 Some people are more equal than others, you know? And there's Supreme Court edifice in the building in Washington that says equal justice under law. So you really have to question John Roberts when he said that Trump doesn't have to turn over his tax returns. Even after the Court of Appeals said he did have to turn over his tax returns. I cannot understand the Supreme Court anymore. Well, maybe I can. In any event, we're gonna talk about equal justice under law. We're gonna talk about the rule of law. We're gonna talk about constitutional faithfulness, if you will, with a Canadian. Ken Rogers, a Canadian businessman, who joins us from Kelowna, British Columbia. Welcome to the show, Ken. Hello, Jay. I'm pretty sure my opinion of American law may disappoint you. Well, I'm already disappointed. So what do you got? Well, I don't think you can talk about the rule of law without first starting off with simplistically, what is the law? Because the difference is in how you describe that it helps explain the deficiencies in the American situation. To me, law is a bunch of rules that are determined by a society that enable a group of people to live together harmoniously. You can have a simple law that says when you come to a red light, you're supposed to stop. Now, most people would agree with that. Americans and Canadians. But you don't have to go an inch past that before an American would pull out their libertarian banner and say, whatever you're gonna do violates my rights, you know, my freedom. And so you can get the stupidity of something like Texas where you can wear your gun in public, like you were going into a saloon in the old Western days. And or you can, you know, stand in a, beside a voting place, wearing fatigues and carrying your machine gun. You know, and somebody would say that's not intimidation or that's, you know, that is not contrary to your right to vote. And it's just, you know, that would be un-Canadian for sure. So that without, you know, your constitution that ranks first, you know, is part of the problem as to why you cannot really get a group of laws that make as much sense as for a civil society like most of Western Europe and Canada. You just have these things that, you know, eventually we'll get to where, you know, and you're getting there pretty quickly. And if, you know, maybe next November, or November the eighth or whenever, which was when you vote, but shortly thereafter, whenever the votes finished, if the Republicans win, you know, and since they're no longer really just Republicans, there's really the behind the scenes empire of libertarians that are dominated, have changed it. So it's no longer the political party that it used to be. You're then gonna have laws that really are for the very wealthy and gradually move to where you've got more of an oligarchic system than you now have. And you prefaced that by saying we may not agree. And I don't know why you would have said that. Well, I thought you'd have your American flag out and basically wave it and say that if it's American, it's got to be better than anybody else's. You know, but, you know, certainly your rule of law is just not the same as in Canada. I mean, if you went to Wikipedia and looked for a definition, you might say, oh gee, the definition's the same. But that's kind of why I says, well, you got to explain what do you mean by law and you get this set of rules. Well, it's the set of rules that are so different in the US that make really the rule of law is not the same. It's not as good. You know, I'm reminded of civil law which is not in the UK. It's not in Canada, it's not in the US. It's in France and other countries in Western Europe. And there's not the same kind of emphasis on precedent, story, the cizes. There's not the same kind of emphasis on, you know, fancy foot interpretations of old cases or the language in old statutes. The not the same kind of lawyering experience. But, you know, there is a kind of emphasis on common sense. I mean, you were thinking of the Texas gun law. Well, I think we have led ourselves astray. I totally agree with you. And in this country, you know, you can find a case where 99% of the people who watch the case think that it's gonna, you know, have an outcome like X and then surprise of surprises. It has an outcome of Y and it happens all the time. And you can feel the variance, the separation of what people expect will happen in the courts or they believe should happen in the courts and what actually does happen in the courts. But it's not only the courts, as you say, it's, you know, you gotta make these laws and legislatures and I like to explore with you, you know, how it works in Canada. You have a parliament. And in parliament, there are, you know, people elected to parliament or like a state legislature or Congress, but they don't run on platforms that deny elections, do they? They don't run on platforms that include, you know, racial bigotry or hate or violence or provisions that will allow the officials involved to turn over an election based on the popular vote in favor of some politicized candidate. You don't have that, do you? No, but, you know, the reason's a little differently and you might just, you know, throw up United, what is it, Citizens United, you know, to a great extent explains that whole differences is in Canada, firstly, the federal government is much stronger relative to the provinces compared to the U.S. versus the U.S. states. But the political contributions, corporations and unions may not make contributions in Canada. You cannot form one of these, you know, PACs and that all contributions come from individuals are, you know, elections, you know, if somebody was running for the, oh, let's pick Wyoming's a small estate and