Judging Freedom - LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski: Does the US Have a Functioning Democracy?

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski: Does the US Have a Functioning Democracy?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

you Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025. My dear friend, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski joins us now. Colonel Karen, a pleasure and thank you very much for your time. I thought we'd have sort of a freewheeling conversation and just see where it goes. I know there's a lot on your mind and mine. I've held my fire a little bit on the Pete Hegseth situation since I worked with him for 10 years and I know him pretty well. since I worked with him for 10 years, and I know him pretty well, and we have a lot of mutual friends, even though I don't think he's qualified to be the Secretary of Defense.

But there are a lot of other things that are irritating you and me, and we'll put them in the category of, does the United States still have a functioning democracy? Who declares war? Who imposes taxes? What's going on these days? Yeah, it is, it does look very much like an executive state, but you know, we elect a

House of Representatives and they all do the bidding of a foreign nation, among other things that they do. What they don't do is reflect the interests of the average voter in their districts. They reflect the interest of those who funded their elections. And it's been that way in some ways for a long time. You know, it's rare to find a really good populist governor. I shouldn't say governor. It's hard to find those two. Hard to find a populist representative or senator who really is in touch with his constituents and really tries

to do what's not just good for them but what they want and what they are communicating to him. We don't have that. So in that sense democracy has been largely a failure for quite a long time and not working. Not working. Who is it that said, your vote doesn't count, otherwise they wouldn't let you vote.

It's a little more clever than that. Yeah, yeah. And these are people who say those things and who have the famous quips that we have, if voting made a difference, it wouldn't be legal. We have controllers and we have a and there's a system in place and that system, regardless of what country it is, whether it's the Soviet Union, Chinese under Mao, Chinese under Xi, it doesn't

matter, the system in place protects itself first. It always protects itself first. And it has interests and it protects those interests first. So that's the system we have, whether it's, you know, we say, oh, we have a constitutional republic, you know, it's representative, you know, we have a very measured and calculated democracy and we have a balance of power,

we have a constitution that limits government. We say these things and you can verify them in writing, but in practice we don't have those things. and you can verify them in writing, but in practice we don't have those things. What we have is a system that has been largely very successful in protecting its own interests, and not really telling us what those interests are, but we can deduce what they are. They are to make money for themselves, to gain power and influence, to maybe have their will played out on the country. I mean, take the DEI movement.

Well, there wasn't like broad support for that, but the people in power felt that that would be good for this country. That would be good for them. We're going to force the country to do it. And we're rejecting that now. And it's not been, it's been a popular rejection. Trump in part ran on that and we wholeheartedly elected him to get rid of it, he's done it. Now he also ran on peace which apparently doesn't profit too many politicians. I mean what can you say? They're not making money off peace, I wish they were.

We would have more of it if they could somehow figure out a way to profit from it. But what we have is war that a lot of people in Washington profit from, Congress profits from it. So we haven't, the government, the Congress hasn't declared war since December 1941. How many wars have we fought since then? They've all been self-initiated, initiated by the president. Chris got me the exact quote, it's Mark Twain. It's very close to what you said, Karen, if voting made a difference they wouldn't let us do it. You know, it's funny but it's sad and true. Yeah, and also you think

about where these quotes come from. This is early, late 1800s, early 1900s and probably long before that but the one the quotes that we remember and we're applying today are 130 hundred 40 years old People then didn't have internet they didn't have tick-tock, you know They didn't have a country with you know, like we have today we say oh, we're so different We're so different but the truth and the facts of the matter and how power works hasn't changed a bit and that is and the facts of the matter and how power works hasn't changed a bit. And that is comforting to us in a way. Let's take tariffs.

A tariff is a sales tax. The constitution couldn't be clearer that only Congress can impose a tax. It is so clear that all taxes must originate in the House of Representatives. It's some of the clearest reductions to writing of the intent of the framers that we have in the Constitution. There are other parts that are clear, the definition of treason, the Fourth Amendment, etc. But this is crystal clear. And yet we have the President of

the United States imposing 245 percent tariffs on the largest economy in the world, and they don't care. They're happy to go on trading with other partners." Shopify helps you sell at every stage of your business. Like that, let's put it online and see what happens stage. "...and the site is live." That we open a store and need a fast checkout stage. Thanks! You're all set. That count it up and ship it around the globe stage.

"...this one's going to Thailand. And that wait, did we just hit a million orders stage? Whatever your stage, businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash listen. They don't, most of these people in Congress, these congressmen, they do not respond to the Constitution. They don't even know what's in the Constitution. They didn't read the Constitution, Article 1, on the rolls of Congress and say, you know what, I want to do that.

