BENSON BYTE: Jonathan Turley - The AI Revolution, the Spread of Socialism, and the Future of the American Republic

Reese Witherspoon here checking into my favorite hotel in Paris. Bonjour. I'm traveling with my Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card, so I earn rewards wherever I book travel. Five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants and other travel, and one point on other purchases. Phew, that was a lot. I need to lie down. Is the room ready? Visit Wells Fargo.com slash autograph journey. Terms apply. With the all-new Dynasty Blueprint in EA Sports College Football 27, you can build your program by earning Dynasty points to spend on NIL, staff, and more. But the fun doesn't end at graduation. With the EA Sports MVP bundle, get College Football 27, mad at NFL 27, plus deluxe edition rewards in both games. Make your rise with the MVP bundle, available now at EA.com. Rated E for everyone with mild lyrics, user interact, and in-game purchases includes random items, conditions, and restrictions apply. See the link for more info. Need a laptop that's built to perform and designed to last all day? Select Windows 11 PCs starting at 49999 are now at Best Buy. Learn more at Best Buy.com. Best Buy. Imagine that. Now it's time for another Guy Benson, Guy Benson Fight, where we bring you the day's most interesting interviews in a bite-sized package. For the full episode, visit Guy Benson.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. For that, as America reassesses where it stands on so many fundamental issues, and just personally, somebody who I see around a building sometime here at Foxxby, I always wanted to talk to more in depth. So, counselor, Jonathan Turley, welcome to Guy Benson, sir. Thank you so much. Great to talk to you, my friend. So, listen, not that, you know, you've had anything to talk about over the last couple of days, but I'm going to run down in chronological order here. A couple of these decisions that, you know, obviously, everybody's up in arms about. But, you know, look, I think you and I are on the same page here in saying that, you know, reasonable minds can disagree, but the court got a lot right here. Let's run down first as they came out real quick. The geo-fence decision, what does it mean and why do you think it was correct? Well, you know, the court has struggled with technology in the Fourth Amendment cases for many decades. In fact, you know, there's always been this race between technology and privacy, and privacy is lost as technology advances. In some cases, in spectacular fashion, you know, the court used to have doctrines like the trespass doctrine where technology allowed surveillance without trespass. So the court had to adjust. So this is another example of technology that the court is looking at and saying, whoa, this could really eviscerate the Fourth Amendment, you know, that you have these companies being asked.

for basically tracking information about individuals, unknown individuals in an area. And the court said, you know, that's going too far. We need some type of protection. Now, people need to keep in mind that a warrant is not a insurmountable challenge. Most warrants are approved. The vast majority are approved. Just that you have to show probable cause. You can't go on a fishing expedition. Right. And, you know, look, this grew out of a lot of us saw this coming, not to get too lawyerly, but it was that Jay Jones decision relative to putting a GPS on a car. And the court agreed a warrant was necessary there. And so, look, it was no big surprise. And I think even a lot of law enforcement agrees with it. There is the issue. of whether you can, and I suspect now it's off the table, you can throw a geo fence around an area as opposed to a specific person. Let me give you for the audience where this devolves to on the ground. You're trying to secure Times Square on New Year's Eve. You're worried about the fact that maybe there's somebody in there communicating by various means, and you're looking for words like bomb, jihad, detonation. You're going to need a warrant for that going forward, I guess, but is that not going to be an awfully difficult thing to get in front of a judge? Yeah, it does make it a real challenge. And as you know, from your own distinguished law enforcement career, law enforcement is not trying to deprive people of privacy, but they are also trying to find these bad guys, hopefully before they hurt someone. And the courts understand that, and they want to try to accommodate. And so we're going to have to see how this sort of plays out. It's easier to put sort of a geo offense with a specific individual in mind to track that individual. To the extent that you're seeking information related to an individual, there might be some room at the elbows. It's got to be worked out as we go forward. But what the court is saying is that they can't allow the government just to sort of do a blanket search for whoever, who is moving and about in a given area without something more. And I think that what we're going to see is you note. We're going to see sort of the courts trying to calibrate this for more reasonable efforts. This is what, you know, law generally the saying is that it's 10 years behind the tech. And that's kind of true here as well. For the audience, you know, you want to think about it in real prosaic terms, the Guthrie case. One of the things you would do is geo-fence where she had been and see if an active phone was in there. You're not looking for a specific person. You're looking for a specific area. But as Jonathan points out, you can get that paper. Don't be lazy. Get the DA or the AUSA to write it. Get in front of the judge and you're likely going to get it. And if you don't, well, then you shouldn't have got it. You didn't write it up well, et cetera. Okay, let's move on.

