them before the crucifixion of jesus christ, so if you look in luke chapter 22, you will see that. sometimes today, we have perceptions that are not rooted in our history, perceptions that may not even be grounded in biblical theology, and it is my pleasure to be a part of this wonderful panel today to help move this discussion along as it relates to guns, crime and race

in our community. thank you so much. >> regina, may i ask professor johnson to expand on the deacons? the deacons of defense? >> yes, it is part of the book that i move through. as you were mentioning, your father being emblematic of the deacons. so the deacons unfold in the south in a couple of towns in louisiana, and they grow up almost organically so there were a variety of branches that were loosely affiliated in places in louisiana but this is

with one of the chapters. mentioning the difficulty in relying on it. and bob and jackie hicks it and i forget the name of the town were hosting civil rights workers from the north, a group of kids from the university of wisconsin, and these were all sort of pacifist idealists and when they arrive in town, some of the local terrorist organizations basically were just good old folks. they were unhappy that the young white kids were staying at the home of the hicks and there is firebombing and a variety of things and the police officer shows up and says, well, i am not sure i can reject you. i cannot nursemaid you. you ought to get these kids out

of here, and maybe you ought to leave town, as well. the response was the kids were disappointed in the local police establishment but bob and jackie hicks were not, and bob and jackie hicks and their neighbors, after getting this statement from police they said we had better get busy. they send the kids away, anticipating violence that night. they had a local man from the community, round and when the fire bombers came later that night, they were surprised, not just by jackie and bob hicks fire and back on them, and there is also a photo of bob hicks after the event in the book, but they were also surprised by seven or eight men from the surrounding community you had positioned themselves around the house and also fired back at the fire bombers, and there is more detail, and i cannot be more colorful about it describing it here but you see in the book and there is also a wonderful book by lance hill, a professor

at lsu. it fully chronicles the deacons of defense. the reason i talk about this episode is that after this event, bob and jackie hicks said, well, maybe we ought to get a little more organized, so it went from this sort of organic response, neighbors coming to help neighbors to a more organized and continuous efforts, and by the end of the run of the deacons of defense -- there are claims there were hundreds of chapters to route the south, and this is one of the under acknowledged stories although maybe some of you remember that forest whitaker a couple of years ago starred in a movie about the deacons of defense. that is not a bad depiction of the story. and this was one slice of a very, very large and dynamic kind of phenomenon, so people who were not organized were engaged in a basic act of self-defense and it is

something that we owe paying attention to create we barely know their names. >> and the reason i really wanted to, professor johnson, to underscore this is that most people do not appreciate that the first gun-control laws were embedded. it actually kept it out of the hands of free slaves. and i would just say to my friends who still want to take guns away and you want to penalize folks like what we saw in the video, is that one of the things that social scientists have understood for a long time

and so you can appreciate it, reverent, frederick douglass said he who is what -- whooped easiest is whooped the most often. those who do this not only loved darkness but look for weakness and what we have learned from chicago, the homes in cincinnati when you strip and make defenseless people in those housing projects, they became the most targeted victims of these communities. when they are allowed to protect themselves, as law-abiding citizens, what they realized is that their victimhood vanished. and that is what i hope people begin to understand.

this is not anecdotal. this is the statistics of the fbi contrary to the mainstream media advocacy and depiction, what has happened in this country where you have had concealed carry crime has dropped. we were just talking about something that was read recently that validated that. we do not have to fight on conjecture, but with conjecture or anecdotal stories, the fbi will now tell you that that is the case. >> this dichotomy and one of the things i am sticking with is we are going to have to do something to help the young people who do not carry the understanding of what to do with a weapon, and, in fact, if they

are already having problems, this was also a juvenile justice system for georgia, and people bouncing around, they will graduate to the adult system, and in that regard weapons were a part of that. 14, 15, or 16 years old. again, most of those probably were give eagle weapons so nobody taught them the right way to use it, but understand they do not even understand the right way of dealing with one another so if you do not know how to deal with one another and respect their property, then you are certainly not going to know how to utilize the gun appropriately. you may have heard about chicago, for instance. turning the fourth of july weekend, there was like 82 shootings in chicago, 16 people killed, and, of course, that

brought national attention to gun violence. 500 murders, and at the time of this writing that came in july there were about 40 murders at that time, but look at this dichotomy. in the same area, chicago's crime rate, listen to this, drops with concealed weapons because what happened is illinois started granting concealed weapon carry, and within a year, chicago arrest records declined by 20% as relates to robbery, because of others having concealed weapons. and the bottom line with that, they were not as quick to hold you up if they felt he carried a weapon. a second thought there.

so if you're going to break into somebody's home, of course that does make a difference. but for us, we cannot be so conservative that we are conservative about the need, and people who do not have weapons on both sides, and both do not care. either one of them has any care for life. one of the most popular tattoos in prison were the teardrop tattoos, and that represented the lives that were taken, and they added teardrops based on lives taken so you have to realize this is a serious problem. gun control is not what we are looking at. of course, being in the ministry also there has to be some kind

of male interaction in their life that can represent interaction. somebody has to care. so it is not just based on a law or the absence of law. this is long before they get into the prison system. [applause] our heart goes out for him. it is for all of us who would be considered conservative. what can we do to make this different? >> thank you. we are going to get back to professor johnson, because i want him to talk about the violence and the self-defense, but, reverend nelson, do you have anything else you want to add before we go to the other professor? where is the faith community in

this? we hear about godly mentors self-control, changes of heart. self-defense, public safety. there are so many versions of how we implement that in the community. >> yes, five years ago, i was privileged to do a study with about 200 mostly african-american pastors in urban communities and there were eight areas that we pulled them on, what were the most important social things that were impacting your community and it should not be a surprise that this issue with gang or gun violence actually was in the top three, so it is something that many of them are very much concerned about with partnerships, with organizations like risen fellowship, and there are state initiatives that they have partnered with, but i leave

in many cases, the churches are still way under utilizing particularly in the urban community, because there are so many challenges that they face. it should bring to all of our attention, if i can say it this way, the value of black life. in the same communities, with regard to life, you also have high rates of abortion. and i think the church as a key responsibility in speaking to the value of a life from before one comes into this world, while one is here, and at the end of life. i would encourage it. my work has been involved in engaging pastors, particularly in urban communities to value

life, regardless of whether we are speaking of it in the context of crime and guns or if we are speaking about protecting innocent life. >> thank you. professor johnson, if you will explain that dichotomy? >> a couple of things. one thing that ken said, and i was waiting as ken was talking about the source of the right to arms, one of the things he described was the right to arms as a pre-existing right, and those of you who sort of study this, when the framers in 1780 were establishing the bill of rights they did not think they had right before the constitution existed so i have

had this conversation. one of the things that had me sort of bothered couple of weeks ago was retired justice john paul stevens actually used the word flawed in his criticism of the arguments about the nature and character of the right to arms, and i wrote a blog post about it. what was happening in the 1780's. one of the things that is abundantly clear is that one of the guarantees that was established by the 14th amendment, too girly for the purposes of protecting newly freed slaves, and this was ken's point earlier it was designed and i am going to quote senator jacob howard, who introduced it to the senate, by describing that the great object was to restrain the power of the states

and compel them in all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees, including the right to keep and bear arms, and there are lots of skeptics there about the right to arms, and many of them are those who have a very deep knowledge about the conversation going on during the 18th century, and they will focus on the militia clause of the second amendment and you have to think about the right of the english bill of rights. and i tried to push people about what was happening after the civil war, and the thing that was happening after the civil war was quite clearly an affirmation of the individual nature of the right to arms enshrined in the 14th amendment.

it was not about malicious. it was about recognizing that newly freed slaves, and this is, again, to ken's point they were trying to re-implements lavery under another name, so you could not travel. you could not own various types of property, and you could not essentially, this was important you cannot own firearms or other weapons, and the idea was people could not be controlled. they could not be successfully terrorized if they were armed or at least made the effort. and more difficult. this runs into the modern debate, and we all recognize this. in any violent encounter, there is a window of imminent threat, where the state simply cannot respond, so during the 19th century, the state was a menace. the state did not want to

respond. the state was a threat. but now we can say that state and local governments are not threats, but there is still that window of minutes, maybe long minutes, where police, even well-intentioned police, cannot respond. that concern was what drove the protection for the right to arms and respect for that tradition is something that i find lacking, and it worries me when i see people castigating the right to bear arms in the way that i said earlier. the last one i want to make, just in terms of what the bishop was emphasizing, and that is lots of times when you have these conversations, people say, well now what? if you really care about this, one of the things i tell the young people to look at, and we were talking about this earlier look at what jeffrey is doing in new york on to the label of the harlem children.

it is private. it is intervention that is urging a change in the culture and the results coming out of that enterprise are, i think phenomenal so it is the other part of the conversation that is really important to knowledge that yes, there is this cohort of young men. and some of them may be pretty far gone and there is what they get in the criminal justice system, but lots of them, i think, are in a spot where the interventions you are talking about are an important part of the conversation, and i think we have got to acknowledge it, and i would be happy to ask somebody here who is doing that work. >> with the background, do you want to talk of the bit about the work that is being done with organizations that are moving on reform and helping communities

kind of understand criminal justice but also second amendment? >> right, and let me start by saying that we live in a time when there is a real struggle between the sort of fundamental and historic understanding of the constitution and our national philosophy that was founded on the individual and the supremacy of god. there are forces that are trying to move us towards a national philosophy founded upon the primacy of the collective good and the supremacy of the state and that is a real live contest. if we want to keep our individual freedom we have to move in that direction, but the nra is an organization that is made up of 5 million members and we are a single issue

organization, but within that, that membership base, there are many conservatives that understand what bishop is talking about in terms of our response to the challenges of our local communities so we have formed a group, and i am a signatory of a group called right on crime, and i encourage you to take a look at that on google, right on crime, as an organization, and look at what we are responding to. i have tried to encourage folks to fight this, the fight to preserve our liberty and the national philosophy that has made us an exceptional nation. not a perfect nation. as lincoln said, we are not a perfect nation, but we depend on

citizens to engage in moving us in the right direction, but there are basic frogs. many are taking a direct action. out organizing mobilizing, and helping people get elected to provide leadership, so that is direct action. that is the direct action arena. and the courts are so important. i think we are one justice away from having an activist court. and we are in the transformational process of turning people's hearts, and our young people in prison. some of them have been put into

the system, like this young lady might think if this prosecutor has the way and because she made an honest mistake after doing everything else legally they are talking about putting her into a situation where she does serious time and is a felon and has lost her job. there are a lot of people who have made a mistake, and we cannot let the criminal justice system convert or transform them into hardened criminals. we can get in, and we must reform our system. our group, right on crime, we are looking at ways to go in and transform the penal code. we are looking at how to reduce recidivism. we are looking at how do we do mentoring programs and provide that sort of intervention.

and this is to understand that we can fight in all of those arenas, and we are engaged in all of those arenas, and that is what i encourage all of you to consider and some of us can do better fighting in one arena than another. i am going to leave the hip-hop community. and think old-school in that. we must engage in all of those arenas. if we're going to have a lasting impact. >> and bishop, if you have questions, if you would write them out on your index card, and i have two individuals who will be walking around. pass them out to the isles.

so if you have a question now for the panel. if you need an index card, kind of wave your hand, and they will get one to you, send them down the aisle, and i will start taking questions from the audience in a moment, but, go ahead, bishop. >> yes, i was going to add that this is why it is so important to live our lives based on certain values and principles, and these principles and foundations that you live by, it goes across the board, and it is not allowing ourselves to be painted into a particular corner because there are certain committees you say, well you guys are nothing but gun toting truck riding with a shotgun in the car -- that is what you people are like, but the thing is that they end up painting them in to rate certain corner. are you pro-choice or pro-life.

you guys that are pro-life you do not care nothing about the kids that are being born and do not have the money to support the child and are being born in an area where they cannot take care of them. and the same thing with the guns. it would be ridiculous to think we do not have an inalienable right to have a gun but there is also a concern about the misuse of guns, so i think all across the board, we have to aversive by ourselves and not allow ourselves to represent our own little culture and our own little area that we are used to and begin to see the whole picture. same thing with ferguson. what is the big problem here? the blacks are upset because they feel like the white police officer did not value the man's life, but there was more to it than just that. really we are talking about a

history. these guys are angry. they are upset, and law enforcement is like the bullies on the block, so the facts do not really matter. the kid was killed, but somebody needs to be a bridge there that understands the importance of law enforcement, and when i came on the parole board -- i did not grow up in a house that had a weapon, but when i joined the parole board, we could make decisions on clemency, and that means we were the last up in determining who actually would have the death penalty in the state, so a lot of centralized stories would come our way so they asked, do you want to have a weapon, and so i'm thinking to myself, with a glock how do you shoot one? we carry weapons because we needed to, there were only five of us, and there was a time with

al sharpton, and all of them were throwing my name around on the radio, so i was happy to have a gun. [laughter] let's be clear about that. but at the same time, i was concerned, because i was looking at the documentation about all of the people who have guns and you have used it the wrong way, it was a breakdown, and there will always be felons, and there will always be a problem. interrupting the destiny and purpose for why they were created. >> bishop, and professor, when we talk about right there urban communities, and you mention that even when a prisoner gets back out, even being in the same room with a gun is in violation and he can go back to jail. what about you should have your

rights? you need to have one? and yet but so grandma has one and everyone is going over to her house on sunday to me dinner and now i cannot be near it, because i cannot go to her house. so there is kind of this dichotomy where we want to enforce this, but in some communities, it serves as a wedge to get it serves to separate me from my family, and how do we go back to the community and say, listen. we want to have this communication. we want to figure this out. do we need to change the probation laws? do we want to list that? how do we prevent people from being disenfranchised from their family and their community at the same time encouraging

everyone to enforce their second amendment rights and help with public safety? >> we always understand, and we always knee-jerk. there is a plausible problem. for instance, with sex offenders. somebody may have engaged with a relationship with a for the rest of his life, you cannot live within 1000 feet of a school bus stop, or a playground. it became so bad, it was hard for us when we paroled these guys. of course, we were concerned about those who were serious sex

offenders, but i'm talking about people who had come under that classification who now, under for the rest of his

communities to shape thought and policy as it relates to over criminalization in these communities. i lived in virginia. i helped karen kuchen l.a., who was the former attorney general -- ken [indiscernible] who was the former attorney general. they looked at the rights of criminals, particularly voting rights. can someone who was charged as an adult when they were 17 years old for a felony, which could we that based whole -- that they stole a cell phone that was worth over $200 -- that means

for the rest of your life you don't have the right to vote once you come out of jail. reevaluating some of these commonsense approaches in a society that has become so law based where we, as bishop hunt was saying, knee-jerk reaction we want to create a new law for every problem when creating more and more laws may not really be the problem. i think we have an opportunity to look at over criminalization in communities whether it's regarding drugs or -- i believe that people do a crime, they should be responsible for paying their debt to society, but i think as we look closer at this, we have inadvertently created more problems by having heavy sentencing and over criminalizing people particularly at a young age. and to be honest, those who are talking about it the most right now are those coming from the center right side of the aisle in a meaningful way. those of us from urban communities need to think about this in a serious way, particularly those from

households of faith. as a minister, my first trip to jail was not because i committed a crime. it was because i went to visit young guys who did. i spent a lot of time in court and in jail because i was helping young guys who had made a wrong turn in their lives. i believe that those particularly from the faith community, have an opportunity to reassess and redressed some of these issues from a unique perspective that could give rise to better policy in urban communities. >> earlier this week i heard newt gingrich say something that i thought was right on and courageous to say. he said there are those of us who took a very stringent position in the early 1990's, who basically were locked them up, throw away the key. it is time for us to have the courage to say that we overextended, that we didn't differentiate between the small core of hard-core criminals who should be locked up and for a very long time, and those who made a simple mistake and with

the right intervention can get their lives back on track and be full and productive citizens. for new to say that -- newt to say that is an indicator that more of us need to seriously look at those things. >> the last point i would make about three of the earlier statements, with regard to the problem of what, in the literature, you sometimes see referred to as the problem of a shared access gun. this is not just an issue of

what happens when someone who has just been let out of prison comes to grandma's house, it also is an issue of kids who are alone and unsupervised getting access to firearms, and this runs very differently. in very rural areas were children have access to the family gun and general training with regard to gun access, it runs differently. in urban areas, i think we have to acknowledge that the shared access gun requires a closer look. and the problem is not just with having someone who is a felon in the house, it is also a problem of do you have a young, volatile 14-year-old who knows where grandma's gun is? this is about choice. are you advocating a gun in every house?

