 Good afternoon and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased you could join us for today's program. Whether you're here in the theater with us or joining us on Facebook or YouTube, today we're happy to welcome back Senator Mike Lee. We'll talk about his new book, Our Lost Declaration, America's Fight Against Tyranny from King George to the Deep State. In just two weeks, the steps outside on Constitution Avenue will be filled with people gathered to celebrate Independence Day, the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. It's probably safe to say that most Americans have not read the entire declaration, but at our July 4 celebration, people listen attentively as actors read the document from start to finish. They loudly cheer for the assertions of Independence and the vision of a government founded on the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and cheer energetically during the list of grievances against the King of England. To those who have only a passing acquaintance with the Declaration of Independence, that list of complaints is unfamiliar, although it takes up two-thirds of the document. In our Lost Declaration, Senator Mike Lee draws our attention to that core section of the Declaration of Independence and reminds us of why the founders risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to break away from the crown and establish a new nation with a new form of government. Senator Lee is here for the back here at the National Archives. He was last here on Constitution Day in 2015 with his book, Our Lost Constitution. In May, I suggest our lost Bill of Rights for your next book, and then we'll have the charters covered in the rotunda upstairs. Senator Mike Lee was elected in 2010 to represent Utah in the United States Senate, graduated from Brigham Young University's Law School in 1997, and went on to serve as law clerk to Judge D. Benson of the U.S. District Court of the District of Utah, and then with future Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito Jr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Throughout his career, Lee earned a reputation as an outstanding practitioner of the law based on his sound judgment abilities in the courtroom and thorough understanding of the Constitution. Senator Lee is a member of the Judiciary Committee and serves as chairman of the Antitrust Competition Policy and Consumer Rights Subcommittee. He also oversees issues critical to Utah as chairman of the Water and Power Subcommittee of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and serves on the Commerce Committee as well. In 2019, he became the chairman of the Joint Economic Committee where he is overseeing the social capital project. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Senator Mike Lee. Thanks so much, David. Thanks to all of you for being here. Thanks for letting me speak at this great building. When you write a book about the Declaration of Independence, this is sort of ground zero. This is the place where the thing is housed. And so we're on sacred, hallowed ground here. As he mentioned, my book and its title and its predecessor and its predecessor's title reminded me of a recurring nightmare I had as I was preparing to release this book, a recurring nightmare in which the word O was inexplicably replaced with a U. It would take on a very different meaning, become a very different book, although perhaps one that would be more compliant with what one, some would say would sell more books. Nevertheless, I found it important to write about our founding documents and I like your suggestion. Perhaps another book could focus on our lost Bill of Rights or perhaps going back further, our last Magna Carta, lost Magna Carta. But I have focused on our founding documents because I've come to believe that the more we can come to understand our founding generation and the reasons why we became an independent nation, the more we can understand our rights and our liberties, the more we can help ourselves avoid the mistakes of the past moving into the future. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And we find these rhyming couplets, the more we understand our own history and the way we came about as a country. Why it is that we no longer fly the Union Jack or sing God Save the Queen. Our revolution, you see, had a lot more to do than simply discarding the monarchy and deciding that we didn't want to be part of a government that was based in London. Those two things certainly had something to do with it, but they were far from the whole story. To get the whole story, we have to go back some two and a half centuries and understand what it was like at the time of the founding. I maintained that a lot of what led to the American Revolution had to do with the fact that we had a large and distant national government, one that had become unsympathetic to the needs of the governed, one that was slow to respond to their concerns and one that recognized no outer bound limits on its authority. Although it has become popular over the past two and a half centuries, to refer to King George III as a villain, as the sole villain, he of course was not. Now, to be sure, the declaration of itself personifies the evil rot by this London-based national government and directs the animus against that government directly at his majesty, King George III. There certainly was good reason for this. He was behind a whole lot of it. He wasn't the whole picture in many respects. The references to King George III could properly be understood as a reference