we got a lot stuff to cover. Let's stay with the first day's decisions. We have the two decisions that seem to expand presidential power. One I think certainly does, of course, which is the FTC ruling, excuse me, but the firing of Lisa Cook initially was perceived as a loss. All right, wow, he can't fire a member of the Fed. What's going on here? I mean, isn't that something the exec should be able to do? But it's actually more nuanced than that. Can you tease that out for the audience? Very absolutely correct on that one. The decision on Cook was largely procedural. You know, Cook found out about her termination from a posting on social media by the president, which posted a letter that was itself rather general. And what the court said was, look, that's not enough. And you may still be able to fire her, but there are some basic requirements when you have to show cause. And this really didn't show any cause. This was just basically posting and saying, you're fired. Hit the bricks. Yeah. Yeah. It was like his old show. And they're saying, nah, it makes for good reality TV. And it makes it really bad for this type of governmental change. So that one's very limited and fact specific. And people, I think, overplayed it, as you noted, Paul. Yeah. But the FTC ruling is a big move, is it not? Yes, and that is huge. And, you know, many people doubted that Humphrey's executor, which is this underlying case would ever be overturned. Now, most people don't know what Humphrey executor is, but it is a foundational case that limited presidents in their ability to remove people in the executive branch and so-called independent commissions. Ever since it came down over 90 years ago, Presidents have opposed it. Many scholars and judges have said, where does this come from? Now, some of us actually like the idea of independent commissions, but that's not the issue. The issue is where in the Constitution does it say that Congress can create this hybrid creature that's a little legislative and a little executive? It's just not there. And what the court said was, yeah, this has been around a long time. And yeah, it has been very important. that still doesn't mean that it is a valid constitutional interpretation. They said, we just don't see it. We don't see in the Constitution where this authority comes from. People don't recognize sometimes that the Supreme Court has constraints. And what are those constraints? It's called the Constitution. And it's not just that they're going to do what they think their party wants them to do or whoever appointed them wants them to do. The idea is to look, if you are a textualist, which I think is coming back involved, you know, as a full disclosure, I'm a member of the Federalist Society as an attorney. You know, you want to, you know, there's an old son, I remember from law school, and there's always this argument of who has the best constitution. I remember Ginsburg saying the best constitution is actually is South Africa. It caused a big hullabaloo, and I think rightly so. But that said, you know what? Maybe the constitution isn't perfect. Maybe our system isn't perfect. But you know what? Having a constitution is better than not having one. At least you got something to look to. And then you have a guiding document.

that was written by brilliant people and amended, and we can amend it as time goes on. And that was another part of their brilliance is that you can update it. Let's move on. Campaign finance, I'm going to look at cuts both ways. It was win for a GOP. I don't think anybody in the audience really wants us to tease that out. Let's get to the ones that really matter. The trans issue, they pinned it to danger. That is to say women. being potentially injured by men in sports. I think that just came down to a common sense argument. It doesn't take it off the table everywhere. It just punted it back to the states, very much like Roe v. Wade. So, you know, states, if you care that much, you've got to either step up or continue with whatever you're doing individual states. California allows men and women's sports. If that's what the voters want there, that's what it is. You don't want it. You got to change it at the state level, get to the ballot box. We've got to go to the birthright citizenship thing. Now look. Feeling is very high on this one. Reasonable minds, again, can disagree on this. I want to pin you down on the legislative intent because the argument on the right has been, this is not what the 14th Amendment was intended to do. It was intended to address a disparity in slavery. I heard the point made yesterday that American Indian children, Native Americans, did not even have the guaranteed vote for a number of years under this. How is it that it's been extended? Why is it reasonable for the court to rule as they did? Well, you know, all this came up, as you know, in the oral argument when Social General John Sauer said, look, much has changed since this was written. We have the birth tourism, which is a billion dollar industry, 10% of births in a given year and now to undocumented persons. But Chief S. John Roberts responded, said, yeah, times changed, but the Constitution remains the same. And that's a valid argument. The key for the court is what it was not deciding. It was not deciding whether birthright citizenship is a good idea. And I think on that one, frankly, the answer is clear. It's a perfectly horrendous idea. That's why most countries have rejected it. Countries that used to have it rescinded it. We are a ship of fools. to embrace birthright citizenship. And people are using us as a virtual source of mockery. You've got these companies sending people over quickly to give birth, create citizenship in their offspring, and then head back to China or other places. So I don't think there's a lot, if you would have a vote on the court as to whether birthright citizenship is a good practice, I expect you to have a very strong majority. But what Chief John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett said with the liberal justices, is that we have, as an institution, long said that the 14th Amendment included birthright citizenship, reading the text of subject to the jurisdiction thereof, which is the key language here. They said that's clearly to mean that your subject as in being in this country, and they went through a great deal of analysis is why they believe that. Now, on the underside, there are equally compelling arguments. Clarence Thomas gave a wonderful dissent. So did Samuel Alito. And, you know, they said, look, you know, this was about extending citizenship and protecting the rights of citizenship for freed slaves. No one imagined anything like this.