i am advocating people have choices about how they respond to deadly threats and there are lots of people out there who on principle choose not to own a gun, but those people who do choose are exercising a right that each and every one of us needs to have. >> i have a bunch of questions here. these two are kind of similar. addressed to professor johnson and professor blackwell. begins of defense history is not taught in light of our gun

grabbing history and events like ferguson. would it be possible to restart beacons of defense. another question to bishop hunt. it was not that long ago that gun safety and marksmanship were taught in public schools and proper respect for what guns can do and a higher percentage of legal gun owners. do you think programs teaching gun safety and marksmanship might assist to direct use away from illegal guns and gangs? >> the answer to the question as to whether or not -- first, i think it is important that as we -- this is why it is important to have curriculums structured and designed at the state and local level. i think we should be much more forceful in our local school districts, demanding that the integral part of the civil rights movement and the fact that these were essentially veterans who had been in world war ii and korea who had in fact defended freedom and our national interests and put their blood on the line and risk their lives -- the answer to the question is that we should constantly never, never, never give up on making them part. the other thing on the internet is a valuable asset for us. there's no reason why we can't get the word of professor

johnson and others and make it internet friendly and push it out there to folks who are homeschooling, push it out to curious minds. we need to take social media and make sure that the more accurate depiction of history is made. look, i shot my first gun -- mr. redd was a world war ii veteran. he was my scoutmaster, troop 75, and he took us out and taught us marksmanship. he taught us gun safety. and i am forever indebted to him for this very reason. my wife's family, who is from west virginia, a coal mining family, shoot the eyes out of an idaho potato at 500 yards. i in fact one their hearts -- won their hearts with my ability to shoot and eat. [laughter] >> i will go to the site in question that talks about the programs in the schools. let me just warn you, my kids graduated from public schools and they succeeded, but i do not

have a whole lot of confidence in these government schools. if a family chooses to have a gun in the home, even if it is a single mom, teach your children how to handle a gun. that means you have to be trained on how to handle a gun. it's going to be part of the understanding that this is in the home for your protection. it's the family's responsibility to teach it. it's more of a community thing. i don't know too many churches that have gun shooting ranges, but i will say that it is important for adults to have access to ranges close by. if you have a gun, somebody is going to use it. take them to arrange. let them get the feel of it because we are talking about

responsibility and how to respect the weapon. that is important if you're going to have a weapon and the home. >> the question was, how do you get this message out there. i am sort of encouraged, partly because i have worked on this issue, but there are two recent books on this question. there is a book called "this nonviolent stuff will get you killed." and there is a book about the mississippi freedom movement called "we will shoot back." the theme is -- i have actually been sort of encouraged. i think it is very hard to get

serious changes in curriculum done at the high school levels but i am encouraged by the internet and the fact that there are all of these networks out there with people who are interested, and maybe you bypass the traditional educational process on this issue. another friend of mine has a book called by passing social media or something like that and he actually elevates the efforts of the concealed carry movement or chronicles how people in the concealed carry movement move past the mainstream media and are utilizing the internet. i think those sorts of conduits are important for this issue as well. [indiscernible] [laughter] >> so these two questions tie in together. i was an elected official and a democrat in a city with majority democrats were -- where gun violence was high. i now live in a conservative town where everyone has a gun and there is no gun violence. why? and then this question.

a recent study in cook county, illinois, shows that high fees serve to deter people who cannot afford the fees. the legalities of trying to

obtain a gun in urban cities is much higher and more difficult than it is in other parts of the state, so maybe that is something the and or a -- the nra helps work with. >> we are. in the mcdonald case, the response from the gun control movement in the broader sense, and gun control elected officials, gun control advocates who happen to be elected

officials pushed back with that strategy of making it such a bureaucratic nightmare that it has still reduce the average person's ability to have and use for their protection again. -- a gun. time after time, fbi statistics show this, that where in fact you have a long -- allowed law-abiding people to defend themselves, you have reduced crime. that's just the reality. nobody can argue that because there's no other authoritative stores -- source they can go to than the fbi statistics and that is what the statistics show. they prove out that guns are not

the problem. it's bad folks with guns that are the problem. >> the one thing i wanted to embellish is -- i think we're at the end of this battery life. the one embellishment i will add is that often the motivation of people in public office for making it difficult for the next marginal owner to have access to a gun is sort of the background logic that any decrease in the number of guns is to the good. any decrease in the number of guns will generate some statistical reduction in crime. the thing that is interesting to note -- and people will talk and disagree about causation in

terms of whether concealed carry is the full story with regard to the decrying -- decline recently in the crime rate, but the thing that is irrefutable is that we now have a record number of firearms in the u.s. and the crime rate, both the gun crime rate, even among young black males, has gone down over the last 10 years. in my textbook, we have a chart that shows gun ownership increasing to record levels and a decline in gun crime, which at the very least refutes the notion that any incremental increase in the number of firearms will generate an

increase income -- increase in gun crimes. we have that theory refuted, and that is the foundation for people who end up trying to put really stiff, bureaucratic barriers in that would stop people from getting access to firearms. i think just that chart should be a refutation of that theory. >> i have a question for each of you to answer. to each of the members on the panel, what is your position on universal background checks? if you could give a brief one minute or two minute answer because we're about to go into a break for our next panel. >> i am opposed. >> do you want to tell us why?

>> one, it doesn't work in the hands of a government they cannot get its act together. it just doesn't work. >> i agree. that's not really the point. there is transformation. there is rebuilt tatian.

-- rehabilitation. depending on a background check is problematic. >> i would add to that. what i said was right because that's what i believe, but if you want me to go deeper, just let me give you an example. look, we put a lot of emphasis and we know now that there are people suffering from mental illnesses who are falling through the cracks. but the reality is that their first amendment rights trump -- according to everybody else i

talk to -- trump our right to know, and therefore, the universal background check has been rendered ineffective and useless. >> i am sympathetic to people who feel this way, but there are a lot of policies and things that seem right but at the end of the day they don't really do what they are intended to do and for those reasons, that is why i would be opposed. >> i am complicated on this, and i will tell you why. the objection to universal background checks is that you cannot do it without a system of registration. i think a system of registration is extremely worrisome. the question is can you put in sentence in place that would get you close to what you would get with the universal background check without actually doing the big command and control structure? in my state, pennsylvania,

people who sell private firearms -- i am a member of the computer board where people sometimes go on -- people who sell private firearms require -- just as a market response, require the buyers show their concealed carry license. the concealed carry license has people who sell private firearms

turned out to be a surrogate for a private chat. this basically fondles into the incentive -- funnels into the incentives. summary asked me this question on another panel and i said listen -- somebody asked me this question on another panel and i said listen, avoid the registration scheme. just say it.

this is the same administration that through fast and furious but illegal guns on the streets of america. i don't trust the federal government invests. >> we are about to go to a break, and i am going to read a question from the audience, but this panel is not going to answer it. i am going to save it for our second panel. the question is, why has no one on the panel addressed the racial disparities in an unjust system regarding stand your ground laws? don't you think that associating gun control with the hip-hop culture feeds an unfair stereotype that exists? i happen to know that our second panel can handle that very well. we are going to take a five minute break. >> can ask a question? please give me permission, because mark twain has messed with my city for decades now. after his seventh visit to the city of cincinnati, mark twain was asked his impression of the queen city of the u.s. by a young journalist at a paper in louisville. he said son, if i heard the world was ending tomorrow, i would get to cincinnati as fast as i could eat has things happen

there 10 years after they happen it -- because things happen there 10 years after they happen in the rest of the world. >> on that note, i thank our panelists for joining us this afternoon. we are going to take a five minute break. be back in your chair is at 4:00 for our latest and second panel. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014]

>> the new congress will see the largest majority with 247 republicans to 188 democrats. and the u.s. senate -- 45 african-americans will serve in the house of a zen it is come january. two of them, republicans, texas and utah. first ever african-american women in congress. there are two african-americans in senate, public and tim scott, and democrat cory booker of new jersey.

>> "q&a" is 10 years old and to mark a decade of compelling conversations, we are featuring one interview from each year of the series over this holiday season. today, the president of the university of houston on the role of colleges in preparing you for the workplace. this movie tells the story using security camera video. "q&a" is today on c-span. >> up next, a conversation with spring court justice elena kagan . she sat down to talk about her career and approach to the law. this is one hour and 20 minutes.

>> welcome. i helped to instigate this event, brought to you by the university center for human values, now in its 25th year. also brought to you by the princeton university public lectures. i want to thank all the university staff who have been involved with this and mostly -- who managed every detail.

>> she has also served as the dean of harvard law school in 2003 and 2009, where she gained a reputation as a bridge builder in that institution. during her four years on the supreme court, she has emerged as the court's more liberal wing and continued her efforts as a consensus builder and her hunting trips with justice scalia. they shoot skeet and other things [laughter]

>> as former vice president cheney been involved in any of these? if he is, stay behind him. [laughter] >> it has been said that the role of the supreme court of the united states is to speak on behalf of justice for the american people. constitutional self-government written by a princeton vice president. he is an authority on constitutionalism and the supreme court. constitution and the court and justice in america than the two people to my right, princeton president and associate justice of the united states supreme court elena kagan. [cheers and applause] >> good to be here. >> let me start off by thanking you to have you here. by the extraordinary audience to welcome you back. thank you for making time. >> i was thinking the last time i was back and it was my 25th reunion and i spent a little part of the afternoon walking

around princeton and seeing all the new things on campus and it looks fantastic. >> woodrow wilson came back when he was in the white house. and might give them butterflies. any time we get you back. steve wanted to hear us talk about the court and the constitution. i want to give an opportunity these rumors about these hunting trips with justice scalia. >> it is a pretty funny story. i grew up in new york city. and i did not hunting. you have to do these courtesy visits, the hearings you see on tv. the tip of the iceberg and you have to talk to all the senators. i did 82 of them. and what was striking is how many of them both republicans and democrats wanted to talk to me about guns. as a kind of -- there are rules about what you can ask at these kind of sit-downs and what i could say and they couldn't ask me direct questions about what i thought about particular issues. the proxies were along the lines of, do you hunt? and i went through the views. and it was -- and my answers were pathetic. no. do you know anybody who hunts? not really.

i was sitting with one of the senators from a senator from idaho and he was telling me how important it was to many of his constituents and i totally understand why and why many senators would want to know these kinds of things. and it was late in the day, my 93rd interview and i say said, if you would like me to hunt, i would be glad to come. and this look of abject horror passed over his face. i said, senator, i didn't mean to invite myself to your ranch but i will tell you that if i'm lucky enough to be confirmed, i will ask justice scalia to take me hunting. i group up in new york and i understand why this matters to you and i would commit to do that for you. and when i got to the court, i went over to justice scalia's chambers this story and he thought it was hilarious and i said this is the single promise i made in 82 office interviews. he said i will have to let you fulfill that promise. and he started with skeet shooting and we went and did the real thing and couple of times a year, we go out and shoot quail and pheasant and once went out to wyoming where i shot a deer. >> you enjoy it? >> i do like it. i'm a little bit of a competitive person, you know.

[laughter] >> you put a gun in my hand and you said the gun is an object, let's do it. >> long before you were a supreme court justice or a hunter, you were a student on this campus. how do you remember princeton? >> i love princeton. all of you folks who go to princeton are incredibly lucky. i suspect it's better. but i was a history major. i had fantastic professors. how many of the faculty were so generous with their time whether in out of office conversations. i saw think these is adviser, a little bit before this and i'm a little bith nervous he is in the audience, i think he is going to take out his red opinion pen. >> don't worry about it. we repealed the grading policy. >> he edited my thesis four times over and i learned it here. i have friends who will be my friends until the day i die. i did activities that were important to me. i spent time fee "daily princetonian.” and i feel warmly about it. and what it did for me. >> did you occur that you wanted to be a supreme court justice? >> i never had that thought. i did an event earlier with some students and a woman asked me, did you know you wanted to be a lawyer and i had to admit to her that i didn't. the law did seem all that interesting or exciting to me. my dad was a lawyer and i look

at what he did and i understand why it was deeply meaningful to him. he was not a courtroom lawyer. as a kid, i didn't get what was interesting or exciting about it. and i went to law school for the wrong reasons. and the kind of -- i don't know what else to do and i want to keep my options open reasons. and i got there and loved it. and i was glad i made that decision. life takes you on different paths. honestly, i had come back -- my 25th reunion, eight years ago, if you said what are you going to be doing with the rest of your life, i said i was going to be cries iseberger and thought i was going to be a university president. fluky way life works. and takes twists and turns and don't know where you are going to end up. >> are you enjoying it? >> it's a good gig. as much as i say all of that, if you had said to me in law school, you have a chance to be a supreme court justice, i would have said yes. >> you did clerk for two extraordinary judges. can you say a bit about how those experiences shaped you? >> the person i am and the lawyer i have been, not just like in the last five years, i started thinking about those two men. they have had a long-lasting impact on my life. the judge, next week is getting the national medal of freedom, and that will be just wonderful. had this really interesting career. he ended up serving in all three branches of our government. he was a congressman from illinois for a lot of years

life takes you on different paths. honestly, i had come back -- my 25th reunion, eight years ago, if you said what are you going to be doing with the rest of your life, i said i was going to be cries iseberger and thought i was going to be a university president. fluky way life works. and takes twists and turns and don't know where you are going to end up. >> are you enjoying it? >> it's a good gig.

[laughter] as much as i say all of that, if you had said to me in law school, you have a chance to be

and he was also the world's most decent human being and i learned about that, too. justice marshall. there your 27 years old and kind of experience, generally, as you know, you clerked on the supreme court, too. you are young and there you are in this institution where all the cases are being decided and kind of a trip, but then in addition to that, there you are

in thurgood marshall's office the person i think was the greatest 20th century lawyer and he was a story teller. and he was nearing the end of his life. he turned 80, the year i clerked for him. and kind of old 80. he was looking back on his life and however much a story teller he had been, he became more so and more so and we walked into his chambers and talked about the cases and do all our work and at a certain point, he talked about stories about the extraordinary career lawyering at the trial level, a.m. at level, constitutional cases, being this the forefront of everything that was most important in the second half or actually in a significant period of time, eradicating jim crow.

and he was funny. but he also told the stories to have a point and we got that. and if you wanted to spend a year at a relatively young age talking to somebody who could tell you something about justice, that was the man to do it with. i will be very grateful for that experience. >> let me fast forward from your time as a law clerk to arrival at the supreme court as a new justice. were you welcomed, were you hazed or looking at things that were new or familiar? >> little bit of both. >> did they hayes you? -- haze you? >> ok. i tell you how they hazed me. this is true. they said, very particular rule for the junior justice, junior justice is the junior justice and they refer to the junior

justice as the junior justice. you have specific jobs. they put you on the cafeteria committee. it's not a very good cafeteria. they haze you all the time actually. the food isn't very good. >> ok. that counts. >> when we go into conference, it's just the nine of us, we don't bring in any clerks, any assistants. only the nine of us. so somebody has to do two things, the first is that somebody has to take notes so you can go out and tell people what just happened.

and i take notes. that is the junior justice's job. and you have to answer the door when there is a knock on the door. literally, if there is a knock on the door than i don't hear it, there will not be a single other person who will move. they will stare at me and i figure out oh, somebody knocked on the door. these two jobs, the note taking and the door opening, you can see how they can get in the way of each other. >> even one sounds like a lot. >> and some of my colleagues you say what doll people knock on the door for? knock. knock. i'm not going to name names. knock, no, ma'am, someone forgot their gases. knock. knock. justices forget their coffee. all that said, all that said the warmth with which i was greeted by all my colleagues was striking to me and here's the first indication of that. my confirmation vote happened in

the middle of the afternoon here in the united states in july. and i say in the united states the chief justice was in australia was at the time. it was 3:00 in the morning there. and literally, the moment that that vote occurred and i watched it in the solicitor germ's office with all my colleagues and one of the assistants came into the room and said the chief justice is on the line for you. it was like, and he said, i want you to be the first to welcome you on board and congratulate you and he said you know, i guess we are going to spending the next 25 years together. [laughter] >> which is a little bit scary really. but i said, really, only 25? really? but he and everybody else has been warm and welcoming from the start and in ap way that is to a great credit of the institution and it is a great institution. what did it seem like when i got back, how lit will it changed.

i clerked there about 25 years earlier. but it was still like remarkably the same institution, using the same procedures, almost a little bit laughbly. in those 25 years, it has been a communication revolution, but seemed to have passed the supreme coordinate by a little

bit. but in great ways, that the institution operates ellie efficiently and collegiately. the first day on the job. the chief justice took me all around to the different offices in the court, the clerk's office, the library, the publications office and every single place i went into somebody said, i remember you from when you were a clerk. it is a great place to work. little bit nervous about that, too. what was i like that back then. so it didn't seem surprising in the way it operated and just warm and welcoming. >> let me ask you about how it is that you interact with the justices, your colleagues

outside of conference when you are not having to take notes and open the door and the communications revolution. when you have a legal issue or a concern about a particular spin that has been circulated, how do you talk to your fellow justice eggs, are you walking down the hall and shooting emails or different from that? >> often you write, and that is write rather than talk. especially if you are commenting on or criticizing a written piece of work or an opinion, you know, it often takes a writing to explain what you mean and why you think something needs to be fixed. and the precision that you can

get through a written memo is actually a good deal higher than if you just walked in and put your feet in and say here is what i'm thinking about your opinion. once an opinion has come in, is in writing. people will say, i really hope to join you, but there is this aspect of the opinion that i don't quite agree with and here's a way that would make me feel comfortable. and literally, we send these memos -- somebody from the chamber whose job is to walk them around the building. >> they are being walked around

the building. >> yes, email has not yet hit the united states supreme court. >> i find that astonishing, they have a set of lawyers interacting with colleagues. >> it is an attachment to that i have sent and i don't >> it is an attachment to tradition, it encourages -- there has been a lot of emails know about you that i just pushed the send button. >> i try not to do that. >> do you do a memo and write it and look it at again when someone brings it into you to sign and worst case scenario you have the opportunity to say no way, stop. so, that's part of the way we communicate. but, different ones of us talk more or less. i'm a schmoozer. i do.

i wander around and talk to people. sometimes it's about opinions and sometimes it's just about life. but, you know, i'll go into you said steve breyer, we are on one end of the court and the carpet might be getting worn between our two offices. we go back and forth and talk br things that strike us in cases. >> that's reassuring in a way. i want to turn now to ask you some questions about how you decide cases. before doing that and in 30 minutes or so, we will have time

to have people from the audience to ask questions, but begin by asking you, what sorts of topics you think are fair game in scenarios like this. david suiter was unwilling where blackmon was telling tales. what is your boundary? >> we speak best when we speak through our opinions. so it tends not to i'm not going to talk about any pending cases or any case that might come before me as i look down the road. but i tend to think that we put our opinions out there, the whole idea of the way we operate, we give reasons the way we make a decision and those reasons are the best statement we could come up what of why we have done a certain thing and unlikely to be improved upon as you do the lecture circuit. doesn't mean i don't talk about some past opinions that i have

been a part of. but i tend to like a bit more talk about the institution and how it operates as opposed to opinions. >> are you interpreting a statute? might have one set of things to say how one should interpret statutes, are you interpreting the constitution. so what do you want to hear about? >> i would like to hear about the constitution and like to hear about the equal protection clause and due process clause. when you get these grand abstract clauses, how do you approach those?