to the King, to the King's armies, to the King's servants, to the King's ministers, and to the parliament there to serve the King. When you view it in that light, it becomes a little bit easier to understand the way things work. Now, he was in fact a tyrant. He was in fact a despot, and it's a good thing that we threw him off. We have to understand, I think, the reasons why we threw off that government, and to do that, it helps us to go back to the declaration. My previous works have focused a lot on the Constitution, and with good reason. Our Constitution provides the structural protections against what would otherwise be intrusions on our God-given inherited rights, the rights that exist merely because we exist. They exist in a state of nature. The Constitution I've come to believe can be analogized to the picture frame. In many respects, the declaration provides itself the picture. But understand the declaration, we've got to talk about its historical background and context, and we also have to understand what it did. When we as Americans reflect back on the declaration, to the extent we remember much of it at all, we tend to focus mostly on the first of three independent component constituent parts of the Declaration of Independence. We refer to the first section, the introductory or preamble section. As many people who went through high school or junior high civics classes can remember, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It then goes on to explain that it's to secure these rights that governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that we have to recognize that whenever government becomes destructive of those ends, those very same ends for which government itself exists, for which it was created, from once it derives its legitimacy and its authority. It is the right of the people to alter or abolish that form of government and to establish a new system of government, one that will more effectively be designed to lead to their safety and happiness. And we're reminded within that same section that this kind of activity, throwing off a government that has become destructive of those ends, is not something that should ever be undertaken for light or transient reasons. Why? Well, because people get hurt in the process. Not only are fortunes lost, but blood is spilled. Treasure is forfeited. Families are divided. Families are often ended. And immeasurable suffering and tragedy comes about as a result. That's why we've got to be careful when invoking the revolutionary spirit of 1776 that we remember that these things can't be undertaken for lighter transient reasons. There are things that we've got to take very, very seriously. It's also important, in order to put it in context, to read the whole document, I refer to the fact that the language with which most of us are most familiar as Americans, is just the first part. It's just the opening, the preamble. The second part is one that I refer to as the indictment section, the list of grievances against King George III and his administration, so to speak. The third part, of course, is the declaration itself indicating that we are now an independent nation, no longer part of that kingdom, which was originally the head of our government. But it's this part, this second part, the indictment section, the listing of grievances. Or if you wanted to put it in Jerry Seinfeld terms in the context of the invented holiday of Festivus, the airing of grievances section that I think we pay too little attention to. We have to remember some of the things that were done by King George III that brought about the revolution and why it is that they mattered so much. I try to carry around with me a copy of the Constitution and this copy, I believe this one is printed by the National Archives if I'm not mistaken. It also conveniently contains a copy of the Declaration of Independence with it. Because in order to understand the picture frame, the Constitution, you also have to understand the picture, which is the declaration. This list of grievances is very significant and it is woven deeply into our fabric as a society. A few years ago, there were several incidents, one occurring on a radio broadcast, on national public radio, and another prominent one occurring on a social media platform in which portions of the Declaration of Independence were either read aloud in the case of the radio or printed out in a series of social media posts. In both instances, people reacted especially to language from the indictment section of the Declaration of Independence, believing that some sort of revolutionary activity was afoot, that people were trying to undertake an effort to overthrow the United States government by force, bringing about violence. People were understandably concerned and this caused a lot of people to freak out. This is sad and it's disturbing on a couple of levels. Number one, that there were a lot of people who didn't recognize the language as being distinctively part of the whole reason why we fly the stars and stripes, why it is that we are our own country, why it is that we no longer fly the Union Jack or sing Hail to the Queen. Another reason why I think it's disturbing is the fact that many found it disturbing, the fact that many found it perhaps too close to home, reminds us of the fact that perhaps in some respects our government today exceeds its authority, not in the same way that it was coming about 250 years ago, of course, but there are other ways in which that happens in ways that I think we need to focus on more than