you want to run for Wyoming for a, just a congressman rather than even the, I guess they only have one congressman as well as one, but they get two senators. However, it would cost you more to run for Congress in Wyoming than it would cost to run for Prime Minister in Canada. Like our elections don't, you know, have the mega, mega scale of money, but coming, you know, steering that back to the question of law, you know, if you're going to elect your judges, then whoever's putting up the money to pay for that judge to run is probably going to have the net result that the judge is not unbiased, you know, so that if you would have, you know, in theory, you know, you get a picture of justice and supposedly you have, you know, balance and fairness and no bias. Well, you know, the method by which you put your justice together, you know, can't help but have bias. I mean, you know, how could you possibly have people before Congress testifying, you know, as supposed candidates for the American Supreme Court and, you know, look the, you know, panel in the eye and say, oh, I favor the legal precedent, you know, and a month later, they're voting to boot out, you know, say the abortion law, you know, just ignore what, you know, they've said in a hearing, you know, it's kind of hard to take somebody like Justice Kavanaugh and say that he's not biased or, you know, for sure just shouldn't be there on that basis alone. Or that he was telling the truth. Or that he was telling the truth when he said he considered Roe v. Wade's settled law. He wasn't telling the truth. Right, yeah, that was my point. Yeah, and, you know, our Supreme Court, they have to retire at age 75. So I don't know if that straying a bit aside helped explain anything that was in line with your question. No, no, no, no, but I want to move on to, you know, what I call the infection. So, you know, I've been writing a commentary about social media lately and thinking about, you know, what's happening to Twitter under its new owner, Elon Musk and how influential social media is for reasons that are still not clear to me. And, you know, the same social media that half the country gets and is persuaded, you know, that Trump is a great guy, you get, Canada gets, there's no way of stopping it, right? So people in Canada, they can look at social media and they can get emails or all these flooded emails from whatever side of the bubble, you know, whatever bubble they might be in. And they've got to be affected by this. And they read the papers and watch TV and they see and some people watch Fox News and other people watch NBC and they got to be affected by the bubble. And so what I'm thinking, and I really need confirmation is really important to me, I'm thinking that the trouble we have in this country, nobody knows the trouble that we have in this country, but maybe Canada does, because Canada is in the same language, you get all our media, every little media you get and it's got to be affecting somebody. So the chaos that we have going on and the chaos which will be much worse after next week, doesn't that infect Canada? Isn't it infecting people in Canada? Absolutely, you know, one thing you could say there is no bad, ugly trait in the United States that does not exist in Canada. Unfortunately, most of them exist to a much lesser extent. You know, in the flip side, there's no good righteous state in the United States that does not also exist in Canada, hopefully because we have less of the ugly side, we may have more of the more balanced total. But really, we are affected by anything. I mean, we have lots of racial bigotry, ours is not focused to a great extent against blacks, but the degree to which we have racial discrimination with our native Indians is equally as ugly as the worst you can get in the southern states. I mean, we don't hang them any, but nevertheless, and we don't walk around with our guns in Texas, you know, but when you have things like the very sad shootings at the school in Texas, you know, you know, shortly after you end up with the governor of Texas bringing in his weird gun law that, you know, everybody go under around wearing their gun, you know, without even concealing it or but wear it in public and, you know, where what Canada does it, you know, the minute that you've all the thing happened, you know, the federal government took it as an opportunity to go another step further in reducing guns. You know, we had, you know, it was, you know, the United States would call it a mega step to do with guns, but to us it's just another inch going in that direction as we had that you, you know, it was against the law to, they were just trying to say, if you have a handgun, that's fine, we won't take it away from you, but you know, you can't sell it and you can't transfer it to anybody else, you know, you can't illegally import it so that eventually you're going to run out, you know, where, you know, in some senses, we've got lots of guns and gun usage, you know, we have long guns on, you know, like we are ranches and farms, you know, pretty extensive, but lots of them are in a place where you need the gun and you know, so they're common and, but you know, we don't have somebody bringing one of those guns and standing in front of a polling station. So what about gun violence in Canada? Do you have school shootings? I recall there was some kind of nutcase in the Maritimes, wasn't it? A year ago or so, who was on a spree to kill people, but that's the only time I can remember, usually it doesn't happen, does it? Oh, we don't have, as I said, every rotten thing you've got, we've got, we just have less of them per capita and a lot are, you know, things like the gun laws in the US, you're a big part of that. Yeah, so what