>> this is hard. when i think about a statute the first thing and the absolute most important thing is to look at the text of that statute, trumps everything that the text is clear. when you go to the constitution and think about those kinds of

clauses and those kinds of clauses speak in abstract even vague terms, not all the constitution does this. if the constitution says you can't be president unless you are 35, you know what that means. but when the constitution says you are entitled to due process of law and equal protection of law, trying to give that content meaning, it can't be done by just staring at the words. how do you it? one possibility is you try to figure out what the drafters thought that it meant and what

it would have meant living in that time and for the constitution it is 1789 and you come up with a list of practices, here's what they thought that this prohibited and here's what they thought did not prohibit. i think that's not a good way of going about the enterprise. and one way you know that, it leads to results that are simply practices, here's what they thought that this prohibited and here's what they thought did not prohibit. i think that's not a good way of going about the enterprise. and one way you know that, it leads to results that are simply untenable. what do the framers think that equal protection meant or not meant to desegregate schools or masogony laws. we know those things.

and any things that get you to results that get untenable can't be a good method. but one of the reasons why some people are attracted to that and this is really important, is that did they think it provides a way of discipline for judges. they say i think this and it's my personal values and personal preferences. there have to be ways of confining the inquiry and it's not going to be that, it will be something else. what are those things? you start with the original meaning.

there is in some sense we are all organizationalists. it is important to what the history over time has been. it's not the history over a particular moment but the history of our republic in a certain sense. we had not these clauses but an interesting case involving the president's recess appointment power. and justice breyer's opinion was how much does it look at the broad sweep, and how this clause has worked in our country for

two-plus centuries. that's important. and i, myself, am a big precedent person. some people call it a common-law constitutionist. but i think hard about the way the law of interpreting the due process clause or equal protection clause has developed over time in case after case after case after case and try to think about the principles that have emerged in all of those cases. and that is not departing from precedent where it's set, but partly trying to understand what has underlay all of that precedent and how the principles that have emerged over many, many decades thinking about these provisions, apply in a particular case. >> another phrase that gets thrown around when people talk about judicial philosophy and that is judicial restraint. do you consider yourself an advocate for judicial restraint and what does that concept mean to you? >> yes, sometimes, but no, other times. this is one of the hardest things about being a judge, you have to know what judges should not be getting into. you have to say, i have my job and it's not this, it's not a legislative job, not an executive job and to let those institutions do what they are

supposed to do and what they do a whole lot better, you have to let them operate in their spheres, where they have confidence and legitimacy. a very significant part of any judge's role, especially at the highest court, is to decide when a particular act, a legislative act or executive act goes too far, goes beyond the boundaries where the law has been set where in the law or the constitution and you can't abdicate that rule. it is an important part of why you are up there. when a legislature dose you can't advocate that role. it is an important part of why you're up there. so when a legislature does something that violates the best understanding as it's emerged over many decades and many cases of, say the equal protection clause, you have to say, you know, sorry you went too far. that's part of my job and that will involve invalidating a few

-- a piece of legislation but it is appropriate for me to do so. >> let me ask you a question about how it is that you consider justices can consider the relationship between the court and the political branches. there are suggestions made sometimes that justices ought to think about what people sometimes call the back lash that a particular decision might generate. i have mind arguments like one that justice ginsburg published as a circuit court judge saying that the court moved too fast when it adopted or decided roe vs. wade or the court's use of the all deliberate speed formula in brown vs. board of education. there was an article of this kind published by david cole as an op-ed piece urging the court in gay marriage cases not to move too fast because of the back lash it might provoke. is that kind of thing something that justices may and should

think about in these cases? >> i don't want to talk about it in reference to any particular issue. i will say this. first, it is super rare that the justices do -- for the most part you have a job to do and the job is applying the law as best you can and probably in most cases a lot -- these kinds of issues just don't come up at all or if they come up in a way where it's just not worth thinking about. you know if you said to me, is it ever worth thinking about some of these things, i don't think i'd say no to that. i mean, it seems to me that at least some part of being a judge has to do -- you say, what makes a great judge? there's something about sort of wisdom and wisdom might say something about the kinds of issues that you're talking about.

but i don't want to, you know, i think for the most part we probably when we think about the sort of questions that you're talking about probably won't get it right anyway. like what do we know? and i think you have to have a lot of humility about your ability to know these predictions, this is the way it will turn out, you know, and we have one job to do which is to apply the law as best we can. that job is really hard. there's going to be a lot of differences about what that means in a given case, but it's differences in the realm of legal interpretation. i think we should be wary of going beyond that. >> a lot of people today when they look at the court see a court that seems more polarized

along liberal conservative fault lines than in the past, including during the times when we clerked or before that. do you agree with that judgment about the court and if so should we be concerned about it? >> yeah. so i think people overstate it. one way to think about this is that if you look at how much we agree on, we actually agree an incredible amount of the time. nine people -- it's hard to get nine people to agree to anything right? so last year all nine of us agreed 60% of the time. 60% of our opinions were unanimous, which is quite something, because, you know, we all need to decide the hardest cases. almost all of our cases have produced splits in the lower courts where people have found things to argue about. not with standing that, all nine of us unanimously decided on the right answer. then add to that you have a lot

of 8-1's and 7-2's and then the ones divided but not along what people think of as the stereotypical lines, which are fun when you con fond people like that. but, you know, all of that said it is absolutely true that in some number of cases every year -- we do about 80 cases a year and let's call it in about 10 cases -- and often these are the 10 cases that are most high profile. there is no way around that. that we are going to split on pretty predictable lines. you know, there are four of us who think one thing and four of us who think the other thing. then we wait and see what justice kennedy does. [ laughter] and that's not, you know, it's really unfortunate, now.

there has been that kind of split for a long time that people have not been able to say has anything to do with republicans and democrats because folks like your boss >> yeah. >> the person you clerked for, justice stevens was appointed by a republican president, but was often on the more liberal side of the court. justice suter, as well. now people can talk about it as though it has something to do with just democrats and republicans. i don't think there's a single one of us that experiences law in that way and that experiences what we're doing in that way. it doesn't have to do with politics in that way you would find across the street in congress, but it does have to do with the kinds of issues we were talking about before -- judicial methodology. it has to do with how you read some of these very abstract provisions in the constitution.

there's no getting around the fact that we are split in that way in some of those cases. they tend for that reason not to be the cases that i most enjoy. i love it when we're being real, you know, when we're really all in there trying to persuade each other and that you know the persuasion is possible and that you know that kind of stereotypical split is not going to happen. that's the most fun part of the job. >> it's interesting. a lot of people would think that the marquee cases are the most fun part of the job. >> yes. i remember once, literally my first conference. and walked in and there were two cases on the agenda. one was a very high profile case. it was one that you knew was going to be on the front page of the "new york times" the moment we decided it.

and the other was the kind of dinky, procedural case. some procedural cases are important. this one was dinky. and the high profile case, and it was one of these which was a 5-4, the way we operate -- it's a little bit stylized. starts with the chief justice and he goes first and he reminds us all of what the case is about and what the issues are. then he gives his views. and he says, you know, so i've voted to reverse or to affirm or whatever it is. then it goes around in seniority order. so i always speak ninth. there is a rule that says nobody can speak twice before anybody speaks once, which is a very good rule if you speak ninth. and then after that we can if we want all break out in conversation together. then it's not so stylized and

it's just kind of all talking together. so the high profile case comes in, and everybody went around the table and said his or her piece and it got to me. i said my piece. then the chief justice who runs these things incredibly well, just said, okay. so it's 5-4 this and then he went on to the next case. and the next case we did the same thing. we went around the table. you know, everybody had somewhat different views. it wasn't really clear where we were agreeing and where we were disagreeing. at any rate, the first case, i think, took us no more than 10 minutes. the second case took us 40. and i walked out and i thought, if anybody -- if there were a fly on the wall here they would have said, what is going on with these people? you know? 10 minutes on this and 40 minutes on that? but as i now have been there i actually think it makes all the sense in the world that there

are, you know, the occasional case where you kind of know there's not going to be a whole lot of persuading done in the room. everybody walks in, having a certain view. they're all really smart, really experienced people. they've seen this problem before. they know what they think. and you say what you think but at that point if you keep on saying what you think, honestly you're just going to annoy each other. it's actually pretty important that we not annoy each other. but then when there's real persuasion, that can be done, you know, everybody really pitches in and tries to do it. and that's -- as i said before that is sort of the most fun part to me. >> that makes sense. let me ask you one last question. i just want to warn the audience or prepare the audience for the fact that at that point we'll be going out to you for questions. so here's the last one. about a week ago paul krugman

nobel laureate, member of this faculty, wrote a "new york times" op-ed piece accusing the conservative wing of the court of being corrupt because of its willingness to take cases attacking the affordable care act. i don't want to ask you about the cases obviously. i do want to ask whether you have a reaction or are willing to share one about how americans should respond to that kind of accusation? it's very strong language. is there any reason to worry about corruption at the supreme court? >> i mean, no. i mean, i -- there is not a day in my job that i have ever thought that anybody was not doing everything that they do in utter, complete good faith. you know? and you can disagree with people. you will disagree with people. but everybody is trying to get it right. and everybody is in complete good faith and that's just ridiculous language honestly. you know, it's actually -- when

i was solicitor general, i of course, would argue with the court every sitting, but i would also just go and watch the court when any of the people in my office argued. it meant that i just sort of watched about 70% of the cases that year. i used to think, man. this is how an institution of government should operate. and the people saw it day in and day out. it's like all of these people who are coming to the bench ultra prepared really having thought through things, really understanding the issues and the arguments, and asking, really penetrating, excellent questions and just trying to, you know, a little bit trying to persuade each other even as we sit on the bench but also just trying to get it right. i think it's an institution of government that really works. and so i could not disagree

more. >> i'm very glad to hear you say that but not at all surprised. i've studied this institution for most of my life and i have to say i've often disagreed with it and the justices or particular justices on it, but i've always believed that all of the justices are deciding cases in good faith on the basis of their judgment about what the law is. >> absolutely. >> we should be proud of that. >> yes. >> justice kagan has been great in answering these questions crisply and i want to remind folks that what should now be coming from the floor are questions, and questions end with a question mark, sometimes with the raising of the voice. typically shorter than the answers that you expect to hear from justice kagan. with that, reminder or warning, i don't know if we have someone up at the top. i will say one of the things about this stage is there are bright light. someone in the back row, we'll

start all the way up at the top. if you could introduce yourself and go ahead with your question. >> hi. my name is ashton. i'm a freshman. my question is, should, in your opinion, foreigner international legal decisions ever have any bearing on the kind of rulings in the supreme court? like should you cite these international foreign decisions? >> well, i think this is a kind of -- this issue is a lot more heat than light. there are a lot of people who seem to feel very strongly about this and i'm not sure i understand why. you know first off, i mean, sometimes everybody agrees that we should look to international law or foreign law in deciding particular cases. if you're deciding a case about a treaty, you know, it's really important to look to international law and look to foreign law about how that treaty operates. i take it nobody would disagree

with that. what some instead think is that one should never look to foreign law with respect to peculiarly domestic issues. on the one hand i kind of think the way i see some of my colleagues do that, i don't quite, you know, i think it's kind of mischaracterized that nobody in our court would use that -- those decisions are binding or that they're precedent or anything like that. that they're more using those decisions in a way you might cite a law review article. like, you know here's something that somebody thinks and now i'll tell you whether i agree with that or not. i think that on the one hand people get a little bit spun up

about this more than they should. i will tell you on the other side this, that, you know, i don't think i've ever actually cited one. there are times when i've had the opportunity to do so, when, you know, maybe some other person who was writing the decision might have. i guess for me the reason is i think that we have -- we are trying to interpret our own constitution and our own laws. we have a very rich constitutional tradition and also in some ways a distinctive constitutional tradition. so, for me if you can't find grounding for what you do in our own laws, you shouldn't be doing it. and the foreign sources come in

just to kind of guild the lily if you will. and i guess my choice has been not to use them that way. not to use them at all. but, instead, to make my best judgment about what our constitutional tradition and our constitutional cases indicate. you have to remember that unlike lots of countries, you know, we go -- there are new countries that look to older countries' laws but we have a pretty long tradition. so for me that's kind of enough. i tend not to and i'm pretty sure i'll continue to not to except for when there is an obvious reason to do so because the law with the case involved some question of international or foreign law. >> so despite the possible harm to my vision let me say, up --

there is a hand in the middle here of this section. can we get a microphone there? thank you. >> okay. >> it blinds you here. >> we can't see you but we can hear you. go ahead and introduce yourself, please. >> my name is catherine frain. i am a huge fan of notorious r.b.g. if anybody has ever heard the phrase before, which is ruth bader ginsburg's internet nickname. >> i'm a huge fan of her, too. >> anyway, i was just wondering, i was watching an interview the other day where she was commenting kind of on the hobby lobby ruling and she said that she thinks that historically the supreme court has had a blind spot when it comes to women. i would like to know what your

reaction is kind of to the gender politics there and if you have seen that and if so do you think it is stabilizing, progressing, what are your thoughts? >> boy you're putting me in a tough position there. i mean, that's quite an extraordinary question. i have to choose between one colleague and some other colleagues right? i don't think i really quite want to do that. and i'm trying to think. as we sit -- you know, it's a good question when i need this much time to figure out what i'm going to say about it. look, i think, you know, that's a case in which there are -- it's actually a perfect example of the way even when we divide in this kind of 5-4 way which we did in that case, that it's really important to understand that there are strong arguments

on both sides of the issue. i, myself, cannot think of that as a are you with women or not with women kind of cases. i think it's a question of how far religious liberty extends. theirs was under a statute rather than the constitution. the question of how to interpret that statute and when people should be able to opt out of general commitments is one of the most difficult cases -- difficult areas of constitutional law and one where people both feel passionately on both sides and have a right to feel passionately on both sides. i guess i don't look at a case like that and say blind spot or not blind spot. i look at it as a case like that and say, you know, this is

what makes constitutional law so hard is that there are real clashing values and principles at work and that case is a perfect example. >> why don't we go down here partly to avoid blind spots in our own eyes. >> really. >> thank you. my name is ryan. i'm a sophomore. my question is you're often the dissent in a lot of decisions. is your frustration at not getting the majority is that outweighed by the sense of history of writing a dissent that may be later ruled into the majority such as in pluesse vs. ferguson and other notable dissents? an unrelated question is professor robert george has said that everyone who got an a in con interp is sitting on the

supreme court right now and i wonder if that's true. >> i don't think i ever took it, honestly. >> i can guarantee it's not true. [ laughter] >> your question is it hard to lose? is that your question? of course it's hard to lose. my god. i just told you i'm a competitive person. like going out and shooting things, you know? it's funny because i was recently -- there was a big kind of convention judges' convention of all the federal appellate judges and somebody asked me a question very much like that, like what is the best thing about your time in the court and what's the worst thing? i hadn't really thought about the worst thing. i thought what was the worst thing? the worst thing is coming back from conference and not being in the majority on an issue that you think is important and you have strong views about.

you know, the days that i come back from conference in that position, you know, sometimes i can punch a hole through the wall. so is it mitigated? is that what you asked me? is it sort of mitigated by your opportunity to write some sort of fierce dissent? not really. but i enjoy writing dissentence. i mean, except for the fact that you're in dissent, which is annoying. i like writing them for a couple of different reasons. there are different kinds of dissents. there are many different kinds of dissents. the ones in the important cases where you do feel, in the way that you said, i'm writing for the future, you know, that i hope that this issue will remain on our legal agenda so that some years down the road

people will come back to it and even if not overrule this case, you know go in a different direction with respect to whatever constitutional provision it is. i mean, i think when you're writing a dissent like that you do feel some -- a little sense of responsibility toward the future. it's like i want to make the best case i can both so that our audience in the current day understands what's wrong with this opinion and, also to some future audience understands what's wrong with this opinion and maybe that future audience will include five members of the supreme court. and, you know, i do think about those things. you know, how do i convey to people what's so wrong about what my colleagues have done? how do i convey it in a way

that suggests what the options are for the future? >> look up top here. we've fwot somebody. there are a couple here. i want to go to the person who sort of looks like a grayish-greenish shirt there. right there we go. in front of the pillar. making things a little difficult for our runners. there we go. >> i'm a law professor at the university of iowa and a member of the institute for advanced study. i'd like to ask you a -- >> you look very young. >> the chief justice has said some things fairly dramatically about the role of scholarship in his decision making, references to approaches to evidence in 18th century bulgaria and so forth. i would like to ask you what you think about the conversation between either the legal academy or the academy in general and the court?

