Cross Word

The Impact of Edwin Meese III on American Constitutional Law and the Rise of Originalism

• Michele McAloon • Season 3 • Episode 111

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michele mcaloon:

You're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. My name is Michele McAloon and you can find out more about me at bookcluescom. I really ask, if you're listening and you like the show, would you please rate and review? It kind of ups my algorithms and, if you like it, tell a friend, because I found out that the best way for any podcast in the world is by word of mouth. So, dear listeners, I really appreciate your input. I appreciate the letters that you send me, I appreciate your comments and keep reading. Thanks, god bless. God bless.

michele mcaloon:

I am so honored to have a very distinguished guest today, professor Stephen Calabresi. He has written a book along with Gary Lawson, his co-author, called the Mies Revolution the Making of a Constitutional Moment a constitutional moment, and it is a book chocked full of great information and understanding and wisdom of where we are in our legal environment today, and it is actually I cannot recommend this enough to understand the US courts and what is happening on the Supreme Court and the lower courts. It's actually a really great book and I believe it's put out by Encounter Books, right, professor.

Steven Calabresi:

That's correct. Yes, yep.

michele mcaloon:

Professor Calabresi. Stephen Gow Calabresi is a professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He also co-teaches in the fall semesters at Yale Law School. He has clerked for Justice Scalia and Judges Robert Bork and Ralph Winter. He was a special assistant to Attorney General Meese from 1985 to 1987 and worked with Ken Cribb as his deputy in 1987 on the second floor of the West Wing of the Reagan White House. He has written many books, several on presidential power and comparative constitutional law and the origins of judicial review, and since 1990, he has written over 70 law review articles. So he is actually a lawyer's lawyer. Welcome, professor.

Steven Calabresi:

Thank you very, very much for that generous introduction. I'm thrilled to be on your show.

michele mcaloon:

I'm thrilled to talk to you about this because you say from the very beginning it's Edwin Meese III, the Attorney General, and it's a book about him. But really at the heart of it it's an intellectual biography about the jurisprudence of original intent. So we'll get into that. But let's go ahead and open up. Who was Edwin Meese III?

Steven Calabresi:

Ed Meese is. I should begin by saying he's alive and well, at the age of 93 and sharp as a tack, and able to enjoy the fact that this book has come out about him. He is a very remarkable man who grew up in Oakland County near Berkeley, California, and is the descendant of Lutheran immigrants to Oakland. He got a scholarship to go to Yale College, from which he graduated in 1952. He then served in the US Army Reserve, which he continued to serve in until the Reagan administration, until the Reagan administration, and then, after two years of active duty, he went to Berkeley Law School and became a prosecutor.

Steven Calabresi:

And as a prosecutor he was prosecuting student protesters in the 1960s who were occupying Berkeley buildings and he made headlines all over California and he came to the attention of the newly elected governor of California, Ronald Reagan, and Reagan asked him to come to Sacramento and meet him and they met and liked each other so much that Reagan hired him right away to be his legal secretary and then two years later promoted him to be his chief of staff.

Steven Calabresi:

And basically Ed Meese was Ronald Reagan's best friend and Ronald Reagan was Ed Meese's best friend and they became extremely close personally. They worked together for the entirety of Reagan's governorship in California. Ed Meese was then chief of staff to Reagan's unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign and chief of staff to his successful 1980 presidential campaign, and then, once the Reagan administration began, he essentially functioned as Ronald Reagan's right-hand man and whenever any important decision had to be made, Reagan always ran it by Ed Meese. So Ed Meese I think the bulk of what we'll talk about with the book is his tenure as attorney general and his impact on legal interpretation and constitutional law.

Steven Calabresi:

But the background to this is that he was Ronald Reagan's best friend and key ally on everything that he did persuaded Ronald Reagan to pick George Bush to be his vice president, which then, of course, led to Bush becoming president and Bush's son becoming president. So Ed Meese was involved in all sorts of decisions that Reagan made and I personally give Reagan huge credit for winning the Cold War against the former Soviet Union and anti-communism and Mies was very involved in that, as well as other domestic policy issues, even during the time when he was attorney general. He became Reagan's second attorney general in February of 1985. Reagan's first attorney general was William French Smith, who'd been his personal lawyer when he lived in California, and then, when Smith retired, meese replaced him, and essentially there have been about 86 attorney generals in American history, and the argument of my book is that Ed Meese is the most influential attorney general of any of the 85 other people who've held the job, and I can give you reasons to explain why at great length.

