My appearance on The Rick Amato Show

Yesterday I made an appearance on The Rick Amato Show for the One America Cable News Network. A few days earlier, I received an unexpected call from Sutton Porter whom I'd met a year ago when I went on a couple of shows--one radio and the other television--with which she had been associated. Sutton wanted to know if I would come on a new show and I assumed she wanted me to talk about Ferraris or branding actors or some such but that was not the case.

On the radio show last year, we somehow got onto the topic of government and politics; a subject on which I've done some considerable due diligence over the past eighteen years. "It's a political show," she told me saying she thought I would make an interesting guest. "When would you like me to appear?" I asked. "Is tomorrow to soon?" she answered.

A few days later, I made the trip into the studio and did two nine-minute segments with Rick and two other panelists. At the end of these and as I was removing my microphone, Rick turns to me and says, "We don't usually do this but would you mind staying for another segment?" I didn't mind.

It was my first stint on a news show talking about a subject that interests me greatly. Rick was a quick and knowledgeable host and the other guests shared interesting viewpoints. What I had to say had it's basis in the following opinion written by the Honorable Supreme Court Justice John Harlan in the 1901 case of Downes v. Bidwell. This is what he wrote about two different and distinct nations:

"The idea prevails with some, indeed it has expression in arguments at the bar, that we have in this country substantially two national governments; one to be maintained under the Constitution, with all its restrictions; the other to be maintained by Congress outside and independently of that instrument, by exercising such powers as other nations of the earth are accustomed to...I take leave to say that, if the principles thus announced should ever receive the sanction of a majority of this court, a radical and mischievous change in our system will result. We will, in that event, pass from the era of constitutional liberty guarded and protected by a written constitution into an era of legislative absolutism...It will be an evil day for American Liberty if the theory of a government outside the Supreme Law of the Land finds lodgement in our Constitutional Jurisprudence. No higher duty rests upon this court than to exert its full authority to prevent all violation of the principles of the Constitution." 

Food for thought, no?