do you read things that academics write about the law? do they influence your decision making process? >> yes. the first thing i'd say is, you know, i think he's right as to one thing, which is that there just are many things that law professors write about that are not particularly relevant to us. that's okay. we're not the only audience for law professors and we shouldn't be. law professors should not think of themselves as supreme court clerks. you know? and, i mean, often law professors are speaking to legislatures, often law professors are speaking to real, live practicing lawyers. often law professors are speaking to other communities within a university, you know, you want the legal historians to be talking to the other historians that sort of thing. there are a whole range of audiences for law professors

other than the supreme court. that's not only inevitable. i think it's as it should be. i think it would be a much narrower conversation in our law schools if all the professors were doing or commenting on the 80 cases the court takes every year. now that's a fact of the matter that for many, many law professors there is no dialogue. that's okay with me and it should be okay with them i guess. there are people who do really engage with what we do. and i often find things that are coming from the law professor world. whether it's an article or more and more you see people blogging about these kinds of things, not writing full length articles but, you know, going on a whole number of blogs and talking about the kinds -- the

cases we get the issues we see, and i sometimes think that what is written there is very useful and very interesting. it leads me to ask questions. it leads me to think through things that i haven't thought about. you know, every once in a while you will have a case where the briefs go in one direction and then the blogsters mostly law professors, go in another and suggest other things are at issue, in a way that i think is valuable. i think it's a pretty happy story, actually, that law professors are not just focusing on us to the extent that they focus on us i actually think that they are contributing to a good dialogue. >> there is a question right in the front row behind the camera. >> hi. i'm kennedy and i'm a freshman. my question is two parts. one, what was the toughest decision you've been part of? the second question is which

decision are you most proud of and with or without details, whatever you're comfortable with. >> i'll tell you the toughest one. i said this actually earlier in the day. it was a case about violent video gaming. i'll preface this by saying i'm usually pretty good at decision making. you know, i work hard and i read a lot and i think through things, i hope and i talk to my clerks and to other justices. it's not as though i make snap decisions but i'm not usually an agonizer. you know? i mean, i'll get all the information i think i need and then i'll make a decision. i don't do a lot of hamlet sort of stuff. [ laughter] but this one case i did. this one case i was like all over the map on. and every day i woke up and i thought, i would do a different

thing. or i was in the wrong place. and it was a case about whether kids could buy violent video games without their parents' permission. which, you know, everybody thinks that's easy because of course, kids can't go into violent movies so what's the problem? but the movie system is a private system. it's not a government system. this was a case where california had passed a law and it said, kids can't buy violent video games. didn't define violent all that well, which was one problem here. but even if it had, there might be other problems, first amendment problems. the question was whether that law violated the first amendment. i have to say everything in my -- i just sort of thought it should be that you should not be able to buy -- if a parent doesn't want her kids to buy violent video games that should be the parent's -- it should be that this law was okay is i

guess what i was saying. but i could not figure out how to make the first amendment law work to make it okay. it was clearly what is called a content based distinction. that's usually subject to the scrictest scrutiny. there was no very good evidence of the kind one would normally need that the buying -- that the viewing or the playing of violent video games was harmful. and so i just couldn't make it work under the first amendment doctrine that we have and have had for a long time. i kept on sort of going back and forth and back and forth. we ended up being 5-4 on that important issue and i was in the five that said that the law should be invalidated. but this's the one case where i kind of think i just don't know. i just don't know if that's right. so -- and then what did you

say? proudest of. i don't -- i'm not going speculate -- which of your children do you like best. you know? you write these opinions. you really struggle with them. you work hard on them. i guess i'm proud of different ones for different reasons. i'm not combg to say the top -- i'm not going to say the top one. >> right in the very front here is one. >> hi. i'm a freshman. after hearing you talk about the respectful differences of opinions that you guys really tend to take pride in on the court, how do you think we can apply that to the political sphere in terms of spreading more civil and respectful disagreement? >> you know, i would not presume to say. i'm in this little institution

and maybe it's better because it's a small institution. it's a very personal institution. there are only nine of us. we know each other really super well. you know, you wish that all of government or like what i really do experience this institution to be, that it's collegial. there are great friendships. and that there is an enormous amount of respect even in the face of disagreement. you just wish that were so in all parts of our government and, you please, honestly, you got me as to how to make that happen. >> let me look up -- my eyes have recovered enough from the light here. there is a hand right back there under the bright light again. there we go. >> how do you even see these things? >> my name is isaac.

i'm a senior. i wonder how the court thinks about precedence and how much it thinks about policy stability beyond the letter of the law. >> beyond? the letter of the law. >> i don't quite know what policy stability is so i'll save my answer for precedent unless you want to explain it. okay. i'll save my answer for precedent. we take precedent really seriously. you know, precedent is -- predictability is an important value in the law. part of that is that people should be able to rely on the law and shouldn't feel as though it keeps changing depending on who gets to be on a particular court at a particular moment in time. it's part of preventing politicization as well. finally, it's part of what i view as a kind of judicial humility which is important,

that even if you think something at one moment in time the fact that others who have gone before you have thought something different, should be a constraint on you. you might not be right. they might have been right. and so i think that it's important for that reason, too. it cannot be that the only question you ask when it comes to reversing a decision is was that a good decision or a bad decision? if that were the case, right or wrong, then this doctrine of precedent the latin name, would have no real force. it's got to, to overrule a precedent there has to be something more than that it's wrong. that can be a variety of things. it can be that the doctrine all around this precedent has changed over time so that the

precedent is kind of out of whack with the rest of the legal universe. it can mean that the world has changed in some fundamental way that makes this precedent work differently than anybody ever thought it would. it can mean -- it can be because the precedent is just unworkable in the sense of unadministerable that you lay out a rule and expect judges to follow it and it turns out that it's a very hard line that you've drawn and judges are all over the map and they're tearing their hair out. so it can be any of those things or probably more but there has to be, you know, some really good reason beyond the fact that i think they got it wrong that would lead you to overturn something. so, you know, i am sure there are times in the years i served as a judge where i will vote to

overturn a decision but i hope it happens pretty rarely. >> yes? >> hi. i'm a freshman here. currently at least one justice on the supreme court has obtained a degree from an ivy league institution with some majority of justices graduating from either harvard or yale law school. when loretta lynch was nominated for attorney generally began to wonder where she graduated from. i looked that up and she has not one but two degrees from harvard. so what do you think this says about the accessibility of institutions, graduate students who attend elite colleges?

is this fair to students who do not graduate from these elite schools that this type of accessibility is just not available to them? thank you. >> actually, i am a little bit of a partisan of harvard law school. when loretta lynch was nominated i, too, looked, and i thought, all right. another one. but that said, i actually think you raise a serious question. you know that there are -- that there are aspects of diversity that everybody focuses on with respect to the court and all of our institutions. people always think about racial and ethnic diversity and people always think about gender diversity and sometimes people talk in the court about religious diversity as well. but there is this way in which

the court is an incredibly undiverse institution. it's actually two ways. one has to do with where we all went to law school, which is even more than you say, you know, it's six of us went to harvard. five of those graduated from harvard. one actually graduated from columbia. and three to yale. pretty much everybody is a harvard-yale person. and in the second, which is just as real, is that we are extremely coastal court. so if you count up the number of hours that we've -- the number of years we've all spent on the line, it's really super high. you know, a couple people from california, justice kennedy is from california, and justice breyer grew up there. and then a lot of easterners, a lot of new yorkers,

specifically. and then justice thomas is from georgia and the chief justice is from the midwest but has spent most of his life in d.c. so it's really kind of northeast centered and as you say -- when i go around, i go around to a lot of law schools and not just like the harvard ones. you know, and people ask me about this all the time. you can see that people think sort of like, well how about us? shouldn't we have access to this institution? shouldn't we feel as though this institution is speaking to us and i think that's important. i don't actually think that any of these measures of diversity have all of that much to do with how we decide cases. i think it's actually pretty

rare that they do. but i thank the face we present to the world, i think people should think about how their government institutions look to the world and whether they reflect the diversity of our country and the diversity of our citizenry. and this is one way in which this court clearly does not. you would i think hope for it to be different. i'll tell you a funny story. i hope senator reid won't mind my telling you this. when i got nominated you go through these courtesy visits as i said. they're ordered in this very rank kind of way. that meant the first person i spoke to was senator reid, the majority leader of the senate. so i walked into his office. he said to me delighted to meet you he said i told the

president i needed two things in a supreme court justice. and you are one of them. [ laughter] i go uh-oh. i hope that other one isn't all that important. i said, what are the two things? he said the first thing was i told the president we have to have somebody who's never been a court of appeals judge. i had not been an appeals judge. so check. i said okay. what is the second thing you told the president? he said i told the president we cannot have any more harvard or yale people. [ laughter] and that one, you know, being of harvard law school, i definitely did not make that one. >> you didn't say i'm a princeton person? probably the wrong answer. let me go up top for a last question. and right in the center here again. >> last one. pressure is on. >> my name is alex.

i'm a masters student at the woodrow wilson school. i want to go back to the issue of healthcare for a minute and ask you about the process around a case like the case versus sebelius. there were lots of different opinions, lots of coalitions, justices joining different justices. can you talk about the role of a justice sort of as a wheeler and dealer in the court in forming these kinds of coalitions and how that works and what your views on it are? >> well, i'm not going to talk about that case. but you know i mean, often things do not break down neatly. sometimes, as i said a lot of the time we do all agree but when we don't, sometimes it breaks down easily but sometimes it doesn't. sometimes it breaks down on particular issues. sometimes we fracture so that there's no five poirn.

we try very hard not to have that happen because when that happens we don't send good and coherent signals to lower courts about what they should be doing. so there is a lot of trying to prevent that sort of fracturing. and the chief justice i think is exceptionally good at this, trying to figure out if we're -- when we're not all together trying to figure out how to get five people to say something so that we can actually speak coherently in a case and for the judges who are depending on our guidance. sometimes that's hard. often people think different things about different issues and trying to figure that out does take work. and it's work that we engage in

in conference and out of conference as well. you know, sort of trying to get to at least a majority. >> well, justice kagan, i think i speak for everyone here in saying we had high expectations for this event and you've made it even better. we hope you'll return frequently and we will welcome you back with open arms any time you want to return to your alma mater. >> it feels absolutely great to have been here. thank you. >> wonderful. wonderful to have you. >> thank you. [ applause]

>> the new congress in january will see the largest house gop majority since the 1928 elections with 247 republicans to 188 democrats. and republicans take the senate majority with 54 seats to 44 for the democrats and 2 independents who caucus with the democrats. there will be more than 100 women in congress. 84 in the house with 22 republicans and 62 democrats and 20 women in the senate 6 republicans and 14 democrats. >> "q & a" is 10 years old. to mark a decade of compelling conversations, we're featuring one interview from each year of

the series over the holiday season. today dan reed director of the documentary "terror in mumbai" about the terror attacks in mumbai india in 2008, where more than 175 people were killed and 300 wounded. he tells the story in his movie using surveillance video, intercepted cell phone calls with the killers and interviews with survivors. it's today at 7:00 p.m. on c-span. >> new year's day on the c-span networks. here are some of our featured programs. 10:00 a.m. eastern "the washington ideas forum" and "energy inventer" -- at 4:00 p.m. eastern the brooklyn historical society holds a conversation on race. then at 8:00 p.m. eastern from the explorers club, apollo 7 astronaut walt cunningham on the first manned space flight.

new year's day on c-span 2, just before noon eastern, author hector tobar on the 33 men buried in a chilean mine. at 3:00 p.m. eastern richard norton smith on the life of nelson rockefeller. then at 8:00 p.m. eastern former investigative correspondent for cbs news cheryl atkison on her experiences reporting on the obama administration. new year's day on american history tv on c-span 3. at 10:00 a.m. eastern, juanita abernathy on her experiences and the role of women in the civil rights movement. at 4:00 p.m., brooklyn college professor benjamin carp on the link between alcohol and politics in prerevolutionary new york city. and then at 8:00 p.m. cartoonist patrick oliphant draws 10 presidential carrick ca as a historian discusses the presidents and some of their most memorable quality. new year's day on the c-span net works. for our complete schedule go to

c-span.org. >> the university of chicago institute of politics recently hosted a discussion on the future of conservativism. topics included challenges facing the republican party, potential candidates, and winning votes of young people. this is an hour and 15 minutes. >> republicans won a sweeping electoral victory last november yet many americans struggle to identify with an affirmative party message. these leaders collaborated to write room to grow, a manifesto for a reformatory agenda that makes conservativism work for the middle class. the commentators refer to the intellectual resurgence of the republican party, referring to our guests today. i have no doubt you will soon see why. our first panelist is andrew kelly the director of the

center on higher education reform at the american enterprise institute. he researches higher education policy including financial aid reform. dr. kelly is a prolific author whose work has appeared in publications ranging from the american journal of education to the atlantic. yuval levin is a fellow at the ethics and public policy center and holds a variety of positions chief among themmed tore of national affairs. he served on the domestic policy staff of the bush white house and earned his ph.d at the university of chicago. he recently published the great debate, thomas payne and the birth of right and left. april ponnuru is a veteran capitol hill staffer and policy director for the net whork wii published the room to grow essays. she served in both senate and house leadership including as senior adviser to senator roy blunt of missouri. previously she served as executive director of the nonprofit national review institute.

her husband, ramesh ponnuru, is a senior editor at the national review volume umist for bloomberg view, and visiting fellow at the institute. ramesh is one of the most respected commentators in washington and his work can be found in the "new york times," "wall street journal," and many other places. ramesh is a fellow from 2013 and we are thrilled to have him back. last but certainly not least our moderator this evening is megan mcardle, a bloomberg view columnist who writes on economic, business and public policy and is behind the popular blog asymetric information. she is currently completing her term as an i.o.p. fellow. we have a ton of talent here today. please welcome me in welcoming the participants. [ applause] >> so i'm going to start off by asking you a question, ramesh. 2014 was a great year for republicans. right? we had maybe not a tsunami but certainly like a decent,

sizable wave. i say we as a nation not personally as a republican. why does conservativism need to be reformed? >> first of all, it's okay to say you're republican if you are. well, you know, i think that one thing that wps should have learned from recent years that its mid-term electorate looks very different from the presidential electorate. and you can be very good at winning elections without having what it takes to win presidential elections. that's for a couple reasons. one, it is easier to get people to let you apply the brake peddle than to give you control of the steering wheel. presidential elections i think the public thinks of as much more steering wheel elections and they need to know that republicans want to take them somewhere they want to go before they'll do that.

>> so the metaphor about driving the car. >> right. yeah. >> the other thing is that there's always been a demographic distinction between who turns out in mid terms and who turns out in presidential elections. where for example you have the mid-term electorate is older and wiser for example. in recent years that demographic distinction has taken on a much more partisan cast than it used to. we now i think have a structural feature of our politics where republicans tend to out perform in mid terms and democrats in presidential elections. you don't need to reform anything if you're a republican who is fine with having congressional majority. it's easy to keep the house majority relatively speaking. it's a little harder but still quite do-able to take a senate majority. you've got to reach a little further if you want to form a governing center right majority in this country which is what i would be interested in. >> so i'll go to you since you

are with the yg network fearless leader. what is reform conservativism, yuval? i mean, is it a bunch of different ideas? is it merely a sense we need to reform conservativism and, okay, let's do it? or is there some coherent core here that is a kind of philosophy? >> i think we're very comfortable in the conservative tradition. i don't think we're offering anything new. the principles that conservativism has established for a long time certainly in the last few decades are principles we're comfortable and feel need to be expanded upon. i think what reform conservativism is is the effort to apply those principles to the problems that we face today. so, you know, where conservatives or republicans have often had an agenda that focuses on bringing down the top marginal tax rate, right which was in a prereagan --

we're talking about a 70% raise. there was a real urgent need at the time to bring that rate down. you know, reagan saw that need and he prioritized -- he applied the conservative principles that we believe in to that situation and said, look. we need to bring this rate down. dramatically. he did and he was effective. partly because we were successful a lot of our agenda has become rather outdated. we haven't been responding to the challenges of our day. and so conservativism has tried to bring to bear the principles we believe in to the particular policy challenges that we face as a nation today. >> so you've all -- talk a little bit, yuval, what are the core policy challenges republicans aren't addressing now or aren't addressing effectively now and need to be? >> well, i agree entirely in what april said. i think it's important that --

i'm not sure where the term conservativism came from. i think of it as a reforming conservativism. our target is not conservativism but the government and the nation's challenges and what's required to address those as reform of our governing institutions and a lot of public policy. so it is applied conservativism. and what that means in practice, it seems to me is a modernization of conservativism's understanding of the challenges the country faces. i don't think it's a change in how we as conservatives need to think about solving public problems. i think it's a change in what we understand those problems to be. and so if as you say in 1981 a lot of conservatives like to live there, the problems had to do with hyperinflation and with high marginal income tax rate, today the challenges have more to do with the consequences of globalization for working americans. they have more to do with stagnating wages. they have more to do with the

pressures that middle class families confront. to the extent we want to talk about tax reform i think the tax burden is especially heavy as a result of the payroll tax and not the income tax for most americans. it means thinking about how conservative ideas need to be applied to contemporary challenges. the most difficult thing for both parties now i think is to see the present. to look beyond the to-do list they both had for such a long time and actually think about what the country's to do list ought to be. a lot of democrats like to live in the mid 1960's. a lot of republicans like to live in the early 1980's because those are times when it seemed like they had something real to offer and the country saw it too. the country doesn't live there in either of those times and you just can't pretend that they do. i think the fact that both parties are trying so hard to pretend is why so many americans are frustrated with politics. >> i look at the list of things that reagan got done, you know, he lowered taxes and regulations not so much. >> yep.