about the dog whistle phenomenon where somebody gets up like Lindsey Graham gets up and says, you know, if Trump is indicted in Mar-a-Lago there will be violence and we know what that is. And when Trump stands in front of the Capitol on January 6th and says, we got to fight like hell, he's really calling for violence. If a politician in the United States makes a dog whistle statement like that, does it have any effect in Canada? Yes, use an example, you know, the, we had a thing that probably made the news in the United States where, you know, the capital city had a whole bunch of 18 wheelers roll in, you know, and park in the main streets in downtown Ottawa such that nothing else could move and, you know, they were beeping their horns in these 18 wheelers and they had big signs on the front and called it the freedom convoy and it would look like, you know, if you saw them coming you'd think they were going to a Trump rally, you know, but then they sat in that city for, you know, the level of patience was greater than you'd ever see in an American scenario. So it takes them, you know, two or three weeks before anything is going to be done. But importantly, compared to, you know, any, let's call it protest in the US, what happens on the side of nearly every protest is in the United States you've got a whole bunch of opportunists that are trying to loot the business down the street when the police are busy dealing with the riot, you know, or the protest. So the protests tend to move to be more violent in nature. Well, here we have our, you know, big copycat, you know, freedom convoy going to Ottawa and there is no, you know, fires on the, you know, some business a block away, there's no, you know, windows broken, there's no great mess. Now, I might use the word none, but you're still the same as in the US we'll have a bit of something, but never the same level of illegality or, you know, lack of good civil behavior where I would call that like respect for the law. What is the rule of law? You can't just have the rule of law, you have a rule, a law, but, you know, who will base it? Like, you know, and that's kind of the differences. Well, yeah, you know, and I was thinking, you know, we really should study, at least for a few minutes, why? Because the cultures are so similar in Canada and the US and every time you look there, they're closer in many ways. But in this way, there is a pervasive difference. And I suggest to you that maybe it's rooted in the fact that Canada is a former Commonwealth. Commonwealths have a common denominator. Of course, they come from Britain, they come from the Britain notion, British notion of law, and inherent in that is perhaps a greater respect for the law. And there's gotta be a reason why it's different in Canada and the US. We hear, we believe that, you know, it's never over till the fat lady sings that you can appeal and appeal and appeal, and then you can reject any legal decision made by anybody and go to the next step. I'm not sure how you characterize that, but there's a question of good faith in a lot of these things. And I think there's a pervasive good faith in the Commonwealth approach, the UK approach. It's like the social compact. It's the essential understanding, you referred to this earlier, of the citizens of their relationship with the state and with other citizens. If everybody is on his own trip, looking for his own interest and be damned the country, be damned his neighbor or other members of his community, then what you have is a lack of respect for the rule of law. And I think that's what we have had, and it's sort of emerging to a greater degree now. And I think in Canada, you have a greater respect under the social compact that binds everyone. Well, I agree with that conclusion today. But, you know, many, many moons ago when I was a young college student, was a graduate student in New York City. And I would have said today is far different the comparison between Canada and the US than then. Like, you know, in the mid 1960s, I would say the rule of law in Canada and the US were a lot closer than they are today. And it's not because ours has improved. You know, it's because yours has gone downhill. Now, you know, in the mid 1990s, you know, 30 years later than my experience in New York, I lived in Salt Lake City for a while for several years. And I would again make that comment that the feeling of the relative rule of law or your comfort with the law was very similar. In fact, I, you know, have traveled a lot in the US over the years and Utah as far as it's, even though it's very far right in its voting, you know, the rule of law feel there is better than in most places in the United States. Well, yeah, voting, that's what we should also discuss. We have our voting, as you said, on Tuesday, November 8th, and most right thinking people are terrified because there are those people who take the position by right, do you mean politically right? Or do you mean right thinking? I just want to understand because to me there is an immediate difference. It's okay, you can pull my chain if you wish. But you know, it's like, heads I win and tails you lose. Whatever happens in my concept of the election laws, the rule of law as it pertains to elections, whatever happens, I win. Yeah, Ken, do you know that there were already in excess of a hundred lawsuits in this country contesting elections except we haven't had them yet? It's quite extraordinary that we will litigate elections that haven't happened yet. And so I mean, I think what I'm saying is we talk about decline of the rule of law. There are so many states and places and legislation, legislatures, that have abandoned the rule of law as it pertains to elections. They want to say, heads I