Steven Calabresi:

But I think he's been hugely consequential and hugely influential as attorney general, and that's aside from the fact that he did things like recommending that Reagan run with George Bush as his vice president. So we're talking about a person who had a huge impact on the world. Many of your listeners probably don't know who Ed Meese is or are hearing the name for the first time, and the reason for that is that Ed Meese is the most modest, unassuming person who one could ever meet, and whenever someone tries to credit him with doing something, he always said well, it was really Ronald Reagan who did it or it was really my staff who did it. I don't deserve the credit and, essentially, when the meek inherit the earth, ed Meese is going to inherit all the land west of the Mississippi River, that's great.

Steven Calabresi:

He's a very modest, very, very modest man who happens to have just done an enormous amount that's had an impact on all of our lives, amount that's had an impact on all of our lives by how you described him.

michele mcaloon:

Actually, my admiration who I had admired already for Ronald Reagan has gone up too, and he's still out there working right. Didn't he just recently come out against Jack Smith as not being legally appointed as prosecutor? I mean, he's still active, right. His mind is still going.

Steven Calabresi:

His mind is still active. He's still going. He and I have worked on probably seven or eight amicus briefs in the last year and a half and four of them argued that Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed to be a special prosecutor of Donald Trump. And we ended up persuading Judge Eileen Cannon, southern District of Florida court in the classified documents case that Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed and she threw out the prosecution of Trump in that case. And Jack Smith was appealing the case to the 11th Circuit until Trump won the presidential election. And as a result of Trump winning the presidential election, jack Smith has had to drop both of his cases against Trump.

michele mcaloon:

Yeah, amazing. I want to know what he eats for breakfast. Now, this is what I really didn't understand, and I think there's a lot of people who have not, did not live through the Reagan years, or even pre the Reagan years that are maybe listening now, but I was shocked to learn that in the early 1980s, constitutional law was made by the judges. Rather than looking at the constitutions, I have two questions for you. To begin with, what was the legal world before Ed Meese and why is the question, what is constitutional law? Important to understanding that?

Steven Calabresi:

Yes. So essentially, since Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal era, and particularly since changes in the courts that happened in 1937 in the middle of Franklin D Roosevelt's presidency, the dominant school of ideas about judging is that legal texts are meaningless and that judges are policymakers and what they should do is make good policy. And so from 1937 until recent years, judges basically saw their job as being policymakers, their job as being policymakers, and the main debate they had was how active they should be in overturning democratically passed laws. Because, of course, judges are life-tenured in the United States and they're lawyers and they tend to be from the elite and well-educated. And so there is a democracy problem with judges overturning laws. And if the Constitution and statutes are all meaningless and what judges are doing is making policy, then one could argue they should just defer to the democratic branches of government and not do anything at all. But judges realized that it was important for them to do some things. And so there were judges who didn't believe in law, who were activists, and judges who didn't believe in law who never struck anything down as unconstitutional, even when it was unconstitutional. But that was the prevailing situation up until 1985 when Ed Meese became attorney general, and Ed Meese thought that this was outrageous, and Ronald Reagan agreed with him that it was outrageous, and he thought that the Constitution and statutes do have a discernible meaning.

Steven Calabresi:

We can figure out what the meaning of those terms is, and that the job of a judge is to interpret the texts of the Constitution or the text of a statute, not to make a policy decision either conservative or liberal and the judge's decision may produce a conservative or liberal result, but that's not because of the judge's politics, that's because that's what the text of the Constitution or the statute says.

Steven Calabresi:

And that's essentially what Ed Meese argued for. And he argued for something that lawyers now call originalism, which is a fancy word for just saying originalism, which is a fancy word for just saying give a text the meaning that it had when it was first written or announced. And you know this is the rule of interpretation that we apply to all written documents, ordinarily contracts, wills, statutes, regulations and even Supreme Court opinions. We expect that district court judges, trial judges, will read Supreme Court opinions and interpret them as they were originally meant to be interpreted. But judges had claimed for themselves this remarkable power to make policy instead of interpreting the Constitution, and that's what Ed Meese basically put a stop to.

michele mcaloon:

Okay, I'm going to have to ask you a very basic question, and it's probably a shame that I have to ask you this basic question, but I think it's maybe a sign of our times.