>> i want to go to the end of our -- back there -- hi. >> hi. >> and talk a little bit about republican antiintellectualism. this is a charge that gets labeled a lot is that there -- sort of rather than having an education policy sort of reflectively anti the academy and all of that represents including coming up with policy. can you talk a little about that? is it true? is it fair? >> i think it is. when i >> one of them is lefty faculty and permissive norms on campus. this started with reagan, as governor of california. this is his take on berkeley. he described or jis that are beyond description or something. that was the way he described what happened on campus at berkeley. >> which also served as are as a recruiting device.

>> right. you're going to look on a college campus and you're going to see these departments of, you know underenrolled majors, ethnic studies women's studies and so on. that's going to be something to a mainstream conservative that they're not going to be interested in or interested in subsidizing, for that matter. that's one of the traditional talking points on it. for me, that's a symptom of a much larger problem rierkts? problem, right? and that is a market that doesn't function effectively, so that consumers can say, you know, i don't want to go learn from a professor that's going to fill my mind with all sorts of nonsense and things that are going to, you know, make my parents blush, right? instead, your only choice these days as an up ab-and-coming high school graduate is to go off to a four-year college and enroll in a place -- if you want to get ahead -- enroll in a place that happens to be populated with

that type of faculty. but, again, that's a function of a market that rewards that kind of behavior and that sort of product, because, you know, there are -- there's not a broader array of options open to people. and so i think we get bogd down in the -- bogged down in the politics this sort of hand-to-hand combat over lib lism on campuses -- liberal lism on campuses. >> is that preventing republicans, though, from having the kind of resources that as policy advisors, the democrats can draw deep into the academy and the republicans have a small handful of republicans conservatives at any given university? >> i think the question of anti-intellectualism and the right is a very complicated question. it's not as simple as a lot of people make it out to be.

>> there's this attitude about the academy and there's the actual academy which justifies a lot of that. >> i don't think reagan was wrong to say that. >> not always here in chicago but sometimes. and in a lot of other places. i do think that that has meant that, as you say, conservatives have not been able to draw on the academy in the same way. so i run a quarterly journal of essays about public policy. and a lot of the people who write for us are people who ought to be academics but aren't. their people who are think tanks when they'd rather be teaching on wall street. the reason is they think they can't be academics, because they're conservatives. in some cases, they're right. i think in a lot of cases they're not right. but that's an attitude that's very prevalent on the right.

that's why conservatives seem to rely more on think tanks and liberals more on universities. i think there's a huge advantage for that on the left, because universities seem to offer more credibility as a think tank. but it is a reality. my own attitude about the academy is different from a lot of conservatives. i think there's an enormous amount of very valuable work being done in the social sciences. what there's not is the just amazing generalists the extraordinary learned intellectual that even through the 1960's and into the 1970's, we saw in the american academy. and they played a big part in the development of conservatism in america. that person is really hard to find now. that person would have a very hard time getting and keeping an academic job. that es a fault of the university -- that's a fault of the university and has not been any better for the university than it has been for conservatives. but there are a lot of great

specialists. there's a lot of good work being done. and there's a lot of useless things and that's just the nature of the thing. >> thank flip, -- thankfully unlike journalism. i'm going to throw out a list of issues that are kind of like the big issues people are talking about right now. health care, immigration inequality, family formation climate change. which of those does this address effectively and which of them doesn't? do we not yet have a -- >> well, one dimension of reform conservatism is an attempt to supply effective, politically effective answers for conservatism about the issues that most americans care about. and in part, that involves reorienting the conversation to the issues most americans care about. that was an interesting list that you put out there. i mean, if you think about the conversation in washington d.c. over the last two years, how much of it has been about

immigration or inequality or climate change? issues that, on a good day will get a combined 6% of the american public saying that's the top issue, that congress ought to be thinking of. and the issues that americans really want to focus on are the bread and butter concerns about the cost of living, about wage stagnation. health care is definitely one of them. but they don't -- you know, they don't think about it, these issues, in the ideological concerns that the left and right do. they like smaller government. it's not their top priority, gusting smaller government. they don't like inequality. it's not a high priority for them. what they really want is rising standard of living for people in the middle of the income spectrum. and that's what i think we're talking about. now, i think -- you know, i have my own views about each and every one of the issues that you discussed. >> you're kidding?

>> no. but i think that it's very easy to for political activists and actors to get caught up in the issues that animate us and lose sight of the issues that are of foremost concern to the people. >> april, why do we end up focused on these things? >> partly, it's the folks that screen us in -- scream the loudest in washington get the most attention. you've got big parts of your base that are concerned about certain issues that the general public just isn't that worried about. you know i think this is the case with, you know, the inequality issue in particular. i mean, i think that's something that -- i want to say it's somewhere around 3% of the public says that's a top issue for them. but that is certainly -- you've certainly seen it in more than 3% of the news coverage. it's the kind of thing that we inside the beltway types, just

tend to respond to each other a whole lot. >> in fairness, if you're a journalist making a modest sum and living in new york or d.c. with hedge fund managers, it's a very pressing issue. you ever tried to get your child into a really good preschool? >> higher income is not rich yet. >> so andrew, actually, income mowability is that -- mobility, is that a big issue for people? >> one of the more interesting things we've seen over the past year is actually a pivot on the part of democrats as well away from some of those rhetoric around inequality, around toward rhetoric of opportunity. i think that's a much more appealing frame to most people. and i think you can't have a conversation about that today without talking about education and particularly what happens after you graduate from high school.

>> realistically, i feel like we've been pounding get more kids through college. i think we need to get more through high school. like this is an evergreen, from every political campaign forever and ever. what do we do now different than what what we have -- >> i think the interesting thing is that both parties have been guilty of this problem. democrats' natural inclination is to try to solve the problems with schools and colleges from washington. they can't do that. they can pass laws that ask the bureaucracy to write rules that are supposed to impact the way states and local districts and colleges do their work. george w. bush fell into this same trap with "no child left behind." this is a very prescriptive attempt to fix schools from d.c. i think that what my colleague

and i try to lay out in room to grow is a different way of thinking about the federal role. and it is the antithesis of centralizing power over decision making in washington and to send it out to actors closer to the problem on ground, who can actually solve problems, and as you've also seen, in his i wonderful chapter, allow people to, through trial and error figure out better ways to solve the problems they face in their local area, their school district and their particular school. have washington kind of retreat from that, but bear in mind the need to create space for problem solvers to do their work. finishes. >> you've said some great stuff about leaving more space for institutions that aren't the government and viewing, instead of the -- in modern political discourse, we tend to view either there's the big federal

government, maybe a little state government, and everything else is this individual sphere, and there's almost nothing in between. republicans have long talked a great game about decentralization and all the rest of it. yet you look at bush's signature achievements, the iraq war and "no child left behind," which are both these -- first of all, why don't republicans put their money where their mouth is and how do you change that? >> yeah. i think part of it is thinking beyond this question of evolution exactly. this also gets to your prior question about the subjects we take up. i think, in some ways, the place where we can be most useful is not in deciding what subjects ought to be taken up, because that's not up to us anyway, but in thinking about how to approach public problems. i think there's a great difference between the left and right in america on the question of how to approach public problems, where there's an inclination on the left, as you say, and it's rooted in progressive thinking that's very interesting and serious although i think a lot of

contemporary progressives don't really wrestle with that thinking very much, that suggests that we ought to think about american society as consisting of individuals and a state. and that the role of the state is to enable those individuals to live the lives they want to lead. this is not a crazy idea and it's a very appealing idea. but conservatives emphasize what happens in the space between those two, between the individual and the state, where our families are, where our civic institutions are religious institutions where the market economy is and where levels of government below the federal government are. we emphasize that, not just because we don't like the federal government, but rather, because it seems to us that that's actually where people thrive that that's how you solve problems, is hand to hand and faits to face -- and face to face. it's going to have to be able to address people's concerns where they are. and that means that there is an important role for government, but the role for government is a supporting role, an enabling

role to enable those institutions in that space between the individual and space, mediating institutions to help people solve problems they have. and if you think about how things happen in that space, conservatives often talk about this, and it turns some people off because it seems like we're just saying put money in the middle of it and it will work out. but it's not about money and markets in that sense. it's about markets as problem-solving mechanisms. you can think about it quite apart from markets. if you think about how you solve problems from the bottom up, you allow people to experiment with different solutions. you allow people who need help to choose from among those options. and you allow the options that aren't chosen to fall away, to fail. that's how markets work. it's true. markets create an enormous economic incentive for things to work that way. there'sthe consumer has a lot of power and can choose among options the one that best suits their needs.

and things that don't work go away. government programs don't work this way at all. regulation does not allow for experimentation. there's a solution and it's prescribed generally. the people who are receiving a receive don'tservice don't choose among options, even though we know and everybody agrees that it doesn't work. a lot of what people are calling reform conservatism seems to me to be an effort to move from that latter kind of welfare state model to that former more market-oriented model. it's not about markets in the sense of money. it's about a way of solving problems that enables those institutions to function that enables people to try different things that enables people who need help to choose from among other options and that enables it to fail. that's what the conservative approach to health care looks like. that's what our approach to higher education looks like. it's what a lot of our kind of welfare reform ideas kind look like.

how would that apply to spacex? it seems to me that's more of a way for us to be useful than which problems should we look at and what is the conservative solution. it's a different way of thinking about how government ought to solve problems. >> i think this creativity and the markets that you all are talking about, it's just much more in step with the times. it's interesting that liberals are really out of step, these sort of technocratic don't tend to yield the kind of flexibility that american consumers can enjoy from the private sector, from civil society, where, you know, the rest of our lives has become for customizable and leaner and more responsible to individual concerns, government continues in this sort of nonresponsive, top-down way that is not -- it's really

interesting that, you know, that conservatism is really where there's room for creativity. >> so let me ask you, shifting gears a little bit but not entirely, you know the big movement in conservatism that has been noticeable in the past few years is the tea party. and how much do they contribute to this? you know, you get the establishment versus the tea party. and is the tea party about this kind of like opening up space experimentation, et cetera, or are they something simpler and different? >> well, i think that -- you know, i wouldn't say the reform conservatives or that i myself would fall squarely in the tea party or establishment camp on the right. i think each has elements of the truth but neither is quite there. >> so which group has which element? >> well, i think a party tends

to be more realistic about means, the means of achieving things but sometimes different as to ends. and you've got the reverse set of virtues and vices for the tea party. i am struck by the extent to which the division between tea partyers and the establishment just doesn't have any policy content to it at all. and i think the tea partyers, they have a healthy reaction against the idea of a republican party that is just solely about keeping the fortune 500 happy. but they don't have a lot in the way of ideas about well, what exactly are we going to do about health care, about higher education? but the other doesn't either. one of the reasons i'm sort of actually hopeful having just sketched this rather dismal picture, the one reason i'm hopeful is i do think at some point, candidates, particularly presidential candidates, after an eight-year presidency, have to run on something. and nobody else is offering

something. so maybe some. to our ideals will catch on. >> so i'm going to just skip -- you're the education guy and the youth. i figure you know what the kids these days are up to, the youth. this has been a big thing. what we were talking about earlier is the idea that increasingly democrats are the party of the young. minorities and single women. republicans have everyone else. unfortunately, many of those people have a very low, you know, very rapid mortality rate in the near future. [laughter] so is there hope? i mean, is this the sort of thing that actually speaks to this? is this the sort of thing -- my understanding is that, look you pick up someone when they're 24 or you pick someone up the first time they vote, you're likely to have their vote forever. what are the issues that speak to the kids these days? >> so i i think, on the higher ed

side in particular, i think it's tough for republicans now mainly because democrats have turned this into studenten loans in particular -- student loans and student debt -- into a campaign issue. it's at the center of the agenda. elizabeth warren, as soon as her refinancing student loan refinancing bill went down, it didn't make it through, she went to kentucky to campaign against mitch mcconnell and said he's siding with millionaires over students. and democrats are giving young college-educated people -- they want to give young college-educated people subsidies. this is a strategy we've seen for two consecutive election seasons. we want to give you lower interest rates. we want to allow you to refinance your loan. that's a stimulus package for the college educated, right? and it's a tough thing to answer on the part of republicans. i do think that there's a

population in the middle of -- not necessarily the youth vote. but i'd say like early 20's and mid-20's. people who have some college and no degree. they often have debt. they've been sort of let down by this system. and they need something. they need some option that is not as time-consuming and not as expensive as a full college degree. and they need something. i think that's a segment of the population that's big. it's 20%, 25% of the country that could easily be wooed by some of the ideas that we talk about in the book. more flexibility, the ability to jump into higher ed and out right? quickly, when you need new skills, jump back out. we're going to help you pay for some of that. those ideas, i think are very compelling, could be very compelling to that group. >> i want to jump in to make a broader point. i think there is a mistake

which is to slice the electorate into these demographic groups in a misleading way. so after the 2012 election there was a lot of talk about how republicans were doing poorly among three or four groups in particular hispanics single women, young people and to a lesser degree white voters without college degrees. and then when you do that people then jump to thinking, there's a group-specific reason that needs to be addressed. so with these single women, it's the contraception mandate. with the young people, it's same-sex marriage. those play a role. but i think the thing that people often underestimate is that each one of those groups is more economically insecure than the national average. each of those groups is having trouble getting good jobs having trouble affording health insurance. in many cases having trouble

paying off student loans. and each of those groups, when you survey them, they put economics at the top of their list. and so even if you were to solve those group-specific problems, if you don't have a compelling message on the bread and butter concerns, you're going to underperform with each of those groups, because they're needier groups. >> it's very directly to look at fdr. basically took up the african-american vote, which has been much more republican, despite the fact that he did nothing on civil rights, right? he picked up a huge portion of that vote by answering economic needs, like they were especially hard-hit by the great depression and so the feeling he was doing something about their needs. >> the one thing that i would add to that is on -- especially on the higher ed side, a lot of the policy for both of the -- that the democrats are putting forward are actually fundamentally regress sieve. they reward the college educated. they want states to spend more

on higher education, but that doesn't go to students who need it most. it goes to the flagship campuses where the most affluent kids in the state are going. there's a window here for republicans to call that out and say this isn't right. we want to do something different. >> let me ask april one last question which is how much headway this is making in washington. do we actually have a reform conservative presidential candidate who is coming sometime? >> well, i mean, i certainly hope so. that's certainly one of our goals, i think, is to effect that field, which is bigger by the day. you know there have been a few champions on the hill that we pay particular attention to. >> can you name names? >> yeah. mike lee in the senate has just been a phenomenal idea generator. he's got -- he's talked about everything from higher ed to taxes to health care. so he's just a really phenomenal

talent in the senate, new blood in the senate. marco rubio has been outstanding. also introduced a lot of legislation, is working on more. they're in fact teaming up at the moment on a tax proposal we're looking forward to. paul ryan has been doing good work in the house. so i guess i've named two potential presidential candidates there. we've got guys that have been around for a long time too who are frefd interested in this stuff. orrin hatch just gave a great speech on constitutionalism as well. i think some of the more talented politicians in wawks arewashington are paying attention to this. there's just frankly not a lot of places to turn, and we're happy to fill that vacuum obviously. so, you know, we're encouraged. there's a lot of interest that's been generated.