win, tails you lose. How does that ring in Canada? Do you have people who say that? And what do you think of the individuals here in this country that lie about the results, want to change the results and want to win no matter what? Well, have you read a book called Democracy in Chains? I have. Okay, the concept there is that behind the scenes where there used to be a normal Republican party, there's now a full blown organization that's taken over and it's totally different. There's billionaires financing the idea that if you are an existing member of Congress, such as Cheney, of all Republicans, it's kind of hard to say you could have anything against Cheney, just from a Canadian point of view, she looks like, gee, if I were a little bit on the right wing side, I'd sure be pleased to vote for her, I'd repick her over most people. And yet, because the machinery in the background is willing to threaten every single candidate, either you tow the line that you don't agree with, or we will eliminate your political career because we will finance the primary against you, exactly in her case, so that the machinery behind that in my mind, for the reason I brought up that book, was because it kind of lays out a long-term motive, like why are this group of billionaires, mainly backed by the Koch brothers or started by the Koch brothers at least, that what is their game plan? Why are they spending all this money? And really, they'd like to, according to the book, and I tend to agree with the summary in it, that they'd rather have an oligarchic state in the US, where the very wealthy decide everything, and they don't wanna have just the idea of less government is the best answer to everything. But their definition of less government is have private jails, private schools, don't have public schools, and when you come to the rule of law and you define a jail, it's a great way to show what a disgrace the United States is as a civilized country, is the number of people you got in jails, and you mean to tell me of somebody who's running a jail to make a profit? Like, oh, gee, I mean, that helps explain why nobody gets released very easily. You know, that might explain why, you know, you have these, you know, next to nothing crimes, like possession of marijuana that happened prior to some state bringing in the law legalizing it, and you still got the guy in jail that had the possession. I remember the book, and as I recall, there was a fellow named Hugh Cannon, I wanna say James Buchanan, and he was a teacher in Mason University of Virginia, and he designed a whole change in the political landscape of the United States, but he couldn't actually do his plan until he ran into the Koch brothers in the late 1990s, that's only 20 years ago, and the Koch brothers funded his plan to do these primaries and to change out the Republican party. Buchanan died in the late 1990s, but his dream lived after him, and with the help and lots of money from the Koch brothers, the country changed. And it's really interesting how you can have one person, or let's say a small group of conspirators like that, who decide they wanna wreck the country and successfully do it. They did it. They changed things out, and we're suffering from that today. Well, you don't get, oh, sorry. We're talking about the same book, right? Yes, exactly, and you're correct, but we're, you know, on some US stations, which we get in Kent, of course, you know, they'll have, you know, one of the important things in this election coming up on November 8th is that, you know, democracy's on the ballot. You know, well, most people don't really understand that, you know, but I tend to think that it's on the ballot an awful lot more than most any educated Americans think. I mean, if the now Republican party, you know, which I again repeat, you know, doesn't resemble the party of years ago. I mean, even Lindsey Graham was a reasonable person a few years ago. You know, you could get the John McCain's of the world could, you know, easily get him to join some compromise in solution. And now he looks over his shoulder and what the libertarian or Koch brothers machine that now is the party, you know, or has taken it over or what they want, you know, either he salutes or he's out. Yeah, well, it's really an interesting mechanism. And I think historians will be writing about this for you decades and decades and decades, assuming they are permitted to write about this. And that's another question, another show. Well, I was going to ask you a question is in terms of the consequence of the election that I don't quite understand is what is the so-called commerce clause? And why does that, you know, as you may or may not know my well-educated brother has a master's degree in political science and his comment to me is if I'm talking to you about this, that, you know, make sure I, you know, explain the difference the effect the commerce clause will have compared to what we have in Canada. Well, I kind of went, what do you mean? You know, so I thought, oh, well, you know. Well, I don't remember the exact language but commerce clause conceptually is that you have to be free to move from state to state. And it's not a, you know, a federation of independent countries. It's part of the, you know, the concept of federalism. Yes, the states have certain powers by themselves but you cannot limit the movement of people or goods across state boundaries. Okay, then I would guess, okay. The coming election will cause a reduction in the size if the Republicans win, there will be a reduction in the federal government in the United States, dramatic. Like there will be, it'll be that the commerce, let's say the federal government's role from the Roosevelt era that enabled an awful lot of