And they said, you know, this is largely the creation of the court. And they mentioned this case that the court turned on and said, look, that case that happened so many years ago involved people here lawfully. And so the court made a mistake. They should have been more narrow when they first started to deal with this issue. Now, all of that is compelling on both sides. And what you've said, what I've said, is that people need... to separate themselves a bit from the personalities here. There's been a lot of anger with regard to Amy Coney Barrett because she had voted, she voted against the president. In this case, and also she authored the opinion on counting ballots after election day. The fact is, Amy Coney Barrett is a conservative jurist. She often, and more often, votes with the president and conservative values. She's also an independent... thinker. And, you know, the president, when he appointed his three nominees, said he wanted independent, principled nominees. He got them. I mean, the thing about it, I know he is, he is really sort of slap back at Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who have occasionally voted with the left of the court. His three justices were magnificent. They will go down as some of his most important parts of his legacy. Those three justices are brilliant jurists who have deepened the intellectual concept of this court. Now, that also means that occasionally they disagree with the president on major cases. But he should take great pride in his quality. I've been very critical of the nominee of President Biden, Ketanji Brown Jackson. Right. You know, that is the point of comparison. You know, Jackson recently said that She didn't like having to look at history to figure out the original meaning of the Constitution, that it's basically easier just to solve problems and deal with whatever contemporary issues there are. That is a very different philosophy from the justices that President Trump appointed. So, yes, they disagreed with him, but they remain conservative jurists, and they have a very impressive list of cases to show that. You know, look, this is one of those things that really, if you were watching it closely, was not much of a surprise, including to the president who pushed the issue. To me, it's a victory in a way. First of all, it was closer than anybody expected. But secondly, you know, he got the issue on the table. And now along with the SAVE Act, which is one of the other ways that you can try to fight back against this stuff, now you're going to get law enforcement and Congress moving. Congress would be better. But as you and I both know, getting Congress to move in unison here is like, you know, 10. tent amount to flying to Jupiter. But if you can get law enforcement making the kind of cases against birth tourism here, which apparently have not been a priority, you're going to get a lot of support nationwide. These are baby mills. They house them in these warehouses, these safe houses, primarily in California, but also down south. They have a lot of them coming in from the Caribbean basin. And they're RICO cases. You can make those cases because it's just illegality organized by somebody. who runs the location, there are at least conspiracy cases, but would be better, would it not, and this is where I want to take you, would it be not, would not be better, to have a statute on point relative to birth tourism? Do you see anything like that coming, or is there a better work around here that we can do to enforce that I'm not seeing?