I want to go run for Congress because I really want to exercise Article 1 of the Constitution and nothing more. I really want to do that. That's my calling. That's not what goes on in their heads when they run for Congress. They want power, they want support, they want to pursue, you know, maybe their political parties, idealized objectives, but they don't want to they don't want to die on anybody's sword on that. They really, they don't have any spine, they don't have any commitment, except for Massey and Ron Paul and a handful of other, you know, congressmen

in the past that we could remember and think about. You know, Davy Crockett, for example, you know, he was, he was one that spoke the truth. There's very few, and there never have been a lot of them. So these guys don't know what's in the Constitution. So to expect them to follow the Constitution and say, Hey, wait a minute, that's our job, not your job. And oh, by the way, this is the law of the land. We're gonna fix this. We're either gonna enact these tariffs

because the president would like us to, or we're gonna disallow them. And they are not proper. They are not an enforcement. But again, Trump is a king in many ways. We think of that we got rid of the king and of course, you know, 240 years ago, they did get rid of a king. And some of the stuff the king was doing was this kind of thing, you know, he was raising taxes, he had

personal debt. Read the Declaration of Independence. That's right. He has transported people to faraway places for trials where they have no counsel and no witnesses. Let's see, they picked up this college student at Columbia University and shipped him to a hellhole in Louisiana where he had never been. And his lawyers are begging for his return. He has shipped and transported people across the seas to foreign and inconvenient places. Might that be El Salvador? This is Jefferson writing about George III. A lot

of it you see happening now. Here's a clip. I never thought I'd be agreeing with him, but I agree with him on this. I suspect you never thought you'd be agreeing with him either. Former Vice President Al Gore, just bear with me. About two hours ago, Chris number 15. The scale and scope of the ongoing attacks on liberty are literally unprecedented. With that in mind, I want to note that before I use what is not a precedent, I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler's Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it. But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil, and here is one that I regard as essential. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a small group of philosophers who had escaped

Hitler's murderous regime returned to Germany and performed a kind of moral autopsy on the Third Reich. The most famous of the so-called Frankfurt School of Philosophers was a man named Jürgen Habermas. best known I would say, but it was Habermas' mentor Theodore Adorno who wrote that the first step in that nation's descent into hell was, and I quote, the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power. He described how the Nazis, and I quote again,

attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false. Our Constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump. Someone who seeks power at all costs to get more power. Well, he's certainly choosing which laws to enforce and which not to enforce, even though his oath said faithfully enforce the laws, meaning all of them,

whether he agrees with them or not. He's usurping powers from the Congress and the Congress, as you just pointed out, Colonel, doesn't seem to give a damn. That's true. And he's attacked judges as political hacks. He can say what he wants about judges, but if he starts disobeying judicial orders, we have a very serious problem on our hands,

generally known as a constitutional crisis. Yeah, I mean, it could come to that. And I think the opposing party, which Al Gore speaks for, and I love that Democrats are talking about liberty. And I love that they're talking about the Constitution because we can agree on that. I think that's a good thing. But yeah, Trump is, a lot of people agree with that idea that he is seeking power for power's sake, and he is basically turning our whatever democracy, republic, turning it into not a dictatorship, but really a reign of a monarchy of some sort.

And he likes the trappings of monarchy to some extent, and this makes it easy to criticize Trump. So yeah, the democracy part. I mean, I'm not a huge, you know, I don't think like democracy is going to heal our country. I don't think it's ever really a factor. I think it's a kind of a, you know, comforting blanket that, oh, our voice matters. We know good and well our voice does not matter. Okay. We have the 80 or 90 different conflicts we've been involved in without a declaration of war have killed Americans and they've killed people around the world in greater numbers, far greater numbers than even the Americans

that died or remained and committed suicide and overdosed on drugs and alcohol. The things that happen when you go fight a war that's really stupid, that is not, the people don't support that war. We hear about the stories of Vietnam, like, oh, soldiers were not, they were spit on. And I'm sure that happened. But Vietnam was not a popular war and it wasn't a declared war. It killed 58, 60,000 people of ours, multi-millions of Vietnamese and Laotians and whatnot, but

we, these wars weren't popular and that's where the problem comes from. They're not popular because they're not necessary. You know, Americans, like any people, we're not stupid. We don't have to be educated to know if a war is necessary or not. We don't need that. If you're not threatened, there is no need for a war. And of course, we talked about this one other time and of course, tariffs are an economic war and it uses the language of war. So these tariffs that Trump is doing to, I don't know exactly what his objective is.