national things to happen. You know, if you're a genuine libertarian, which I think these radicals that are now running the Republican party are, then, you know, the elimination of the federal government's ability to shove the states around, you know, and say, you've got to do this, you know, or we won't fund or we won't this or we won't that, you know, that I would guess that that's, you know, the connection of that commerce clause that can achieve the goal of the now Republicans to, you know, get down to where, you know, they don't have to pay any tax and too bad for people who can't afford healthcare or schools or anything else. Well, I know you're a student of demography, demographics and, you know, just look for example, what's the Supreme Court decision, the obstacle for the movement of people. So if I'm in a state which is outlawing abortion and I have the ability to leave that state to go to another state where I can get an abortion and by the way, this could be by country as well, then I will do that. So Lindsey Graham can send his daughter to Illinois, but, you know, the guy that he's voting to deny that right to, can't. That's right, and I think this changes, you know, you vote with your feet, you say Illinois is a better place or Hawaii is a better place. Why would I stay in South Carolina when they're so, you know, they're so hard on me. So I'm leaving South Carolina and I think people will vote with their feet. This is not the only issue. If a state turns red and oppresses people, if a state, you know, terminates civil rights for anyone about anything, I think what's gonna happen in the next few years is people gonna say, you know, the hell with this noise, I'm moving to a state that's more liberal. And indeed that may be their only option in many ways. But even though, you know, Washington State or Oregon or California, you know, to a lesser extent, Colorado, you know, states that I know reasonably well, you know, even though they may be very Canadian in their attitude, if you have a, you know, federal government that's pushed by the Koch brother machine, then they will have abortion being disallowed nationally. Oh my God. You see, the idea is if, you know, from their perspective, if you can, you know, make states rights far stronger and then you get these red states that, you know, have all the gerrymandering and everything else that's kosher, that then those states, you know, can as a group prevent any federal change in constitution, then, you know, you're just gradually going to enable that modified or the new Republican party to make federal laws that over, you know, that force California to do dumb things. Oh, no, I totally right, totally right. And one of the great hypocrisies is when the Supreme Court says, this is up to the states and then the Supreme Court steps in and tells the states what to do. That's hypocrisy on a national scale and we have had that. But let me go to one last point, we're really out of time here and to talk about a very current news item that is the attack on Paul Pelosi just a few days ago. This is outrage and it's an outrage. Also, the social media makes fun of it in the way of shot and fro it. And I wonder, you know, your view of that from the Canadian perspective, could that happen? Could you have an assassination? We've had a couple of incidents like that. Recent years under the Trump administration where public officials have been attacked or their families have been attacked or killed, does it happen in Canada? Would it happen in Canada? As I've said before, anything that's bad in the United States, we've got. You know, we watched the American TV, our radicals hear the same crap on social media or television as Americans, they're just less of them per capita and less of those problems per capita. But example, we have one of our major, we've got three political parties of significance rather than just two. And so we have a, you know, a coalition type government, but the party that's out of power, you know, just put in a new leader, you know, and he does stupid things like, you know, using it in American terms, the Federal Reserve Bank and the US in Canada, it's called the Bank of Canada. Well, he said, you know, the first thing he'd do is fire the head of the Bank of Canada because they should heal to, you know, political things, you know, missing the basic point that that part of the government and admin of the country, you know, without that independence, you know, nothing would work well. Yeah, you're right. And so that's another piece of the virus where Canada catches the notion of politicians arguing for the destruction of an institution that have existed for years and years and without common sense. Wow, this is a great, great topic. And what I've learned over the last half hour and our discussion, Ken, is that the rule of law, as you said, it has to be defined. What are we talking about? And at the end of the day, it's we have to have respect for other people, for their welfare and for the institutions, the social fabric, you know, that binds us together. And so the definition of law and rule of law is... Well, what are the laws that you're trying to have the rule of is the key piece. You know, it's the American lack of the proper laws or allowing things like, you know, Citizens United, you know, that are illegal in Canada. It makes the difference rather than just a pure definition of rule of the law as everybody's treated equally before the law, well, that should apply, even if the laws are dumb. Ken, it's always so good to talk to you. Thank you so much, Ken Rogers, Retired Businessman, Kelowna, British Columbia. Thank you so much for joining us. Fine, Jay, thank you. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.