Steven Calabresi:

Yes.

michele mcaloon:

What is an attorney general and what is an attorney general supposed to do? Because Ed Meese was actually. He was a fantastic attorney general, because it seems like he knew what his mission was and, as you said, he ran almost an academic legal classroom as being attorney general. So if you could answer first thing and it is sad that we have to ask, what is the job of the attorney general now, that one has become unclear in recent years, absolutely.

Steven Calabresi:

So the attorney general is the top lawyer to the president of the United States and he runs the cabinet department called the Department of Justice, which has almost 100,000 employees. And the Department of Justice includes thousands and thousands of federal prosecutors who prosecute violations of federal criminal laws. It also includes thousands and thousands of civil lawyers who represent the government in non-criminal lawsuits that come up, of which there are many kinds contract disputes, disputes about property ownership, disputes about environmental law, disputes about civil rights laws and all of that. And the attorney general is the head of the Department of Justice, so he's in charge of roughly 100,000 lawyers and their secretaries and other employees, secretaries and other employees and he's responsible both for running the Department of Justice and also for advising the president and in Mises' case that was Ronald Reagan advising the president on legal matters.

Steven Calabresi:

And traditionally the attorney general has usually advised the president on the appointment of Scalia and Justice Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court. And he also recommended dozens of other extremely brilliant and talented people who were appointed to federal court of appeals or federal trial courts. So the attorney general does a great deal, attorney General does a great deal Within the Justice Department and under the Attorney General is the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the FBI is essentially the closest thing we have to a national police force, and FBI agents investigate suspicious things where they think there may have been a crime, and then, if they find evidence of a crime, they contact criminal lawyers in the Justice Department and the FBI agents work with the criminal lawyers to pursue prosecuting the crime. So the short answer is he's the chief law enforcement officer of the United States and the principal advisor to the president on anything that has to do with law, from criminal prosecution to appointing judges and Supreme Court justices.

michele mcaloon:

Okay, so we have this thing called originalism, but let me ask you a question what is the difference between a judicial philosophy that's conservative versus a originalist judicial philosophy?

Steven Calabresi:

And I thought this was an interesting point that you made in your book have various ideas about policy matters, and in my case, for example, I think that there should be laws against the use of certain illegal drugs, or laws that put limits on gambling or on prostitution or things of that kind, and so those would be ideas that I have, as a conservative, about what the law should do. An originalist judge has to address a different question, which is what does the Constitution say about a particular matter and whether a particular outcome is a good idea? There are some things that, as a conservative, I'm opposed to, that are nonetheless constitutional. So I think the federal government spends way too much money on various welfare programs and transfer programs, much of which is wasted. The government, for example, provides Social Security benefits even to people who are wealthy, who are retired, not simply to people who are poor and might need them.

Steven Calabresi:

I think there is a legitimate role for a government safety net for the poor, but it's not obvious to me why the wealthy should be entitled to Social Security benefits once they turn 65. But the question then arises is is it constitutional for the government to do this? And the answer is clearly yes. So there are a lot of things the government spends money on that I don't approve of. But in general, the government has very broad power to spend money to promote the general welfare as Congress and the president see it, and so the federal government spends tons of money on things that I don't approve of. But that's constitutional, it's legal. Who simply followed my policy inclinations? I would trim the federal budget hugely.

michele mcaloon:

But that's not what the Constitution allows a judge to do. Okay, so prior to 1980, 1983, 1985, you had very liberal not liberal judges, but judges that were making policy. And Ed Meese comes in. What actually and this is a question I had when I was reading what makes him an originalist? What actually? Is there a crystallizing moment where he decides wait a second. We need to read the original intent of the Constitution. We need to read the words. Was there a moment?

Steven Calabresi:

Well, I think that for Ed Meese, one crystallizing moment was that he was a state prosecutor in Oakland, california, in the early 1960s, during the Warren Court era and the Warren Court was named after Chief Justice Earl Warren, who served from 1953 to 1969. And it was a very activist and very left-wing court. Among other things, it cut back greatly on the ability of the police to prosecute crimes. It was pursuing a policy that was going to end with a ruling that the death penalty is always unconstitutional and can't be imposed, and it was also heading toward a conclusion that people had a constitutional right to receive welfare benefits and a constitutional right to vacation leave and medical leave and things of that kind. And Ed Meese knew this was nonsense, not only as a policy matter, but also because when you read the Constitution it's really clear that the death penalty is constitutional.