I do think that's cutting. I think Speaker Johnson indicated that that's what they want to do. There are a couple of different bills on the Hill. And the interesting thing about that type of legislation is that it will likely be challenged, but that'll bring it back before the Supreme Court. They fell one vote short. And, you know, Clarence Thomas in the defense said, I don't believe that this ruling today will... be able to withstand the test of history. Some people noted that it doesn't have to stand the test of a year if the court changes, particularly if there is a new Republican president and we have the addition of one more conservative. They only lost by one vote. Brett Kavanaugh would have voted to strike down the, he did vote to strike down the executive order, but he said that he agrees that birthright citizenship is not in the 14th Amendment. So they are literally one vote short of that. So legislation would give them another chance to get to the court in a short term. Now, the ultimate solution is the 28th Amendment to actually ban birthright citizenship. Other countries have done that. Countries that did what we did and realized it's an incredibly moronic practice, and they got rid of it. Now, polls currently show that people, when asked, generally support birthright citizenship, but we've never had a national debate on it. This is a debate that has been confined to the courts. Now, the courts are out of it, largely, and it's up to the country. So perhaps we should have that debate. Well, I think we'll have that debate, and I think that's why it's important that the president fronted the issue, but I do think that in getting down to the voting public, it's going to get skewed by the media and the Democrats. And you and I both know how you ask the question is how people perceive what is just. And look, if we had a crystal ball and these people could look into it and see what's really happening with this. That is recently as two years ago, you had one in ten birds in America being foreign born. people would likely say, okay, this is no good. But you know what? I have no faith that we're going to get an amendment. We got one of the best here. We got Jonathan Turley on the line. We hung on to him. We chained them to the microphone. So, counselor, tell us about your new book. Cheers to America's 250th birthday. Get 20% off your first purchase at Fox Newswineshop.com with code FNRadio 20. 20% discount excludes wine club offers and cannot be combined with any other promotion. Expires July 31st, 2026. Must be 21 order to order. Please drink responsibly. Well, that's very kind of you. You know, Rage in the Republic is a book about our revolution. Half of the book looks back at what are the unique aspects of the American Revolution, the American Republic. And the other half looks forward as to whether that republic can survive in the 21st century, whether it can survive us.

Now, the key about this moment is that we're living in very dangerous times. People are saying that we should trash the Constitution. These are law professors, deans of law school, saying that the Constitution itself is now a threat to the American people. So we're experiencing a crisis of faith at the very moment that we should be celebrating the world's greatest democracy, the oldest, most successful democratic system in history. And the book looks at those issues and looks back at what makes us so unique. Because ours was the first so-called Enlightenment revolution. Enlightenment writers like John Locke had been out for a while. But we came together, and this was fascinated the world and created the first revolution based on the simple belief that rights that define us as human beings come from God and not just from the government. And that is still a revolutionary concept. And Europeans talked about us like we were a different species. In the book, I talked about this one Frenchman who wrote a popular book in France. And he asked this question. He said, what then is this America? They really wanted to know. They couldn't understand how people had nothing in common with each other, no real connections to land, no stratified class or institutions, could come together at one point on the globe and create the world's first Enlightenment revolution. The question I ask in the book is whether we can answer that question today. Who were we then and who are we now? And if we can't answer that question, maybe we don't deserve another 250 years. But there is an answer. It's just that so many of our fellow citizens have forgotten it. It's a lack of education. It's a lack of appreciation of how lucky and unique this whole thing is, the American experiment. I'm going to quote a European to you, a surprising one. Bono, lead singer of you too, whether you like that band or not, saw him say one time. The thing that fascinates me and other Europeans about America is that it's not a country as we know it. It's an idea. And watching an idea play out. among 350 million people is really quite something to see, especially when it's so successful. But you know what? They grow up in this country not realizing that we are, in fact, a new thing and an tremendously successful thing. Imperfect as all governments are. It was Margaret Thatcher said something like, it's the best system out there. It's the worst, excuse me, democracy is the worst system out there except for all the others. But we didn't have marbled into us all of the class stuff and the royalty that all of the European nations had a throw off before they could get anywhere near what we were creating and leading on. So let me ask you this. Where is it going? You said the second half of the book talks about how we can continue and where we think it's going. What's our path to success? Well, you know, that is the great challenge in that