this book, we didn't expect the kind of attention we got. and i think it was remarkably successful for being a pretty modest effort. but that's what you get when you get smart guys like this working on a project. >> on that happy note, i am going to open up to the floor. there's a mic that will circulate. please speak into the microphone. also, please raise your hand so i can call on you. >> hi. thank you so much for coming. my question is regarding the last topic that you were talking about, specifically about paul ryan. i can't remember who -- is paul ryan too smart to run for president? this picture of him giving a speech on the house floor with charts and tables. not like ted cruz. i guess my question is, is that a real trap, you know that these reform conservatisms can fall into, and how do they

combat that? >> do voters hate charts? ha ha! i'll just say one thing quickly and i'll turn it over to these guys. my sense is that, you know, the smarter guys who are going to be running for president know that they can't keep doing more of the same. it just hasn't been successful. the last presidential election was -- there wasn't much of a conservative agenda offered. i think those who are looking at -- how many cycles has it been now that we haven't run the popular vote? >> five of the last six. >> right. you just can't continue this. this formula is not working. i think that the smarter ones are going to realize there's something in common here. we need to develop a more rigorous you know, agenda. i think it's really important that conservatives -- you know

because we believe in limited government and we're sort of often portrayed and often portray ourselves as being like anti-government, there's a sense that a lot of folks don't want to get too in the weeds on policy like that's a nonconservative thing to do, if you know too much about things, then we have suspicions about you. i just think that's wrong. and we've got to confront that you know. ryan has got an excellent reputation in the house amongst his colleagues. i think that's for good reason. they recognize something in him. he's doing the hard work of policy-making and understanding the problems that we face today and the situation we find ourselves in, which is like a bloated government full of, you know, a gazillion programs that need reform. and nobody has got -- i mean, if you want to dismantle that, if you want to change that, you've got to understand it. and, you know, i think ryan is a

popular guy nationwide, you know, with the conservative base. and so i think that intellectualism doesn't concern me. >> so no plans to issue room to grow as a pop-up book? >> yeah. exactly. yeah. >> slide show? anyone else have -- >> i think it's a good question. seems to me that, well, there are a couple of questions it brings up. i think, first of all that part of what we're trying to do is not so much to find a candidate who will be a champion for these ideas exactly as a whole but to enrich the policy conversation on the right in general. so that different candidates can take different ideas from among these and can take this way of thinking and try to approach the public this way. i think it's very strange that the model of paul ryan has not been followed by other members of the house. it's been incredibly successful for him. it got him on the blessed

presidential ticket. he did it basically by being a nerd. that's what he did. and it's not actually that hard. he picked an issue, became an expert. you know, it took him a while. and he's very smart. but plenty of people are smart. and he decided that he was going to make a name for himself by offering concrete policy ideas. it got him very far very quick. he's still quite young. he's about to become the most important committee chairman in the house, way out of seniority because members just think yeah, of course he should be chairman of the ways and means. it's strange to me that there are a not a lot of other back benchers who think that way, thinking i could become an expert in this or that. it's not happening a lot. i think it ought to. >> well, it's not entirely unprecedented, of course. you've got kemp, who really authored, you know, tax reform from a back bench, not even on the relevant committee, if i remember correctly. you've got tim who authored

welfare reform also, so it's been done. it can be done. i disagree. i think it is hard. it is hard work, maybe not for you all, but for the rest of us, it's hard work. but, you know, it's what you're elected to do, right? and >> i would just say i've been personally very impressed by his work on education in particular, and i think to make a broader point, i think april is exactly right, that there's this suspension of understanding policy details and the nitty-gritty on the right that is sort of bizarre to me. it seems to me to be a critical ingredient of efforts to rein in the federal role in a way that's productive. and if you don't, you know -- if all you want to make is blanket claims about doing away with things that never go anywhere we're not going to get very far. >> you know, the first two years of the obama presidency, there was a lot of talk -- and qubs

subsequently too that republicans have become the party of no. i was very for that at that time. it was far superior to being defined as the party of me too but maybe a little bit less. and i think that it became more important to develop an alternative agenda and present it in 2011, 2012. but it was not crazy for other people to think, you know, why willwhy are you against an incumbent president -- i think there was a lot of evidence that that was a mistake. but there would have been a natural tendency to turn towards forpformulating an agenda as you got closer to the end of a two-term president. i think you're going to see that happen, for example, with senator cruz who, by the way is extraordinary in terms of sheer brainpower.

i mean you may disagree with him. but listen, i've been arguing with him for 20 years. he's a smart guy. and i expect that he and other people are going to develop a positive agenda over the next couple of months because it will just be kind of bizarre to run in 2016 without one. >> i think the last few months have been very different from the last few years, in my own sense. there's a lot of policy ferment on the right. there are more politicians getting to that point in their speech when they should offer something, and thinking, i should offer something. [laughter] >> the first step. other questions? >> how much do i have to worry about rand paul's influence on foreign policy? secondly, pew did a study that found conservatism has never been less popular among young people than it is today. my theory is the fact that republicans can't stop talking about the 80's. you mentioned a lot of younger

republicans. they have a photo of ronald reagan. it's all reagan. and i don't know how you win younger voters when you can't stop talking about days before. i'm wondering when we're going to move on. >> he was great in "bedtime for bonzo." >> kids love that one. i think there's an enormous generational difference between conservatives. in some cases, it's a real philosophical difference. people over 40 are very different from people under 40 and how they think about the constitution the role of judges. very interesting thing. i think even more than that there's a difference between people who remember the reagan years and people who know stories about the reagan years. on the whole not in every way, i think that younger conservatives are more constructive and more inclined to think about policy and the ways we're talking about it here because they're more

inclined to think about the present. and less inclined to want to repeat the ends of the sentences that people started in the 80's. the beginnings of those sentences were great and we should start our sentences that way. we should have the same principles the same commitment to the constitution, the same belief in america, the same optimism, but what it means now has to be a response to what is happening now. that's the first door. and i do think that is changing some among younger conservatives. but it's going to take a while. [inaudible question] >> i don't see how we're going to do better than younger people. >> nature has a way of dealing with that. these are going somewhere. >> are you saying they're going to be cold? >> you know evolution. look i think that a generational shift takes time,

naturally. that's what it is. but the fact that it's the younger people who are thinking more creatively and the older people are not is a good thing because among the democrats, for example, i think the opposite is happening. there are still a lot of people who remember why the new democrats were necessary and maybe are themselves kind of in that mold still. younger liberals tend not to be that way. and they're a lot less realistic and a lot less constructive. i'd rather be in the situation of conservatives at this point, looking to the future. >> i was just going to add, i think that there's a dimension to this sort of crony capitalist corporate welfare side of this debate that i think could appeal to people who would normally maybe shade to the left, saying, hey, wait -- and this has been a big talking point. >> i wanted to get to that. >> they've been all over this and our colleagues. that, to me, is just this natural issue for people who are

sort of suspicious by nature of big business right? to sort of line up behind some of that stuff. so i don't -- i'm not as pessimistic, i would say. >> i am an unapologetic invoker of reagan. he was the most successful republican president of the last century, more politically successful than any president since him in the sense that,ing,ing look our last three presidents have all taken office with their party in control of congress and left office with their party completely out of control of congress. and the white house flipping as well. so we should learn from them but we should learn from the real reagan, not the mythological reagan. one of the points steve makes -- he's written a two-volume history of reagan and his times -- is that reagan rarely made it a big selling point with the public at large that he had a program that conformed to conservative philosophy, even though we largely did.

he had a program that developed from conservative philosophy but he advertises to the public on the basis of its practical advantages. you're going to have lower crime rates, lower inflation, so on and so forth. and i think a lot of today's reagan invokers don't follow his example. they just drop his name in >> they're much more concerned with ideological purity and sort of i think maintaining this standard. i mean -- >> reagan was an innovator. >> right. it also goes to what rameesh was talking about, where there's this difference between the tea party and the establishment. i mean, so much of this is tactical and, you know, attitudeinal. unfortunately we've gotten to this place where a lot of our conservative players -- the people who much came up with many of the ideas and are much more concerned with these tactical fights than than they are

with developing policy. it's interesting. >> that's how you end up with the debate season we had in the presidential primaries last time, where a lot of the time it's a competition of who can say it louder. >> right. >> you call it the party of goldwater versus the party of reagan liberty versus the party of actually talking ant about people and how all of this affected them individually. >> it was also really uninteresting, for people who were interested in policy, it was just really uninterested. >> when 999 is the biggest policy proposal -- >> it's not a good sign. >> other questions? plenty over here. >> thank you. the book mentions making tax cuts for families where they need them most. what would that look like in practice? and do you think there's any room for maybe incentives for mothers who want to stay at home to raise their children, incentives for families to

operate economically in the way that they see fit instead of punishing women who want to stay home women or men who want to stay home and have single-income families? >> well, you know, the cost of raising families has increased. and the tax code does, i think a very poor job of recognizing the extent to which raising children is an investment in the future. i mean, we say that as a kind of rote sentiment. but it actually is financially in part an investment in the future of the country and in our future taxpayers. and i think the tax code ought to recognize that fact. i don't believe we should be providing incentives for mothers or fathers to stay home with the kids. i do think we should be enabling families to make the decisions they want to make, whether that is -- you know, a lot of government subsidies in the child care area flow towards

commercial day care. that is something that a lot of families like to use. however, it is in general the least favored form of child care for american families, and i would say, if you extend the child credit, which is a very popular proposal with almost every group in the american public you are allowing people to make these decisions. does one parent want to scale back to part-time work and spend more time with the family? do they want to use it to purchase child care, supplementary educational services? you leave those choices up to the families by providing them with tax relief. s that, i think, in a certain sense, a very traditional conservative answer, and it ought to be provided in this form now. >> a traditional conservative answer is not being directed to the right question where the problem that exists now is different from the problem that existed 35 years ago. when you think about how to

provide people with tax relief today, what does milz middle class tax relief look like? for most people, the payroll a tax is a huge tax burden. and for many americans, almost most, it is the only tax burden they actually have at the federal level. they don't have an income tax liability. but conservatives do not talk about the payroll tax as a target for tax relief. and try to kind of shield it off from conversations about tax degreescredits and tax reform. it should be at the center of those discussions. >> just to be clear, the child credit i'm talking about would apply against the payroll taxes so it would be a form of payroll tax relief. >> exactly. it's very important in that sense, because you have to talk to people about problems they face, not just about an abstract economy out there. >> if you get really rich you're going to be paying more taxes. >> it's a better incentive to get rich. there's a tendency in general

for conservatives to talk about the economy in very abstract terms. it's not crazy. economic growth has to be there as a foundation for everything else to work out. if we don't have economic growth, then a lot of the other problems we have become much worse. and a lot of the solutions we offer are insufficient. but we also need to help people with the problems they face and to help them understand what we're offering in terms of the problems they face. >> they did some polling on many of the ideas found in the book. and it was remarkable, on expanding the child credit not only was it overwhelmingly popular with the public but with so many of those item demographic groups, it did really, really well. for example, you might not intuitively think that, you know, single women would care that much about ex and expanding the child credit for, you know -- which we've sort of described as being for families but would

certainly be applicable to women who have children without a spouse at home. wildly popular with single women. very popular with minority groups. you know, it's one of those questions that gets to those economic concerns that underlie a lot of the insecurities that are felt most acutely by these demographic groups that we worry about in electoral politics. >> we have two questions in the back. the one on the right first. >> this is about the conservative anti-intellectualism you were talking about earlier, so excuse my interps of interpretation of what you were saying. what i heard that is that the market that encourages the students to go off to college is dominated by liberal thinkers in getting degrees that aren't very important. what would you say the correction for that is whether or not that's an accurate

depiction of what is actually happening? >> i think that's a fine paraphrase of what i said. i would probably only add to that that i think part of the problem is that people can't tell what the value of a particular degree is, and what -- you know, whether it's going to pay off in the long run, down the line partly because we don't have that information readily available to them. so, you know, markets are such that there are always going to be people who want to buy that silly major, right? these people are going to just do it. i think the republican governors, for instance, one in florida comes to mind, have sort of made a mistake about making this "we want more s.t.e.m. majors and less anthropologists," right? to me, that sounds more like central planning in bucharest than it does like a market-based response. but i would say, what i think

the federal government should aim to do is to inform consumers in a way that allows them to make judgments about the product that they're investing in. and simultaneously to lower barriers to entry, to let in new providers who are offering a different product. right now, the accreditation system the accreditors that come to credit chicago, they probably go to credit chicago state. probably the same group. and they both probably bear the same seal of approval. at the same time, so it keeps chicago state in business. not a very good college. at the same time it keeps out somebody who would want to compete with chicago or with chicago state that may be offering something different that may not be, you know, staffed by traditional faculty. these are exams examples of the policies that have been in place for a long time that are actually preventing consumers

from making informed choices and from competition and preventing competition from taking root in this market in a way that drives cost down and drives quality up. so... >> in the back row, there was another gentleman. >> this question is somewhat related to that one. primarily directed to mr. kelly. you had said earlier on that part of the problem with higher education is students are often choosing to study things or forced to study things that don't make any sense or studying nonsense. you said -- yes. fill their heads with nonsense. part of my question is, how is it that students starting out can distinguish between things that are nonsense and ideas that really matter, particularly in the liberal arts or certainly areas of social sciences where part of the purpose of education is to be able to make those kind of distinctions to begin with? i guess my worry is that conservatives take a

market-driven approach. you talked about making investments in majors to see how they pay off. but i was wondering if there was anything within sort of reform conservatism that recognizes the intrinsic value of knowledge and the potential nonmarket values of knowledge and that having market-driven solutions could degrade and devalue the very important nonmarket values that come with higher education? >> speaking as an english major i really want to hear the answer to this. >> so i should have prefaced my comment about nonsense by saying i was a history major and took plenty of classes that didn't equip me to be a think tank wonk like i am now. i'm not one who choose superrationally what they were going to do with their time in college. what i would say is that i think there's a distinction. so what i -- where i would draw the line is there's a distinction between what the government is going to subsidize and spend money on, especially in the case of student loans

right? as a lender, the federal government wants toen ensure that the -- wants to ensure that the money they're lending out gets paid back. that's a fiduciary responsibility of the taxpayers. i think, above and beyond that, a market would reward -- a proper market would reward a lot of the nonpecuniary benefits of higher education that you're describing. so i think those things would still exist. but as a taxpayer, the question i have is whether i'm subsidizing, you know, and lending money to people to study things that i'm going to wind up being on the hook for when they default. that's where i would draw the line. i think taxpayers have a slightly different interest than students themselves. i think you raise an excellent point. and we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that education is about more than just earning power. it's about creating an educated citizenry. it's about creating art and

music and all sorts of other wonderful things. i just get concerned when the federal policies that we have currently encourage investment in any program at any price and don't -- you know, and don't distinguish between things that have value in a labor market and don't. >> i have a slightly different perspective from andrew but i think one that's complementary. i think maybe the biggest problem with the way our society and our government to approaches higher education is that we essentially tell people that if they don't go to a traditional four-year collegiate institution, they're losers, especially economically. they're not going to be successful. and i think that is misguided inefficient and just plain cruel. and one of the secondary problems that has arisen from it, i don't think it has done no

favor to the ideas of a liberal arts education. so i think not only do we need to keep in mind that knowledge and reflection are intrinsic goods, i think actually in a way decoupling the economic imperatives from these institutions actually ends up helping. >> let me say too, i entirely agree with that. and i think it's important to see that people who want to defend the liberal arts -- and i would say i studied political philosophy in college. and then to become more practical, went to the university of chicago. >> ha ha! >> i have a lot of experience with people calling things nonsense. i don't think that academics who worry about liberal education think enough about the fact that the insanity of the business model of the university is a huge problem for them. the fact that we now have a system that is economically

unsustainable and so under constant economic pressure means they're the first to go, because the fact is, liberal arts education is understood by our society as something like a luxury item. that's a mistake to some extent. it's not entirely a mistake. i think, even if you think properly about the place of a true liberal education in the life of a democracy, i'm in agreement that it is something that will interest a few and it is very important that those few have access to great education. it is not what everybody will be interested in, and that's okay. the question is, how are those few going to have access to great liberal education? and i don't think it's going to be in a system that is under the kind of pressure that our higher education system is under now. and part of what we're talking about when it comes to reforming higher ed is to make the system more sustainable by making it answer people's needs and wants better than it does know. some of those wants are going to involve higher education and liberal education, the kind of

liberal education that you would get here and other places. it's very important to some people. that means that it is a market that will be served. and we shouldn't simply think of it as a market in economic terms. but i don't think of markets in general in purely economic terms. markets are ways of allocating resources and allowing people to find what they want. and some of what people want is this kind of a an educated citizenry. and b, access to truth and to beauty and to the sorts of things that a lot of people at this university seek. i think that today's higher education system is the enemy of those people. and they need to see that. they're going to be the ones who have to go first. and the kinds of solutions that andrew offers, i think, could be very did for liberal education -- good for liberal education. they involve allowing people to seek what they want to make it sustainable economically. there's no getting away from economics when we talk about higher education.