Steven Calabresi:

There's a clause there are two clauses in the Constitution, one applying to the federal government and one applying to the states that say essentially the following no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Well, what those clauses clearly contemplate is that you can be deprived of life if there is due process of law. Well, what those clauses clearly contemplate is that you can be deprived of life if there is due process of law. And so the position of the Warren Court liberals, that the death penalty was always unconstitutional, was contradicted by the text of the Constitution itself, which allows for the death penalty so long as there is due process of law. And naturally, because the death penalty is such a severe penalty, it's only applied to the most serious murders and the most harmful murders, and there are many procedural protections to make sure that somebody is really guilty before the death penalty is imposed. But anyone, whatever your politics are, whatever you think about the wisdom of the death penalty as a policy matter, it's just clear that the death penalty is constitutional under some circumstances, so long as there's due process of law under some circumstances, so long as there's due process of law.

Steven Calabresi:

It's also very clear from reading the Constitution that the Constitution doesn't guarantee welfare benefits. There simply is nothing in the Constitution, which was written in 1787 and which has been amended 27 times since then. There's nothing in the Constitution or in the amendments that creates a right to Social Security or a right to food stamps or a right to Medicare or Medicaid or any of those things. Now Congress has chosen to create those things and to fund them, and it can do that under the Constitution, but the Constitution doesn't require it.

Steven Calabresi:

So I think Ed Meese became originally interested in law and judging because he realized that what the Warren Court was doing was imposing left-wing policy that was contradicted by the very words of the Constitution. I think that one of the things that caused him to be very interested in the words of the Constitution and their original meaning is that Ed is a very devout Lutheran and reads the Bible and reads it closely and follows the text of the Bible. And so I think that for him and this is hypothesis on my part, he hasn't said this to me, but I think that because he reads the Bible and follows it, he also thinks judges should read the Constitution and follow that, and I think that is one of the things that inspired him to argue for originalism. I think that is one of the things that inspired him to argue for originalism, absolutely.

michele mcaloon:

You know, I'm a retired Army helicopter pilot. In flight school my flight instructor looked over me and said just follow the instructions. So if I was a secular lawyer I would be a originalist. There's no question about it. Just follow the instructions, right.

Steven Calabresi:

And those instructions were brilliantly written, just follow the instructions right, and those instructions were brilliantly written, as Justice Clarence Thomas once said at a speech that I was presiding, was the moderator for. He said originalism is really simple. If you're driving down the road and you see a sign that says stop, you stop, you don't slow down and cruise through the intersection. You come to a full and complete stop. And that's what originalism is. It's just read the text and follow it.

michele mcaloon:

Follow the instructions. We'd probably be far better in life if we followed the instructions. One of the real, I thought, real strong points in your book was you explained how Ed Meese looked at federalism and departmentalism and separation of powers, and I thought you did a really good job of explaining that, because that is something that was what that was 30 years ago, but that's something that we're still kind of wrestling with and we've seen the Supreme Court decisions over the past two years, like the Chevron deference. Court decisions over the past two years, like the Chevron deference, the overturning of Roe v Wade have all dealt with those legal theories that he actually was preaching to the choir on this.

Steven Calabresi:

So Ed argued, as attorney general, that what judges should do in a series of very well publicized speeches that made the front pages of the newspaper in a pre-internet world where being on the front page of the newspaper was the only way you got noticed. He argued that what judges do is follow the meaning of the text of the Constitution, the original meaning of the text of the Constitution. He thought that judges were failing to do that and that they needed to be prod to the Supreme Court decisions that are being made by originalists now that are, I think, inheritors of Ed Meese.