I'm sure it has to do with helping. He seems to think that President Xi is going to come calling and he'll negotiate some sort of a favorable term. The people that we talk to who are very close to Chinese officials say, forget it, Xi is not going to come calling. They'll just exist with these tariffs. Scott Ritter and Colonel McGregor, Doug McGregor, who are on the show regularly, serious professional military guys

have made the similar argument to you. All these wars are unnecessary. The American public sees it, the troops see it. These wars are done either to satisfy the urgings of Benjamin Netanyahu or the military industrial complex. They are not done for a moral reason. They are not done for a legal reason. Scott even argues they're not done for a geopolitical reason. They're just to satisfy one person or just to satisfy the donor base. Yeah, that's true. It's true. And that is not a sign of a democracy. Of course, you know, there was a 2014 study by a couple of professors,

one from Princeton, I think, and another from Chicago, one of the schools in Illinois, I think. Anyway, they did a study, they compared how the system actually works. And they said we were in this country, not a democracy. We didn't operate like a democracy. The closest thing we came to was an oligarchical, an oligarchy of some sort, like a business oligarchy. But anyway, they looked to try to see where the United States form of government fit out of eight different types.

And we were not a republic,, we were not a democracy. So I think it's clear, and for people that are on the fence, like, oh, I think democracy will work, or we'll just waive the Constitution and things will get back to a constitutional standard of some sort. You know what's another thing that we should talk about is the concept of emergency, because this is something that tyrants use all the time. It's an emergency,

so we have to curtail liberty. Trump loves declaring an emergency. Trump's, I know I'm going to hear about this from my friends in the White House, but bring it on. Emergency, stated emergency is the imbalance of trade. Now that's not an emergency, but even if it were, an emergency is a sudden and unexpected event. That's the definition in the statute. And we've had a little bit. Sudden and unexpected, yeah. Or how can it be a sudden and unexpected event?

No, not at all. And there is a sense of emergency regarding this $40 trillion debt that we are adding $ or three trillion a year to because you know we have no idea how to stop printing money and the government has the Congress has no idea how to stop spending you know and that's very clear nothing has changed in this Congress you know couple what was it last month they passed another extension as a CR which funded everything that the Doge had unfunded in the first 85 days or so, refunded it all.

The Congress is so incompetent and so stupid and so uncaring about what's good for this country that they piled on the money into programs that had already been stopped and canceled and exposed as fraudulent, etc. So, you know, this Congress is absolutely useless. This debt that we have that's growing faster than people can even imagine, in fact, it's already so big you cannot, no normal human being can wrap their head around what $36 trillion is, what $40 trillion is, it is impossible to pay back.

There's not enough GDP in the planet to pay it back. So what's happening, and this could be seen as an emergency, is we're gonna write that debt down. We're going default on that debt. That's going to happen, okay? People are going to stop buying our bonds. No matter what Trump has tariffs or no tariffs, whether the dollar is strong or weak, ultimately there will be no more good money to throw after the bad money that this country has or this government has consumed. And of course, that's a crime against the people of this country because we've been living in a fantasy world that the rest of the world will support us.

Well, okay, for an American, maybe that's an American emergency, maybe that is because we are coming to the end of this. But that's not the kind of emergency that Trump is doing. He is doing what all politicians do, if they can, they can get away with it. And he does have popular support still, even though it's dropped a little bit, he has the popularity and the power

to declare these emergencies. And we, the people, we shouldn't be falling for this emergency stuff. You know, the government today, well, for 100 years, the government was Madisonian. The federal government can only do that which is affirmatively authorized to it by the Constitution.

And then that constitutional law professor from Princeton got elected to the White House, and Woodrow Wilson put that on his head and turned the government into Wilsonian. And that teaches that the government can do whatever there is a popular will to do, except that which is expressly prohibited by the Constitution. It's the exact opposite of Madisonian. And every president since Wilson, even the sainted Ronald Reagan embraced that advice. Just veering off from this a little bit.

I don't know if you've seen this TikTok influencer, this young Chinese guy. Tell me what you think of this, Karen. This is viral internationally. Cut number 11, Chris. They rob you blind and you thank them for it. That's a tragedy. That's a scam. That's why I'm saying this right now. Americans, you don't need a turf. You need a revolution. For decades, your government and oligarchs only ship your job to China, not for diplomacy,

not for peace, but to explore cheap labour. And in the process, they hollowed out your middle class, crashed your working class, and told you to be proud while they sold your future for profit. And yes, China made money, but we used it to build roads, lift millions of property, fund health care, raise living standards. We reinvested in our people. My family also benefited from it. What did your oligarchs do? They bought yachts, private jets, and mansions with golf course driveways. They manipulate the market, dodge tax, and pour billions into endless wars. And you, you get stagnant wages,

crippling healthcare costs, cheap dopamine, debt, and flagged wave property made in China while they pick your pocket. For 40 years, both China and the United States benefit from the trade, the manufacturing, but only one of us use that wealth to build. This isn't China's fault. This is yours. You let this happen. You let the oligarchs feed you lice. Well, they made you fat poor, and addicted. Now they blame China for mess they made. I don't think so. I don't think you need another tariff. You need to wake up. You need to take your country back. I think you need a revolution. The only thing I would change is we have not spent billions on wars. We have spent trillions