>> i think this is the last question. since we haven't -- sir? >> here in cook county, we had thethe lowest voter turnout in about 70 years. this was echoed in other places in the country, especially if we're talking about a market approach. how do we know what citizens want if so few of them are participating in the process? how can we really make accurate statements about what we're going to do in the future or where we're going to go if so few people are interested in participating? >> would we know even if they did participate? anyone want to -- >> it's a great question. i think our democratic system is a way of legitimizing government power, which is essential, necessary. it's why our government is a legitimate government. it's not necessarily a way of figuring out what everybody wants. there are other ways. it's one of the ways we have to figuring out what everybody wants. other ways include markets. other ways include everything we do in society.

they're always pursuing what we're after. obviously our political system -- well, maybe it's not obvious. but to my mind, our political system would work a lot better if more people participated. i think republicans have been very bad about this, and have at least allowed a lot of the public to have the impression that they want fewer people to vote, which is nuts and shouldn't be what they want. that's not to say if everybody voted, we would know what everybody wants. you're voting among two options neither of which is probably what anybody wants. our system is never going to be a way of answering that question. but it is a way of answering questions about what our government should look like. i think more people should be involved in offering those answers. people in public life should want more people to be involved and more people to be voting. that should be everybody's goal in a democracy. >> i would just add, i think this is partly why it's critical, why some of the market-based ideas are critical for people being able to express their preferences, because if you have -- you know, if you

have low voter turnout and one party wins, and they happen to be a part of the one that wants to impose the "one size fits all" policy option uniformly across the entire population, you have a huge segment of the population that yes, maybe they didn't come out and vote but now they're being stuck with something is that doesn't necessarily match their preferences. it's just another avenue for people to vote with their feet and have their preferences met by their government. >> obamacare is a good example that never had majority support in the country. never has. >> and to close with something we were talking about earlier to the extent that washington and the political class in general is talking about things that are of intense interest to the political class but not as much to the public at large, i think that becomes less of a reason for people to get interested in vote because they're not being offered anything that makes them want to get up. >> none of the above is not a

crazy decision in our political system. >> our goal, i think, should be growing our total numbers. when you hear a lot about, you know, that we need to win more women or we need to win more -- whatever segment of the population, my response to this is always, no. we just need more. we just need more votes. doesn't really matter where they come from. and one of the most obvious ways to do that is just to grow the pie. and i think there's just a lot of votes out there that we're not asking for. >> on that note, i think this has been a great panel. thanks to all of you guys for talking about this for an hour and 15 minutes. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014]

>> quay is ten years old -- q&a is ten years old. to mark a decade of compelling conversations, we're featuring one interview from each year of the series. today, dan reed, director of the documentary "terror and mumbai" about the terror attacks in 2008 where more than 175 people were killed and 300 wounded. his movie tells the story using security camera video intercepted telephone calls from the killers and interviews with survivors. q&a is today at 7 p.m. eastern on c-span. tonight on c-span, the first of three nights looking back at

public figures who died in 2014. at 8 eastern the funeral service for the late "washington post" editor ben bradlee. he died in october at age 93. one of the speakers at the funeral was carl bernstein, who talked about white house efforts to get the "washington post" to kill one of its stories on watergate. >> on september 23, 1972, about 9:00 p.m., i reached john mitchell, president nixon's former campaign manager, by phone about a story we were running. it said he had controlled the secret fund for undercover operations such as watergate. mitchell was quite upset responding jesus! several times, as i read him the story. he then proceeded to threaten an important private part of katherine graham's anatomy which he said would get caught

in a big, fat ringer, if the post printed the story. he also said "we're gonna do a story on all of you." and he hung up the phone. i called ben at home. woodward and i did not much observe the chain of command. ben interrogated me. had mitchell been drinking? i couldn't tell. did i properly identify myself? yes. did i have good notes? yes. okay ben said. put in all of mitchell's comments in the paper. but leave out mrs. graham's... tell the desk it's okay, he said. a top official of the nixon campaign, moore, called me a few minutes later to make an appeal that mitchell had been caught in an unguarded moment. he's been a cabinet member, and so forth. he doesn't want to show up in

the paper like that. the official then called bradlee at home to repeat the appeal. bradlee recalled saying, which just boils down to this question mr. moore, of whether mr. mitchell said it or not, and whether the washington post reporter identified himself as a reporter. if he did that, all my requisites have been satisfied. mitchell's comments stayed in the paper. >> you can see all of ben bradlee's funeral service tonight on c-span at 8:00 p.m. eastern. in addition to carl bernstein speakers included tom brokaw and mr. bradlee's children. new year's day on the c-span networks here are some of our featured programs. the washington ideas forum. energy conservation with david crane. business magnate pickens. and inventory dean cayman.

at 4 p.m. eastern the brooklyn historical society holds a conversation on race. then at 8 p.m. eastern, from the explorers club, apollo 7 astronaut walt cunningham on the first manned spaceflight. author hector tobar on the 33 men buried in a chilean mine. and richard smith on the life of rockefeller. and former investigative correspondent for cbs news, sheryl atkinson, on her experiences reporting on the obama administration. new year's day on american history t.v. on c-span 3 at 10 a.m. eastern, juan the role of women in the civil rights movement. at 4 p.m., brooklyn college professor carp on the link between alcohol and politics in prerevolutionary new york city. then at 8 p.m. cartoonist patrick draws ten presidential

caricatures as historian david mccullough discusses the president's and some of their most memorable qualities. new year's day on the c-span networks. for our complete schedule, go to c-span.org. will >> in congress in january will send you a night in elections with 200 47 republicans to 148 democrats. it will be 50 force seats to 44 for the democrats. the oldest member will be john conyers. he was elected in 1964. the youngest is a republican who is 30 years old.

host: for a monday political roundtable, we are joined by liz chadderdon, president of the chadderton group and a democratic consultant, and the republican consultant, phillip stutz. we are about to begin the 2015 where the political headlines will be dominated by the 2016 presidential race, the early jockeying for that race. jeb bush is in the race early. is it a good move by jeff bush and announced that he is actively exploring his run? guest: i think it's a really good move. some people will run in the middle and it outmaneuvered ted cruz. you think about the donor race and that's where you look at it from a consultant standpoint. jeb bush is solidifying his donor base. he will compete in texas with ted cruz and rick perry. he will compete against marco rubio in florida in the donor race. by coming out early, he

solidifies the name brand he has an solidifies his donors. in a way, it pushes them aside from the donor standpoint. in a way, he may have knocked down for five candidates by coming out first. i think it was a smart move. host: a story from "the new york times" -- liz chadderdon, is a good to be first out of the gate in this kind of race? guest: i could not agree more that for jeb bush to come out early and grabbed the middle which is what will be difficult for the republican party because there are so many people running. if you get into the middle and you start to lock down the big donors that are looking for the more establishment candidate you do that early and then you can take a huge leap forward. i think jeb bush was really smart. i think he took the wind out of the sails for governor christie and will hurt senator rubio because it's florida and rick perry.

there are a lot of people who jeb bush has got the jump on that are now going to be struggling more for donors. i think a big one is mitt romney who is still out there thinking he may run again. i think jeb bush takes mitt romney's base. that's probably a big reason why he got in early. host: talk about the 2016 democratic primary field. when will we see a likely hillary clinton announcement? when will more candidates get out early in the race the race is frozen. guest: the race is frozen and is frozen and there's not a race until she makes a decision. an interesting situation that we are waiting for hillary. for two years, my friends and family have in listening to me say i don't think she is going to run. i think i am wrong. i think she will run. she is interviewing staff and i think she is getting ready to

make some announcements. but i don't understand is why she is waiting. i don't understand what benefits are other than she keeping everybody else out. the democratic donors, unlike the republicans, are sitting there with no one coming for them because everyone the democratic party is waiting for her to make a move. host: your thoughts? guest: it's like waiting for goffman. for my republican standpoint, i laugh at this because democrat nominees including hillary represent the old white party were the republican potential nominees have an african-american, to hispanics and an indian which is quite the dynamic. i think what you are seeing in this election cycle is candidates -- they used to come out really early like a day after the midterms and we are seeing more candidates wait. on the republican side, you will see a ton of candidates. they are trying to show up there donor base. joe biden will not get in any time soon and manly will be the first time -- will be the first one in before anybody and elizabeth warren is out there

and has no reason to jump in. hillary does not see the advantage of jumping in right now. i think that's what we are seeing. host: we are talking about the republican democratic primary matchups. if you want to join the conversation with misschadderdo n and philip stutts, the lines are open. you brought up elizabeth warren what are your thoughts on her? do you think she will run? will she have more influence by not running? guest: i think of hillary does not run which is looking less likely but if secretary clinton does not run, elizabeth warren will run. if hillary clinton runs, elizabeth warren does not run and i think it's that simple. i think senator warren is

fascinating right now. she is beginning to represent the populist end of the democratic party. in some ways, is counter to president obama. it's very fascinating. we have seen draft movements not work before. we have seen draft elizabeth warren but we don't know if that would work. i think she is sitting out there and enjoying the limelight i also thank as a get into the republican senate in the new year, i think she really will carve a herself as one of the big populist and more liberal races in the senate like ted kennedy which is the cg occupied. i think that's where she is moving unless secretary clinton does not get in the race. guest: tony robbins talks about one of the most important aspects to success is modeling and i think elizabeth warren is

modeling with the tea party did. when president clinton was elected, we saw the tea party born. this is an economic conservative movement. economic conservatives said we are pulling the party over to the right side on economic policy. i think what you are seeing with senator warren is exactly that on the left. she is saying that president obama has negotiated too much

with republicans and given into much. congress has set by them is not really jumped out and gone against the president on this. i will pull our base back to the left and try to get the party back to the left. host: if you want to join the conversation, the phone lines are open -- we are talking about 2016 and the political landscape ahead and who your favorite candidates are. we want to know who you are supporting. we will start with leslie from maine on our line for republicans. caller: good morning. host: you are on. caller: i'm a hard-core conservative and i went to the republican convention in bangor and i would never support jeb bush because he is too

pro-immigration. i would stay at home before i would vote for him. host: immigration as an issue in the republican primary -- guest: it's a big issue because we have to grow our base. we are losing minority votes. we have the ability to grow and while i would certainly see your point and agree, there has to be some middle ground republicans have to come to or we will lose every single presidential election in the future. there is a lot of different proposals out there and there will be a very robust debate in 2016 amongst the 25 candidates that will run. the jeb bush's stance on immigration is a problem in this party, no doubt about it. is there someone who can come up with a position that meets in the middle that primary voters can accept? that's the key to this race.

immigration will dominate especially the media. they want to talk about this bread they know it's a divide in the party and they will bring it up as often as they can. maybe the goal is the republican congress takes us off the table for presidential nominees in this upcoming fiscal session with the homeland security budget out there but that's the key. can congress take this off the

table and lead republican candidates to talk about something else? host: let's get your thoughts on immigration but i want to point out the latest polling on the republican primary field very early but former florida governor jeb bush is said to have a largely over the republican field according to a new cnn poll. he wins 23% of the republican vote right now well ahead of chris christie who gets 13%. the story noted that conservative ben carson follows chris christie with 7% and former arkansas governor mike huckabee and rand paul coming in at 6%. guest: there is going to be a big, robust argument about immigration and the republican primary. in 2012 we saw this. it was a robust and defying issue. it may even be more so in 2016 specifically because the president has put immigration back on the table. if i'm senator mitch mcconnell of kentucky and taking over the republican senate, i'm sure he's got a list of things that republican presidential candidates wish he would take off the table for them before they really get into 2016, immigration being the top. i don't think senator mcconnell will take up a major immigration restructuring but speaker john boehner says it's dead in the house. i think republicans will have to deal with immigration. philip is right, if the republican party does not recognize the value of a moderate immigration policy, they will continue to lose presidential races.

presidential races are countrywide even though we have an electoral college, they are not state like we saw in the midterm elections. presidential races are countrywide even though we have an electoral college, they are not state like we saw in the midterm elections. a state like california or texas or florida or new york will have a greater impact on presidential elections when you have more minority-based voters coming to the polls. they do not come as often. the republicans have to deal with immigration but you listen to leslie on the phone and there is a hard-core constituency of the ones who show open primaries who have very distinct feelings on this issue. . guest: where we come from is political consulting. we are not talking about whether the policy should be an acted on but where these people should get elected. host: what is your experiment in

the area? guest: i have been on for presidential campaigns. we have had to run these demographic numbers me talk about jeb bush jumping into a lead, i left these articles. all that matters is iowa, new hampshire and north carolina. it's obvious that the jeb bush name has immediate recognition. every republican candidate in some of the democratic candidates will be elevated during this campaign and then they will be brought back down. that is how it always works. herman cain was living the republican primary at one point and got knocked down. nude gingrich was leading in 2012.

everybody leads at some point. iowa was rick santorum. it's who goes into iowa or new hampshire or south carolina and come out of those not killed off enough. the majority of the candidates will be knocked out and they will be a real battle on this which is like the southeastern conference which can be incredibly fascinating. host: you also served as the get out the vote director. liz chatterton was a board member of the executive for the american association of political consultants. they're here to take your questions and comments this morning as we have our political roundtable for the next 45 minutes or so.

illinois on our line for republicans, good morning. caller: good morning i would just like to say that i don't know who participated in this cnn poll or if they announce it to the public. i think it would have turned out differently. if the powers that be want to make jeb bush the republican candidate, they obviously want to throw the presidency back to another democrat because somebody people will stay home. guest: i actually agree with that. "the new york times" article that said donors are trying to decide the primary between jeb bush and chris christie, that's ridiculous. the donors don't ascites primaries. -- don't decide primaries. the article indicated that people who support jeb bush will come out and try to eliminate a lot of the field and the robust debate, that's ridiculous. we need to have a robust debate

and see how they perform in iowa and south carolina and new hampshire so host: it's a valid host: point. let's go to our line for democrats. maxine is waiting in taylorsville, illinois, on the line for democrats. good morning. caller: good morning. i don't believe hillary will run. i have said it all along. i don't believe she will run mainly because of her age and she is an old tired gun and i think she will be involved politically in the democratic cents with everything but as far as running, i don't think she will run but as -- but if elizabeth warren runs, i would definitely vote for her. guest: i could not agree with you more. in many ways, i have not thought that the secretary was going to run but i am starting to change my mind. philip hit on this that we are consultants.

we are not policy makers and we get these folks elected and then we move about our lives. one of the things we look at in pure elections is what is happening behind the scenes. hillary has been interviewing some very high profile political operatives to be her managers. i don't think you make those moves publicly as she has been doing if you are not seriously thinking of running for president. i am surprised that she is not thrown her hat in yet but i don't think you go about interviewing the level of political operatives she's talking about bringing on as a manager if you are not seriously thinking about running. host: if she is running, philip went through the strategy of the early primaries for republicans. talk a through the early primary strategy for hillary clinton. guest: it's interesting because the question is always go to

iowa or not. if i was working for the republican party and i'm not but if i was looking at these more moderate folks who are running like jeb bush, chris christie, i would tell them to skip iowa and go straight to new hampshire. iowa is an insider insider insider process. i have seen up close in personal and it's fascinating but it is the insidery of the insidery. for the republican party the more conservative element in iowa control the process. folks like rick perry or marco rubio or certainly somebody like a rick santorum is going to do very well in iowa. more moderate people like jeb bush or chris christie not so much. i would tell them to go straight to new hampshire where is -- where it is a more open process. on the democratic side it is the opposite for it if you are hillary clinton, go to iowa and rack up a big win. you will have very little opposition most likely.

you understand the process, you didn't eight years ago, and i think you come out of their and can wipe away any opposition as you going to new hampshire. host: does she have the bigger advantage with any insiders game in iowa? guest: she does. this is part of what some people don't like about her. in this case it will play to re-strengthen 2016 but in 2008 it played against her when people were looking for an outsider. they found one and now we are looking more toward who really gets the inside process that we as democrats can trust to still be a good -- a good democrat but run the table and when the election? right now secretary clinton is that candidate. host: a question from twitter -- guest: that's a good question.

it's not going anywhere. you can be disenchanted or get involved in the process. the supreme court has ruled that money and politics is free speech. it has been decided by the cement court and is not going anywhere. it will probably grow between the parties based off of the cromnibus that just passed a few weeks ago. host: what was in there to allow that? guest: it allows the national political party committees to take more than they were able to receive previously. i think it went from $32,500 to [indiscernible] host: will this reassert control from the party committee? guest: that's right. in 2004, i had a long discussion

with the man running the bush campaign and some of the democrats came out with these different organizations that were sort of affiliates or side-by-side with the democratic national committee and we ran everything in the 2014 through the republican national committee for the campaign. he said this election will tell us where the future of money is going to go in politics and will it run through outside groups? over the last 10 years especially with the supreme court decision, it has come from the outside groups on the policy committees diminished. that will change a lot. based off of what just passed. the party committees will have more power and more money. go back to the question -- the money has been deemed free speech. is there to stay. guest: i could not agree more, it's not going anywhere and i can see how it can be disillusioning for people. i completely agree that the law or the amendment in

thecromnibus that was in the recent bill was meant to try to take some power away from the super pac's who have been authorized by the supreme court and are out there running a mock on both sides of the aisle. they are spending millions of dollars with absolutely no accountability to anyone. host: for people who want more transparency, is that a good thing? guest: i think so. it will be easier to look at those reports and see who has donated and where was spent. it's not easy to do that for a super pac right now. when sheldon goldstein propped up the presidential campaign, we all knew about that because the press reported it. that's one incident and we just saw $4 billion spent in the 2014 midterm elections. no one really knows who spent it or where it went. that was on both sides of the aisle. $4 billion.

if people do not like this amount of money, then get involved. $4 billion in the midterm and2/3 of americans stayed home and we saw some of the lowest voter turnout in american history in the midterm election. what does that mean? it means the money is winning but not in the way the money is supposed to be winning. it means the money is chasing people away which you can argue that means people are using less money but that's not the way it will work. americans have to take their money back from the government not let the money win. host: we also have a line for independents. this is from washington, d.c., good morning. caller: good morning i have a question about hillary. i think she will run. i want to know if you think she is giving space and time for her

announcement not just based on keeping it for the other incumbents but for the scandal that was leaked about her towards the end with benghazi and negative press pulled up by some conservative groups? is that why she is waiting to announce her run for the presidency? guest: perhaps, but the bigger question is is she waiting to see if anyone else is really making any moves? i don't know why she is waiting. if i was advising hillary clinton i would tell her to get in and tell her to announce with gusto and tell her to wipe the table clean of anyone else and take all the money and establish yourself as the result of nominee and run for president and the eventual winner for the next two years. i would tell her to go in full throttle and scare everybody else out. she did not really do that in