Steven Calabresi:

One of the legacies of the New Deal and of Franklin Roosevelt appointing eight out of nine Supreme Court justices was that from 1937 until 1995, the Supreme Court never said that there was a limit on the power of Congress to pass a federal law, because the 1980s never enforced the limits between congressional power and presidential power or the limits on the power of executive branch agencies like the ones that you mentioned. That you mentioned, ed Meese gave 30 or 40 speeches as Attorney General, and he gave important speeches on federalism and on separation of powers and on administrative law. One of the things that he argued, which is clearly true, is that part of the genius of the American Constitution is that we not only have a Bill of Rights that protects individual rights, but we also have a constitution of checks and balances, and we have three branches of the federal government, including a Congress divided into two houses, which check and balance each other. And so, as James Madison said in the Federalist Paper no 51, ambition counteracts ambition, and the different branches of the government check and balance each other, and the states check and balance the national government, and the national government checks and balances the states, and this is a very important system. The states, and this is a very important system. But the system can only work if the Supreme Court enforces the limits on federal power, the limits on presidential power and the limits on the power of administrative agencies. And prior to Ed Meese the Supreme Court had washed its hands of that and it was just rubber stamping anything the government wanted to do, and Ed Meese changed that.

Steven Calabresi:

It took a long time for the Supreme Court to absorb the change. In 1995, for the first time since 1937, the Supreme Court held that the federal government had passed a law that exceeded its power. And then, in a series of decisions after 1995, the Supreme Court came to the same conclusion with respect to a number of other laws, and the Supreme Court also began to enforce the limits, the dividing line between congressional power and presidential power, and then enforce limits on the power of administrative agencies. What has happened is that, especially after President Trump in his first term appointed three originalist justices to the Supreme Court, there's been a majority of six justices out of nine who believe in enforcing federalism, limits and separation of powers, limits and limits on administrative agencies. And those justices were appointed because Ed Meese basically argued this is the philosophy that judges ought to have, and so that's made. The system of checks and mail is real again and effective again in a way that it wasn't before. He was attorney general.

michele mcaloon:

Can I ask you, as a law professor, a question? I mean all these questions I'm asking a law professor, but and we'll probably see these within the next week as President Trump is inaugurated and he has promised that he is going to make several executive decisions right, and the last two or three presidents have done this and we're seeing a rash of them come out of Biden right now. Where do executive decisions fall within the Constitution?

Steven Calabresi:

So part of what's happened is that since the New Deal and since 1937, congress has delegated enormous amounts of power to the president, to cabinet officers and to administrative agencies. I'll give you an example of that. The statute that sets up the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcasting, including radio, television and the internet, literally begins by saying the Federal Communications Commission shall have the power to regulate communications in the public interest. Period is limited by the First Amendment. So if the FCC tries to regulate communications in a way that violates the First Amendment, the Supreme Court has struck it down. But it's a huge delegation of lawmaking power by Congress to the Federal Communications Commission and throughout the government. One finds that Congress, since 1937, has delegated an enormous amount of legislative power either to the president or to cabinet secretaries or to administrative agencies, rather than passing laws itself. And the reason why Congress does that is that if Congress passed laws itself, some people would like the laws and some people wouldn't like them and they would be controversial. But if Congress simply passes the buck to the president, the cabinet officers and the agencies, then congressmen can praise decisions that those people make that are popular and distance themselves from decisions those people make that are unpopular. But this is completely unconstitutional because the Constitution says that it's Congress that's supposed to legislate and the president is just supposed to apply the law. And so these delegations of power are unconstitutional.

Steven Calabresi:

And one of the things the Supreme Court has been saying in the last four years for the first time since 1937, is Congress, you can't do that, you have to be more specific. So, for example, congress had delegated to the Environmental Protection Agency the power to regulate pollutants in public interest. And Joe Biden's Environmental Protection Agency decided that carbon dioxide, which causes global warming, is a pollutant, and so his EPA drew up a massive code for regulating all the emissions of carbon dioxide by cars, by gas stoves, by factories, etc. In the country. And the Supreme Court 6-3 said to Biden's EPA you can't do that. This is a major question. You've decided Congress has to decide how to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. You can't simply decide suddenly today for the first time that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and regulate all the carbon dioxide emissions in the country. That's a decision that needs to be made by Congress, which has to pass a law through both houses that the president then signs and enforces.