we do. Whenever we have a government that requires people to work weeks, if not months out of every year, just to pay their taxes to that national government, that is itself an overpowering military force that sends forth swarms of officers that make everything the people buy more expensive goods and services, but currently to the tune of about $2 trillion a year is about what we pay as Americans in order to comply with federal regulations. And contrary to what many would have you believe, much of that cost is borne not by big wealthy corporate fat cats, by a monopoly game piece type of a figure, but by poor and middle class Americans who find that everything they buy is more expensive, who find that they pay for those regulatory compliance costs to the tune of about $2 trillion a year in the form of higher prices on goods and services, diminished wages, unemployment, and underemployment. And so because of our history and our tradition, we often look to the fact that where there is tyranny to the idea, we cling to the outmoded notion that where there is tyranny, that tyranny will necessarily be wearing a crown and seated upon a throne. It's not always how it works. In fact, there's nothing about tyranny that demands that it occur only in that circumstance, only in a kingdom, only where there is a despot, or only where there is a single strong executive. We've had American presidents who have been accused of being tyrants, and we of course have a pretty broad spectrum of styles within the presidency. We had Andrew Jackson, who was often mocked being called King Andrew. We had Abraham Lincoln, who was often dismissed as a despot. We've had presidents who have in one way or another abused their power. And yet I would maintain that the most significant threat to American liberty has not been a threat that has been carried out within the Oval Office or any of its predecessor offices within the American presidency. In many respects, greater threats to our liberty come in a uniquely modern American form and very often are easier to ignore because they can't be dismissed or personified down to a single human being. A vast federal bureaucracy that is staffed by well-educated, well-intentioned, hardworking, and highly specialized individuals is not as menacing as someone sitting on a throne who wears a crown, who has lifetime authority. A large unmanageable federal bureaucracy is one that is created under color of federal law. It appears to have all the trappings of something that should be able to act and that is supposed to have all of our best interests at heart. And yet when you compare the writings of Thomas Payne in his classic timeless piece Common Sense, something that I focused on extensively in our last declaration, you can see that there may be some similarities. When you have unaccountable power, you have problems. When people are asked to give undue deference to any government, whether that's an individual person wearing a crown or an entire agency, as long as that power is exercised in a form that leaves it unaccountable to the people, you end up with a problem. Yes, we might say, but our system as government is different because we have elections. Well, yes, we do. We do have elections. One of the problems occurs when we shortly elect our House of Representatives, we elect our Senate, we elect our President. And yet over the last 80 years, Congress has pulled more and more of its power away from the people where it's supposed to be exercised at the state and local level and moved it to Washington. And there's a second step. Once there is more power in Congress, members of Congress seeing the onerous burden that exists with respect to the legislative task, meaning that making law requires countless line-drawn decisions, decisions that can themselves be gut-wrenching and difficult and have profound consequences for those subject to them. Sometimes members of Congress having previously been given a charter, this picture frame of which we spoke, the Constitution, that limited their power, now see over the last 80 years that their power has been opened up and that there are a lot more decisions that they have to make, decisions that were originally confined to things like establishing a uniform system of weights and measures, regulating trade or commerce between the states with foreign nations and with the Indian tribes to declaring war, granting letters of mark and reprisal, and otherwise carrying out legislative affairs that are distinctively and by designation of the Constitution national. As we have drifted away from that, we've seen Congress increasingly inclined toward a delegation of law-making power, of passing laws that essentially say we hereby declare that we shall have good law in Area X and we hereby delegate to Commission Y the task of making and interpreting and enforcing good law in Area X and Commission Y has that authority we hereby make it so. Then Commission Y goes about its business. It effectively enacts legislation. That legislation in many cases might be wise, it might be good, it might be well tailored and well suited to the people subject to it. In other cases it might not be. Let's talk about those latter cases where it might not be. When that happens we end up with a problem. The lawmakers are in the House and then in the Senate. People understandably when they face a federal regulation, complain to their members of Congress and members of Congress go through a familiar ritual where they beat their chest and say oh yes those barbarians over there at Commission Y and then