2008. i don't think there is an obama waiting in the wings but that does not mean that she should not take it more seriously. host: the caller was wondering if hillary clinton may be is waiting at the issue of benghazi. doesn't matter how long she waits for the republicans to revisit that issue? guest: everybody knows she will probably run. she has 100% name id. the second she comes out, she becomes the target not only among republicans but democrats as well. maybe they are holding back to take the focus off of the criticism for a little while.

i'm sure they are lining up their donors and money. i do know know if there's anything wrong with staying patient and avoiding being the target. host: another year perhaps? guest: oh yeah. host: could she wait that long? guest: i'm saying you've got a year so she can wake -- she can wait a few weeks or months. host: what is too long? guest: i think he needs to get in before the summer. i think that will happen. host: also an outline for independents mike from north carolina, good morning. caller: thank you for taking my call. i have no experience but i would like to consult with ms. cha dderdon. i have never thought that hillary clinton was not running.

she is a power-hungry narcissist. i don't think she has ever considered not running, that's my opinion. i would love to ask the republicans consultant, why in the world do we always -- what is the republican party always let the liberal mainstream media moderate the debate? my second question is -- is it true that all the ones who voted for mccain had turned out for romney that the election might have turned out different? host: we will let them take those comments. perhaps you can start with debate moderators. guest: i think the republican national committee has gone out and are putting in stricter parameters. one of the things you see when the party is having list of cases it's an old strategy -- sometimes our party looks back at what happened in the past and

things we have to do something to fix that. in 2012, we did not have a good bench of candidates other than mitt romney that could win. this year, we've got 25 candidates that can run and of those, 17 are incredibly smart a lot of governors, a love senators per it we have a strong policy oriented presidential field. the best presidential field the republicans have ever seen. let's have as many debates as possible. i don't care if a liberal media person moderates the debates. we've got smart people that can handle these questions. they have implemented real policy ideas in their states. this is the most exciting time to be a republican in a presidential race. host: will too much money be spent to attack each other and then turn around in a general election and have less cash and all these flaws aired? guest: i understand that.

part of the greatness of our democracy is having a robust debate. maybe i have a problem with that when our bench are a bunch of characters and clowns but we've got an incredibly strong policy oriented, people who have not talked the talk but walked the walk in their own states come a time of governors and interesting an incredible reformer they have done taxes and education and corruption and health care. this is what we want in the republican party so let's talk about that. host: do you think governors it as make the best presidential candidates? guest: i do because they are executives. host: let's go to the republican line from miami, florida, good morning. caller: hi, i was in the marine corps and i served under ronald reagan. it seems lately, at least the last two elections, that the candidates the republicans have put forward are too far right. they seem to be a political wing of the ku klux klan.

i would support bush or christie because they show they can work with all different kinds of people. the last two candidates republican party has put up have been big embarrassments. host: did you think mitt romney was too far right? caller: absolutely, way too far right. guest: i don't even know. john mccain has been accused of being a defector to the democratic party. he certainly has conservative present -- principles. when mitt romney was governor of massachusetts but he created the health care program that republicans did not like. he reached across the aisle to democrats and got along with ted kennedy. he moved to the right during the presidential race and that was his biggest problem.

i'm not sure i totally agree with that assessment. if you look at the republican nominees back to my first campaign which was senator dole, we have run the more moderate side of the party. george bush is conservative, but with a compassion that is more middle of the road. host: i want to read you this tweet -- host: this headline is from "the washington times" -- guest: even i'm not looking forward to bush-clinton again. i enjoyed the 1990's, but they are gone. i can understand why voters would be looking for something new other than bush-clinton. at the end of the day, if you ask me right now, on december 29, 2014, the democratic and republican nominees, i don't think jeb bush will be the republican nominee. it's incredibly likely that hillary clinton will be the

nominee and i do think that will be a problem for her in some ways. she has 100% name i.d., and a lot of the sentiment around her is baked in. it's done. you either really like her or you doubt prove there is not a whole lot of middle ground left on hillary clinton. this goes back to the earlier caller who called her a narcissist. that's a fair assumption from a certain point of view and a people are saying she's a narcissist, i don't know how you would tell a candidate to overcome being a narcissist or people thinking you are a narcissist. i think hillary will face a tougher electorate in 2016 than she ever would have back in the 1990's or even back in 2008. at the same time, i hope you all have thousands of debates because i am looking forward to the 20 to 25 to 30 nominees gaffing away on television saying crazy things that we can use against you in television

ads. i think this will be a fascinating election, i really do. as democrats, we don't want to have that many debates on a certain level because it gives rise to more "saturday night live" fodder and rise to headlines per the more you guys talk, the crazier it gets. with all the money that is out there, all of a setting come you get tv ads running in south carolina making fun of that gaffe, it can get very confusing for people like us. it can be fun but it can certainly but more interesting but more confusing for the voters. bush-clinton, i would not like to see it. host: you mention voters have strong opinions one way or the other about hillary clinton and that's a subject of a story in today's "the wall street journal."

guest: to me, the most interesting thing you just read -- where is she with liberals? host: 59%. guest: that is low. clinton should be in the 1970's -- 70%'s or 80%'s with liberals. i appreciate you see that and when you read that i thought that maybe where the elizabeth warren thing is coming from. that is the opening.

it's not simply because liberals will choose the next president. they will choose the next nominee and that's what is different about primaries, even presidential primaries than the general election. in a primary, the more conservative on the republican side and the more liberal on the democrat side choose the nominees for better or worse. that's the way we have more to this out. general elections tend to be more about swing voters. she is a long primary process to go through. if she is only pulling 53% of liberals, there is an opening there. host: scarsdale, new york, our line for republicans, good morning. caller: good morning and thank you for taking my call. my question is, aren't there a lot of hispanics who came to this country and did things right and did everything by the book and they don't like a lot themselves of these people just crossing the border and coming to this country? isn't that true? aren't there many people out there who feel that way and to feel that kind of denigrates

their status here because -- you know what i am saying. host: how does that translate for you in the republican primary field? caller: to me, it's not just give legalization to all these people walking across the border. they are not even deporting criminals. there were two or three agents on the border that got killed by people who have been here before and been deported. there has got to be a stop to what's going on. there just has to be. host: talk about the impact of the president's recent executive order on immigration. guest: it has energized the republican base. there is no republican candidate running who will be for any kind of amnesty. they will have to be strong about security on the border.

in all polling, you cannot say the word "pathway." the president's actions were incredibly bold, may fall under its own weight, may end with a republican congress that will have to fund the budget. it will be a fascinating debate going into 2016. i don't think there will be one republican presidential candidate the says "pathway" or "legal status." you can already see jeb bush is backed off another issue called common core. he has not backed off, but just said let's call it something else -- tougher standards. people are positioning themselves in this primary. republicans that are angst ridden over the immigration issue will be satisfied with some candidates and maybe not

satisfied with others, but they will not be angry. i just think any republican primary candidate can come out with any pathway to citizenship. host: albany, georgia, line for democrats. caller: good morning, and thank you for taking my call. the most recent vote in congress to increase the limit that an individual can give for campaign contributions -- i think it was around $32,000 an individual could give. they increased it to $320,000. they did it with a knife at their throat. the government was going to be shut down. so they stuck this on a bill and got it passed. what is so great about an individual being able to give 10 times the amount they were able to give?

the key and the secret to win the election is who has the most money, and it was the koch brothers. i want to get a movement started to boycott every product that is koch brothers and what they sell. there's always an alternative to what you can buy and there is more than one product on the market. let's see if we cannot get the koch brothers' profit margins go down. i'm sure it won't bother them because they are multimillionaires. to have them running our country, that is absurd. host: we talked about the increase of contribution limits for party committees, but you can pick up on the role of the koch brothers. guest: he makes an excellent point. this is happening on both sides of the aisle. i think the republicans public

have more of the large donors base and have been doing this longer than the koch brothers are a little more outfront -- have tried to neutralize them but we have koch brothers as well. both sides are spending unbelievable amounts of money. as we said earlier, moving more of this money back into the party is a good thing. people will be able to see it spent and understand it a little bit more. at the same time, you're never going to be able to stop big money in politics but it's like water at the top of the mountain, he will find a way down. if people want to take a personal stand and not by koch brothers products, that might be hard. they make a lot of things. everyone has americans has that right. we saw super pac's spend a record amount of money in 2014 and 2/3 of the nation stayed home. and they probably think they are sending a message but they are not. they are saying i will longer

care about my government and no longer want to participate in my government because somehow that means my government will change. that is not true. government is made and elections are won by people who show up. if the american people choose to not show up even though record amounts of money is being spent, that is not sending a message. it is saying the money is working. at this point, i think you will see that most of that $4 billion spent on the republican side and now we have a new republican senate. i am hoping that what people realize is if they let the big money dictate their actions, they will continue to not see the results they want to see. it will not stop. i think people don't understand that. host: we've got about 15 minutes left. arkansas, our line for independence, good morning.

caller: good morning. i think it should be distributed among the challengers that are running. instead of letting the big money pull the strings. obama is the worst we have ever had come and his immigration think i'm it is illegal, and it should be put back. coming in and no taking the jobs for our children. things like that. the big money, pulling the strings of our politicians, and we got to show -- school for politics. host: several suggestions have been around for a while on

fixing campaign finances. what about his suggestion to split donations equally among all candidates? guest: that would be great, but it will not happen. i want to make this clear. it has been decided by the supreme court. money is in politics. it is a form of free expression as defined by the supreme court. we can talk about how we can change this, but unless the presidential campaign makes the number one issue and the issue that they will run on, nothing will change. the supreme court has decided that. the thing is immigration and money in politics today. we may see one of those as a big issue on the campaign. money will not be a big issue in the campaign in 2016. host: jack is calling in on the republicans' line.

caller: can someone tell me how shutting down this out-of-control administration last year hurt the republicans? do they not win by a huge majority all over the country? i mean, really, how did it hurt the republicans? guest: well, it didn't. i think if they had shut down the government three weeks before the midterm elections it would have. they shut it down one whole year before the elections. most americans had forgotten about by the. i would disagree with the caller, republicans did not win by a huge majority. but they did win.

guest: the obama machine was supposed to be turned on in that 2014 elections. there was supposed to be no stopping it. i tend to agree, i liked when republicans stood for something that they believed in. they shut down the government for a while to make a point. i do not think it hurt them at all. host: mississippi is one of the states that will have gubernatorial races. how closely will mississippi we watched -- be watched? guest: mississippi will not be.

louisiana will be -- everybody runs in the primary. if too many republicans jump in, a democrat could make it out. that is an interesting race to watch. kentucky will be a much more contested race. guest: i would agree. also, look at the legislative races happening in virginia. there's no gubernatorial race in 2015, but their entire state senate is up. most people would say, who cares? what does it matter if the state senate is up? they are only in the minority by one seat. the state senate will be very competitive -- with the majority of competitive states in northern virginia. if you're looking for a bellwether, i would take a look

at the state senate races. if the republicans run the table of those races, that is a big indicator as to where we are moving in 2016. if democrats run the table, i think that is an interesting indicator. if nobody runs the table, we will have a 2016 to remember. host: for those who question the bellwether reading -- we see what happens nationally in 2016. guest: again, razor thin margins. the attorney general race in virginia, which democrats won was won by 200 or less votes 200 votes out of 3 million cast. that is razor thin. used to be red in fairfax, now

they are trending blue. if they go red in 2015, that is an indicator for 2016. host: good morning. caller: i have two points. republicans should enjoy these next two years because they are against everybody, the working-class people. everybody talks about immigration wars, what about all these killings going on here in america? every night here in tennessee, someone is dying. you are not addressing that. so i guess it is ok for americans to kill americans, but overseas, you say, yes. we need help here. answer my question, please. good-bye. guest: she makes some valid points. i would agree. what we stand for from the republican party, i disagree with her. we stand for hard work in

earning your way, not having the government there to support you. on the murder side, i agree. there were more shootings in chicago over the holidays -- we do not see you on the news. my problem from where iced and on the political aisle the democrats have hoisted out sharpton to be the spokesperson. i do a lot of education reform work. i work with extremely strong black leaders who are working in the inner cities to get better options for education. they are extremely strong african-american leaders who are trying to change the country for the better, trying to get better options for african-american families. these are democrats, by the way, they're not republicans. but we never see real leaders hoisted to the top of the mountain. trying to make change, trying to help families, help education opportunities for poor families.

what we see is our sharpton as the spokesman who is creating more divisiveness in this country. it is a real shame. host: do see a leader who could address that in hillary clinton, warren, biden, sanders, people who have been mentioned? guest: we really do not have a leader who is poised to address that in the democrat party. everyone you just named, all wonderful leaders, but i'm not sure any of them have the credibility to address these issues. in fact, hillary clinton being at only 53% approval rating for liberals is an opening for someone who can do that. i am not sure who that someone can be. on the top of my head, i cannot think of any current democrat leaders who can address that

but i'm hoping that in the upcoming democratic primaries addressed in a much your way it has in the past. host: a good place to go you want to keep track of all the different candidates -- larry sabato of the university of virginia has his rankings. sabato's crystal ball. you can go down to the republican candidates as well. there is no first tier, but the second tier dominated by jeb bush, rand paul, scott walker, chris christie. a few minutes left to talk politics 2015. terry is from north carolina on

our republican line. caller: good morning. my question is -- the gentleman who called earlier about the koch brothers, i don't guess he understands that the koch brothers employs 65,000 well-paid employees. the venom i hear out of the democratic party out of the ko ch brothers -- i think we need more koch brothers. we need people to employ people and pay them. it is amazing to me. host: what you do for your job? are you one of those folks? caller: i wish i was. i would have a really good job if i did. guest: they also give hundreds

of millions of dollars to charity. people could have complaints about their political views, but they are trying to help people as well. host: allen is up next. caller: i do not think it is the money so much, it is the lies that they put out on the air. every political ad should have to be the truth, and only the truth. no lies, no anything else. that would cut obama's speeches down to about five minutes. host: you spent a long time as the direct mail assistant has won several awards -- let's talk political ads. guest: you really do not. we would both agree.

i have been doing this for nearly 15 years. i started when i was 7 -- kidding. i have never lied in political mail. i would say that 99% of direct mail. part of it is no one ever follows up. they never check it out. with the internet, it is an easy thing to do now. the truth is it is not lies. it is like that defense and the prosecution. if i'm the prosecution, it's not my work to do extensive work for them. if i'm the defense, it is not my job to do the prosecution side. again, you can say, we are part of the problem. i've been told that -- including from my mother. however, i will stand by as a 15- year political associate and member of the political

consultants board -- i've never lied in an ad and i do not think any my brother and have lied. guest: everybody is held accountable for the political ads. there's a lot of accountability, more accountability that we've ever had. guest: i agree. host: ronnie on the line. are you with us? caller: my question is for ms. chadderdon. they say that 2/3 of the people do not show up to vote. they say that if you're a voter republican or democrat

that you can keep your doctor, that eventually catches up to you. i think the recent elections taking the senate, i think that is a fact. you can only get to wait so long. host: liz? guest: i would disagree. i think we're all trying to get our views out, here in washington, as well as in any situation when you want the world to know your side of the story. you will only tell your side of the story. i do not think the american public is stupid. in fact, i think they're very savvy. at the same time, i think they're very overwhelmed with what is going on in america and in their own lives. sometimes, they do not do their homework. at the same time, should any political consultant or politician be lying to the american public? no. i would disagree that that is what is happening.

guest: i think he is the best color of the day. maybe on the political campaign side, we do not live, but politicians, people cannot keep their promises and people think that is a lie. i think it was a great point. host: a good place to end, and thank you. tomorrow julie rovner discusses the health care law and what changes are coming to coverage in 2015. then we take your phone calls and comments about your experiences with health care coverage, plus facebook comments and tweets. "washington journal" live tuesday at 7:00 eastern tuesday on c-span.

"q&a" is 10 years old. today, dan reed about the terror attacks in mumbai in 2008 where more than 175 people were killed and 300 wounded. he tells the story using security camera video, and interviews with survivors. 7:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. tonight, the first of three nights looking back at public figures who died in 2014. at 8:00, the funeral service for beenn bradlee. part of the speakers at the funeral was carl bernstein. >> on september 20 3, 1972

about 9:00 p.m., i reached john mitchell the former attorney general and campaign manager iphone about east -- by phone about a story we were wanted. he said he controlled a secret fun for undercover operations for watergate. mitchell was quite upset. responding jesus, several times as i read in the story. he then proceeded to threaten an important private part of katharine graham's anatomy which he said would get caught in a egg fat wr -- big far wringer if "the post" ran the story. he said we would do a story on you, and hung up the phone. woodward and i did not much observed the chain of command. ben interrogated me.

had mitchell been drinking? i could not count. did i properly identify myself? yes. did i have good notes? yes. ok, ben said, put in all mitchell's comments in the paper, but leave out mrs. so does it is ok, he said. -- so the desk is ok, he said. don't virtual maiden o the overheated -- top pofficel made an appeal. beautiful called bradley at home repeat bill. -- the appeal. bradley says it boils down to this question, whether mitchell said it or not.