Steven Calabresi:

And I think that captures really the essence of what the court is doing in applying originalism right now and the way in which it's returning us to limited government and, frankly, restoring democracy, because the protection agency is a collection of bureaucrats and they're not elected to anything. They differ from ordinary Americans and their policies for reducing carbon dioxide emissions were going to end coal mining in West Virginia. They were going to raise the price of gasoline to $6 a gallon. They were going to have all sorts of harmful consequences and maybe those things should be done or maybe they shouldn't be done. Maybe those things should be done or maybe they shouldn't be done, but it's Congress and the president through the democratic process.

michele mcaloon:

Who are supposed to make that decision, not an unelected agency? Yeah, that's interesting. I think it's going to be real interesting to looking at, when they do kind of the forensics on the Los Angeles fires, to see what role the EPA played in there, and I think there's probably there might be some ground to cover on that. Okay, one final question as we go forward towards the Trump White House.

Steven Calabresi:

He is an originalist.

michele mcaloon:

I mean he's. What should we look for from Pam Bondi? Should she be, should she be confirmed, and Trump as they? As Trump continues his path to originalism and as Pan Bondi steps into the office.

Steven Calabresi:

Well, I think that what one will see is, first of all, trump and Pan Bondi and Trump's White House counsel will recommend the appointment of judges who are originalists and textualists, who will follow the law rather than just make policy decisions, and unfortunately, president Biden, over the last four years, has appointed judges who are just policymakers. They don't follow the law, and so I think we'll see a big change in the kind of judges who get appointed, and that will be a very good thing. I also think that President Trump will issue a series of executive orders, probably on Monday, his first day on the job.

michele mcaloon:

He's promised that yeah.

Steven Calabresi:

I think there'll be a slew of executive orders that will reverse all kinds of unconstitutional things that President Biden tried to do. So just yesterday or the day before yesterday, president Biden issued an executive order saying that students who had gotten government loans to go to college didn't have to repay the loans. I think President Trump will reverse that order, and that's entirely fair, because many students have repaid their loans and it would be very unfair to excuse the people who haven't repaid their loans when other students have paid loans. Absolutely. That's just simply one example. So I think there will be a slew of presidential executive orders that will reverse executive orders that Biden made, particularly in the last few months.

Steven Calabresi:

I think that Pam Bondi as attorney general will clean up the Justice Department and get rid of some of the political persecution that's been going on. The Justice Department under Merrick Garland has been very, very political. The two criminal cases that it brought against President Trump one involving the events of January 6, 2021, and the other involving Trump's retention of classified documents were both brought in an unconstitutional way by an illegally appointed special prosecutor, jack Smith, and I think I very much hope that Attorney General Bondi will repeal the regulation under which Jack Smith was appointed because it's an unconstitutional regulation, using it as a weapon to harass Republicans or Democrats and get it back to what it's supposed to do, which is enforcing the law even-handedly, equally unto the rich and the poor, unto Democrats, unto Republicans, et cetera.

michele mcaloon:

I think it was Ed Meese that said our law should be maybe it was Ed Meese, maybe he was quoting the founding fathers but a rule of law versus a rule of men and women, and I know that is. Laws ensure that we have rights and obligations and duties and justices. I hope Pam Bondi is as smart as Ed Meese, or at least operates in his spirit as going forward. I think this originalism has actually saved democracy in a lot of ways.

Steven Calabresi:

Critical to democracy and critical to limited government, because if the Supreme Court doesn't enforce the limits on government in the Constitution, then we don't have limited government. So it is critical.

michele mcaloon:

To my listening audience. This is a brilliant book because there's a lot of great civic nuggets in it. Critical To my listening audience, this is a brilliant book because there's a lot of great civic nuggets in it. Really it's a great book. It's kind of an insider's peek into Washington too.

Steven Calabresi:

Well, thank you very much. It was, you know, such a great privilege to work for Ed Meese for two years when he was attorney general. I would, you know, the two most exciting years of my life. And it was a great privilege to work for President Reagan for several months in the West Wing of his White House. And to me, I think Ronald Reagan is, along with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, one of the three greatest presidents in our history and I think Ed Meese is the greatest greatest presidents in our history and I think Ed Meese is the greatest attorney general in our history and I just have huge admiration for both Ed Meese and for President Reagan.

michele mcaloon:

Well, your admiration for Ed Meese and President Reagan actually earns admiration from me for you. So I cannot thank you enough for doing this interview and taking time out of your very busy legal schedule. You know what, actually, I'd love to talk to you in a couple months' time to see where we are as far as We'd love to do a follow-up. Thank you very much, all right.

Steven Calabresi:

I really appreciate it.