they say you know what I'm going to do I'm going to write them a harshly worded letter as if that were our job writing harshly worded letters and then we go about writing the harshly worded letter and yet Commission Y continues to exercise that delegated power. That is wrong because the people who work for Commission Y while hard working well educated well intentioned and highly specialized don't work for you. They're not elected by you they don't stand accountable to you they don't even really stand in a meaningful way accountable to anyone who is himself or herself accountable to someone who is elected. So that becomes a problem because we put a distance between the people and their government and that starts to resemble more and more the type of system that we threw off some two and a half centuries ago when we declared independence. Very different in its form and in its appearance. It's not clothed in gold sewn fabric or seated upon a throne or wearing a crown but it is nonetheless a type of government that in some ways resembles the government that Thomas Payne complained so bitterly against in common sense. Thomas Payne is a character who I absolutely love. He was raised in England. He was convinced by a man in Benjamin Franklin to come to the United States. He was someone who was no stranger to suffering no stranger to the plight of common men and women. He grew up in a town where he routinely saw excesses abuses under the authority of the crown where enemies of the king were routinely hanged in public for everyone to see and this disturbed Thomas Payne deeply when he came to the United States he saw it as a land of opportunity. He got into the publishing business and in time he saw that the American people were being harmed by their being subject to a national government based thousands of miles away from them one that wasn't accountable to them. So he wrote this masterpiece of a work called common sense judged as a fraction as a percentage of the local population. It was a best seller that would match up favorably against and in fact defeat any modern publication by that day's standards and he did all of this for the cause of the revolution. The publisher who reluctantly agreed to publish common sense was not the first or even the second approached by Thomas Payne and in order to agree to publish it the publisher made Thomas Payne agree to all these basically indemnity type provisions where he would hold them harmless because the publisher knew just as Thomas Payne knew that this could end badly for Thomas Payne and for the publisher. Just as our founding fathers generally and those who signed the Declaration of Independence recognized that they were signing on the line not just their names not just their physical signatures but their honor their sacred honor and also their lives with it and they knew that they had to make it count. Thomas Jefferson is someone who I discuss at some length in our loss declaration. Thomas Jefferson is someone who while flawed and while having made great mistakes mistakes that he himself lamented and mistakes that we have continued to focus on as a country of appropriately so as a slave owner and therefore someone who was willing against basic moral decency to own other human beings nonetheless understood the wrongness of what he was doing. And as I discuss in chapters eight and nine of my book Thomas Jefferson actually made several ends several runs at ending slavery. He tried to do it early in his career as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses during the colonial era and failed. He tried several more times during his career. There was one effort that I think sometimes gains too little attention and isn't discussed as much as it ought to be. It's an effort that he undertook in his early drafts of the Declaration of Independence in which he acknowledged how wrong how barbaric this slave trade was. And he actually did a very decent job of explaining the connection between the slave trade and the powers that were all too invested in seeing its perpetuation not just in the United States but also in London. And he tagged he laid much of it at the foot of King George III in a way that we don't usually think about. There were certainly economic interests in London and those economic interests regardless of how intimately aware King George III was of those interests were interests that nonetheless affected him and his reign and his government and his parliaments helped perpetuate that system. In his original draft of the indictment section of the Declaration of Independence Jefferson contained some very strong language for King George III specifically with regard to slavery. I'm going to quote just a little bit of that for you right now. If you've got the book it can be found on page 149 to 150 at the beginning of chapter nine. Here's what he what Jefferson wrote of King George III in its original form. He said he's waged cruel war against human nature itself violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere were to incur miserable death in their transportation fiddler. This piratical warfare the probrium of infidel powers is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this excrible commerce and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die. He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them and murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another. This language tragically was removed in an act of expediency before the declaration of independence was issued. The understanding within the colonial the