Uh, why did you think parental rights should not be terminated?

Well, it, it basically for reasons Vivek has already articulated in, in, in large part, uh, of course I don't know the evidence, I don't know the families directly.

But by reading the record I couldn't figure out why it was that social services decided to, uh, up the ante if you will and go ahead and terminate the, the, the parents' involvement with their kids.

The kids were being visited by their parents and there was ongoing relationships in a supervised fashion that seemed to be perfectly safe and appropriate.

Um, the record was pretty clear as to why you didn't want the kids living with these particular parents a- at least at this stage of their life full time.

That's, that made a lot of sense.

But what the, what facts triggered the necessity to per- uh, permanently, uh, terminate the, the, uh, relationship just didn't make sense to me.

Yeah

So those two amendments, just those two examples, the 19th Amendment and the 26th Amendment, fixed a defect in the Constitution, whereas the 19th Amendment did not fix that problem, because that was a people problem.

First of all, the premise that we should only amend the Constitution to fix defects in the Constitution lacks a little bit of important nuance.

The original declaration by George Mason, as you've heard many times, is to stop the abuse of power by the federal government.

And the abuse of power by the federal government can be done in ways that if they were following the Constitution correctly, they wouldn't do this, but they do it anyway and they get away with it.

And so you have to solve government problems.

The whole idea of people problem versus not a constitutional defect, it's a little bit off because the 18th Amendment was trying to solve the problem of private behavior.

The purpose of a Constitution is to grant government power or limit government power.

Senator McGilvery, did you ever get the $10,000?

And he's going to share some more granular thoughts, I think, about how can we properly ground parental rights in the Constitution.

Well, thank you, Jean.

And I have the privilege of being able to say that my friends, Melissa and Marty Guggenheim have said things that I want to wholeheartedly endorse.

Both of their comments, I think they're well said that kind of no matter which angle you come from, we should get to the conclusion that parental rights are of the highest value and should be protected with great vigor by our legal and political system.

I would just say a couple of words about the current situation, including the Mahmoud and Mirabelli case.

I litigated perhaps one of the most infamous losses in the pro-right sphere, and that was the case of Mozart v. Hawkins County School District.

that was decided in the 1980s by the Sixth Circuit and served tonight by the Supreme Court.

that

Help us think through what's most important.

important.The starting point for thinking through these issues is the First Amendment.

The First Amendment only binds the government.

The government cannot interfere with freedom of speech.

Now, it's also important to know that speech concerning violence is not necessarily protected, but in general terms, ABC or any other employer can decide to hire somebody or fire somebody if they don't like what they're saying.

Now, we have the situation where, uh, President Trump and the chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, both made comments that were efforts to s- urge ABC to take action against Jimmy Kimmel, and, uh, you know, uh, at first blush, this seems to present a problem because both of them are, in fact, government agents, and should the government be allowed to encourage a private employer to silence somebody because the people operating the government don't like the speech involved? Well, uh, the Supreme Court took up a case in la- the last cycle about this very issue.

You know, it ar- uh, arose from the Biden administration's, uh, meetings it had with Facebook, Twitter, other social media organizations where the Biden administration regularly said, "Silence this voice, uh, let this voice, uh, be heard.

Mm-hmm.

Farris envisions a fairly minimal relationship between federal authorities and higher education.

That some federal officials occasionally attend football and basketball games at their alma mater.

And- and I'm not satisfied with the- the shoe being on the other foot.

I- I want them out of the shoe business.