We are facing, as I am talking to books, some of the greatest threats and challenges that we have faced as a country. I look at the combination of AI and robotics. I take the most conservative estimates on loss of jobs, and we're looking at a record number of lost jobs. Now, I happen to believe in the free market that we will generate new types of jobs, but it will have to burn off this economy. And during that process, we will have more unemployment than we have seen in many years, perhaps ever, in this country. And that creates real dangers. Now, we happen to be the best suited country to face those dangers. We have a constitution that was built for change. I mean, we've always, as a nation, embraced new technology, new changes. It's part of our character. So we cannot just survive. We can thrive if we keep the system that we have. I was talking about this book in Prague, and there is an EU member who said, you seem very confident about your republic surviving the 21st century, but I'm not sure how you feel about the EU. And I said, I'm really surprised by that, because I thought the book was clear. I don't think the EU will survive. And the reason is that you've destroyed everything I talk about in the book. You've destroyed all those democratic institutions and traditions that we will need. This country has exactly what it takes to succeed. But one of the things I talk about is we have to protect what I call a liberty-enhancing economy. Most people don't know that this is not just the 250th anniversary of our republic. It's also a 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith's wealth of nations that came out at the same time. And the founders immediately embraced it. It wasn't a big hit in Europe. It was a big hit here because the founders saw his economic theory of free markets as the perfect companion to their political theory. They believe you cannot be free unless you're economically free. So in the book, what I talk about is we can't be a kept citizenry. We can't go into this century and just have a universal basic income where much of our society is being subsidized by the government. It won't work. We need independent citizens for this republic to work. That is the great tension in this thing because you hear even people as thoughtful and learned as Elon Musk talk about a universal guaranteed income because of the potential displacement of jobs due to AI.

And I'm wondering as you're talking if we're not going to that model, and AI does take all these information-based jobs off the table, and it already is undeniably. You see Amazon firing people and other big, big firms just laying off tens of thousands of people. What's going to replace it? What are they going to be doing? Even as I know we have the ability to innovate, do you see what the lifeline is here? I do. And one of the things I talk about in the book is Milton Friedman, who I had the pleasure of watching at the University of Chicago. And when I was there, he ruined me for life. And, you know, he has his own view of a universal income system that makes people less dependent. One of the things I talk about in the book, and this is where any listeners, we can determine who got dates in high school. Because if you recognize this name, you clearly did not date in high school. And that is, I refer to what I call Gynon Jobs. And Gynan was the bartender on the Starship Enterprise. And he used to drive me crazy when I would watch the episodes, and they would be fighting Rondelins and then they'd go to the bar. And Gynan would be standing in front of a replicator, a machine that could make the perfect cocktail. over and over again, exactly the same on a molecular level. And yet they would turn to Gynan and have her make the cocktail. And the question I asked in the book is why? Obviously, the cocktail itself was only part of the reason they were in what's called Tend Forward or that bar. The question I ask in the book is, how many jobs are Gynon jobs, jobs that we want humans to be part of? And there are a lot of them. So one I say in the book is that, look, Congress is going to commit all of the mistakes that it always commits. So they already started, as if she read this book, Elizabeth Warren, has already started to do some of the things I talk about in the book. Just recently, she said, I'm going to tax AI and they're going to subsidize dying industries. So we're going to burn billions. We always do. And those jobs aren't coming back. There's going to be fewer taxi drivers. There's going to be fewer radiologists. That's just a fact, Jack. And the fact is that we've never picked winners. Well, every time we try to subsidize an industry, we burn billions without effect. The economy is simply too big for us to direct. It's too complex. And we're going to have to make these choices and pivot to the stuff that works. And as you articulate... We better make those decisions now before we burn so many billions. We can't actually do that. Professor, I don't mean to cut you off with my producers here are waving the white flag. I mean that we're out of time. Before we go, I wanted to make sure I had time to do this, however. This sounds like a fascinating book. And by the way, if you want to send a freebie up to Fox so that we can talk about it on the radio, I'm not going to tell you no. But that said, tell people where they can find your excellent blog. I read your website all the time. Tell people where they can find you on the web, on X, and where they can get the book. Well, thank you. Rage in the Republic is available on Amazon and all other sites that are stores you go to. It's doing very well, and I appreciate everyone who has purchased it. And I'm also at jonathan churley.org if you want to check out the blog. Jonathan churley.org. I rip it off all the time, so it sounds like I know what I'm talking about legally on the air.

Counselor, we appreciate you as ever. Thank you, my friend. Great spending time with you. And you. That was yet another Guy Benson bite. For full episodes of Guy Benson, go to Guy Benson.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the show ad free on Fox News Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music with your prime membership, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.