continental congress and within the committee of five that involved the drafting and the content and the review of the declaration was stripped out based on the understanding that it would alienate the southern states and cause them to bolt. Jefferson would later comment that he regarded both the northern and the southern states of being involved in the perpetuation of this crime. So it wasn't all at the feet of King George III. He said the southern states of course continue to support the legal framework necessary to perpetuate slavery and all too many in the north while not themselves involved in slavery nonetheless may include some economic interest that involved the transportation of the slaves from Africa to the United States. There were a few words used by Jefferson in here that I thought were mentionable. One was excruble. It's just not a word we use enough in today's society. I haven't found a way to insert that into a Senate floor speech yet but the day is coming when that may happen. Another word is Christian. He referred specifically to the Christian king of Great Britain. Why did he use that? Well many believe may have been a reference to the fact that King George III being a Christian and coming from a Christian nation knew better had been talked better. Many of these slaves came from a land that did not share their faith and a land with a history and a tradition of slavery. That's part of how some of them justified it. Well these people come from a land that don't have our traditions. They're slaves anyway. They're going to be slaves anyway and they fooled themselves into thinking that that somehow made it okay. It's part of what made all of this so treasonous on the part of Thomas Jefferson as if the rest of the declaration itself even the declaration as it was ultimately printed that makes no mention of this. This part of it made it especially treasonous and I think it's it is certainly worth noting that Thomas Jefferson was willing to lay a fair amount on the line even though he didn't succeed in keeping it in there. There are certain things that he did say that made a difference. Look for example at the president who ultimately succeeded where Thomas Jefferson had failed at Abraham Lincoln. The fact that he channeled the same words used by Thomas Jefferson's used by Thomas Jefferson in his Gettysburg address and noticed specifically that this was a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Lincoln who would later free the slaves in America recognize what it is that Jefferson was trying to do recognize that taken to its logical conclusion that portion of that language penned by Thomas Jefferson ultimately would help propel the emancipation proclamation itself recognizing that this government would be about acknowledging and respecting and protecting the eternal nature of the human soul the inherent dignity of individual human beings and the fact that that is what government is for. It's not there to adorn he who sits upon the throne or he or she who occupies a particular administrative or legislative executive judicial office. Government is there to protect the people and the sanctity of their lives and so as we approach Independence Day this year I hope that all of us as Americans can look to our founding documents and in particular the Declaration of Independence whose birthday we're about to celebrate here in a couple of weeks and recognize it for what it does. We're recognizing who we are and why it is so important that we do all we can to protect liberty. It's also my hope that as we review this history and the history that I try to outline in our last declaration we can look with a critical eye toward those areas where we might be falling short of the vision of America and for the American people it's embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Now we don't have a king but we do have a government that's not always as respectful to the individual rights of human beings to the eternal dignity of the human soul. It's my hope that this can help us restore that which has been lost. Thank you very much. Why don't we take a couple questions and then we've got to do a signing. I apologize by the fact by the way for the fact that I was late and for the fact that I may have to leave shortly after we start the signing. They have this inconvenient habit of calling votes in the Senate and those votes started later than they were supposed to and I'll have to rush back there in a minute but yes. Hi Carl Golvin, retired special agent US customs. I was a 9-11 responder domain reference and idealliveson.net. Sir haven't we come to have government of buy and for the most powerful corporate and financial interests which use the administrative state to their own purposes and isn't that all traceable really to the monetary issue. I would reference Andrew Jackson's farewell address of 1837. He ended the second bank of the US warned us never to let there be another or else the most powerful financial corporate interest was conjure more and more credit into existence until all of our wealth had been siphoned away and we were servants of those entities. So hasn't Congress inexcribly abandoned its constitutional obligation to coin money and regulate the value thereof by creating the privately controlled federal reserve which serves those interests that aren't those of the people. Thank you. First of all thank you for your service to our country. My maternal grandfather to whom I was very close was a customs officer. He was a tea man back when they were the largest single law enforcement