What do you think Karen well, he's a smart guy that is saying what I think many Americans intuitively do Understand and and you have to remember Trump got elected Kind of saying similar stuff. Not yes. Yes. He was talking about the hollowed-out. He was talking about the abuse, the terrible cost of health, of health care and the government's role. I mean, look at the COVID disaster. That didn't come out of the free market. That came out of big pharma and government hand in hand. And with a little CIA lie on top,

that's always nice to have the CIA in your corner. But Americans sense that this is true what this guy's saying. In fact, I think almost every bit of it except for he's wrong. We spent trillions on unnecessary wars. But then if you think about China too, how many real wars has China engaged in? You know, have they pushed a few people around in their region? We do that every day. We don't even count. Karen, we have 850, 900 military installations around the world. The Chinese have 10.

I'm telling you, it's clear as day and we do need a revolution. We need a Ron Paul revolution and we need people to turn their backs on this government that is, and I say this government, I mean both parties. And I think Trump has his heart in the right place to some extent. He recognizes problems are there and he sees himself as a problem solver. And he enjoys the power of a king, you know, the good king, to solve problems. But it's going to be tough And he's not doing very well. We were talking a little bit about the whistleblower, the leakers, so-called leakers out of the Pentagon.

That story hit the wire, I guess, just a day and a half ago. And it turns out, like so many things that we hear first, the truth is still tying their, tying their shoes while the lie has made it around the world three times. And that, that leak accusation is a way that the Pentagon bureaucracy in this case is protecting itself from actual real reform, actual things that the American people sent Donald Trump to Washington to fix, to fix, to eliminate waste, to give us peace and not war. And he's trying to do that in a Pentagon that is totally invested in war, not fixing things,

waste, abuse, duplication of effort, all that. So these guys that they're saying leaked information, in fact, we're not leaking any information, but they were opposing the will of the swamp. And you know, I haven't heard the word swamp in 90 days. You know, the deep state, the swamp, and we need to talk about that because it's real. And I'll just throw one little thing in there. This guy, one of the guys called Will, who was one of the three that were escorted out of the Pentagon, gave an interview, which everyone should watch to Chuckle Carlson, so it's out there. He mentioned in his hour and a half interview that they're worried about people that want

peace or have opinions that differ from the deep state. And yet, some of the Obama appointees, Susan Rice, for example, who was big in Obama and was big in the Biden administration, still sits on the Defense Policy Board. We're 100-something days into this administration, and she still sits on the Defense Policy Board while they are escorting out people that are of a like mind with the American people who want this change. Because if we don't get this change, we are going to have a revolution. Um, according to, uh, I'm gonna see what this is. The daily beast, a fired up Pete Hegseth used a softball Fox news interview to threaten to prosecute, prosecute his own ex-aids.

And these guys are his friends and allies for 10 years. They leaked nothing. They are being worked over by the deep state inside of the Pentagon. And if Hegseth doesn't figure this out pretty quick, then he'll go too. Of course, they want Hegseth gone, you know, and I don't think he's particularly qualified to be Secretary of Defense. On the other hand, we had a guy that disappeared for a couple of weeks, didn't tell anybody,

and nothing bad happened. So I'm not sure how necessary a Secretary of Defense really is. I think the machine knows how to fight the wars without that guy or gal. But yeah, Heksep has his own challenges, but he was identified as one of the saner advisors, along with Tulsi Gabbard and the Vice President

advising that diplomacy is better than war. Now we don't we should have to be highly educated to tell a president that diplomacy is better than war. That's common sense. It's what the American people elected Trump to do. But in any case, Texas was on the right side of that argument just the other day last week, I guess. And he will be punished for that. And so will his loyal aides and Trump supporters inside of the system. This system has its own interests and it is fighting a war right now. So, you know, you talk about revolution and think, oh, that's maybe it's going to be violent. Well, let me tell you, the war is ongoing in Washington and it's against the interest of the American people.

And we're funding both sides actually. We're actually giving more to our enemy in Washington than we are ourselves. And these kinds of situations, what we see with numbers, it does lead to revolution. I don't think many people in this country are ready for that, but it's coming. We'll be ready here.

Karen, thank you very much. Much appreciated, my dear friend. Thank you, Judge, I appreciate it. Sure, we'll see you again next week. Coming up tomorrow at 7.45 in the morning, Professor Gilbert Doctorow from Brussels. At two o'clock, Max Blumenthal, and at three o'clock, Phil Giralardi, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. MUSIC