agency within the United States and I'm grateful for your service. Yeah look you raise some very fair points there are a couple of layers of them that I'll address first as a broad matter as you're in the initial part of your question. Yeah corporate interests do benefit from the accumulation of power in the hands of the few and they do tend to benefit from our modern regulatory system. So the regulatory compliance costs that I referred to a few minutes ago I described them as costing the American economy two trillion dollars a year many respects that might be an understatement those are just the official numbers of what we're able to measure. There's a lot that's not measurable but all those costs end up being borne disproportionately by poor middle-class Americans and in many respects they end up ignoring disproportionately to the benefit of corporations including and especially many of the corporations most subject to the most heavy regulation. You have a heavy regulatory system that makes entry into any market in any industry much more difficult. You if you discourage entry into that marketplace you're going to have less supply. One of the things I focus on as the chairman of the antitrust subcommittee is the fact that more competition tends to bring down prices and bring up quality so the opposite also happens. With respect to the Federal Reserve specifically look I've made no pretense of the fact that I've got grave concerns with the Federal Reserve with the way it operates it's history it's creation and the fact that we have taken the people's elected representatives out of it entirely. I've got a number of reforms that are proposed these are very is a very difficult area to achieve reform. I focused of late on incremental reform in this area understanding that if we bring about an audit of the Federal Reserve and if if we take certain steps to make it more accountable we can gradually get to where we're going. I know of no way of shifting from our current system dramatically toward a system that relies on a precious metal standard. That is probably the system envisioned by our founders and it had many advantages. When the Federal Reserve system was created a little over a hundred years ago they departed from that in a way that's that's difficult to retreat from. Yes sir. Thank you Senator Lee. I'm a college student here in the Washington D.C. area and I've had a strong interest in American history for several years. I'm looking forward to reading our lost declaration and I did read written out of history in written out of history one of for me one of the most meaningful stories in written out of history was the story of Elizabeth Freeman who later the Massachusetts leave who successfully sued for her freedom and later changed her name to mum bet. And what I found particularly meaningful was that she was inspired to do so by he by by hearing by hearing the draft of the Massachusetts state Constitution which declared all men are born free and equal being read in her master's home. I was wondering if you might be able to speak a little bit about mum bet story and what you found most meaningful about about learning about about learning about her. I'm so glad you brought up the story of mum bet. She is one of my favorite stories in all of history and certainly one of my favorites that I included in written out of history. Mum bet was a slave in the home of Colonel John Ashley in Massachusetts. She was present at in the service of her master's household at the time of famous document that was drafted in her master's home. And that declaration acknowledged that all human beings are born free and equal. That same language was written in her master's home. That same language was later incorporated into the Massachusetts state Constitution of 1783. One of the lawyers who had been there negotiating and drafting this document along with her master was a young lawyer near that town named Theodore Sedgwick. On one particular day after the revolution and after the Massachusetts Constitution of 1783 had kicked in, she became aware of that language's inclusion in the Massachusetts state Constitution. And after enduring a particularly humiliating beating at the hands of her master's wife, mum bet decided to seek legal counsel from this young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick. She approached him and in effect asked the question if all people are born free and equal. If I am free and equal under Massachusetts state Constitutional law, then why is it appropriate for another human being to own me? And through See it Theodore Sedgwick she brought suit against John Ashley. She did so using a common law writ known as a, what's known as a writ of replen. A writ of replen is an ancient common law remedy used to require someone to restore to its rightful owner property that had been taken unlawfully and was being possessed illegally by the defendant. Think about it for a minute. That told them in some ways morally all they needed to know about this. The fact that she was being treated as chattel and that she had to bring this common law action for a writ of replen against John Ashley. Sedgwick representing mum bet ultimately succeeded. Mum bet was able to win her freedom. She did so in a way that was heroic. In a way that brought about a precedent. A precedent that would take some 80-some odd years to complete. But she opened the door for other slaves initially in Massachusetts and elsewhere eventually throughout the entire United States to be freed her story is inspiring. Thank you very much.