The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | How Crime Novel Became Reality for 8 Cities With 'Rogue Prosecutors'

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Violent criminals are being given a “slap on the wrist” and released back onto the streets in eight cities across America, says author Charles "Cully" Stimson.  Between the "defund the police" movement and the election of “[George] Soros' bought-and-paid-for rogue prosecutors, crime exploded,” says Stimson, co-author of the new book “Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America's Communities.”  The term “rogue prosecutor” refers to “those who are funded by, or inspired and supported by, the George Soros network,” says Stimson, who is a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Stimson's co-author, Zack Smith, is also a legal fellow there. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)  Soros is a left-wing billionaire who has used his vast wealth to further the Left’s agenda, including spending “$40 million in [district attorney] races,” Stimson says, adding that in cities where these “rogue prosecutors" have been elected with Soros money, crime has spiked. As an example, Stimson compares two cities, “San Diego and Philadelphia, tied as the seventh-largest cities in the United States." "The difference between a real prosecutor in San Diego with [District Attorney] Summer Stephan and a rogue prosecutor like Larry Krasner [in Philadelphia] absolutely impacts your public safety privilege. And both big cities [have] gangs. San Diego [is] right on the border by Tijuana, Mexico. ... Philly's on [Interstate] 95; so, the corridor between Baltimore and New York City. Big highways. Last year ... Philadelphia [had] over 550 murders. San Diego, guess how many? Fifty—10 times less.”  Stimson joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain the spiking crime trend in cities with rogue prosecutors at the helm and to share stories of the lives of people who have been tragically affected by criminals being released back onto the streets. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Now there are over 70, two. Soros bought and paid for rogue prosecutors around the country in major cities, those who are funded by or inspired and supported by the George Soros Network. This is the Daily Sicle podcast for Monday, June 26. I'm Virginia Allen. And that was Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow, Cully Stimson. Cully and his colleague, Zach Smith, are the authors of the brand new book, Rogue Prosecutors. how radical Soros lawyers are destroying America's communities. According to Cully, there is a direct link between cities with rogue prosecutors and violent crime. These are prosecutors who have decided to not enforce whole categories of crime in the name of social justice. Cully is joining the show today to tell the stories of the lives that have been devastated by the policies and practices of eight of America's rogue prosecutors. Stay tuned for my conversation with Cully Stimson.

But in the meantime, I want to tell you about another podcast product of the Heritage Foundation. Whether it's high prices at the pump or power grid problems causing outages, energy and environmental policy impacts you, your community, and our country. Host Jack Spencer and Travis Fisher are bringing in top experts on what you need to know every one. week on the Heritage Foundation's Power Hour podcast. You can dive deep into these issues of environmental and energy policy and find out how these policies are impacting our daily lives. You can find the show wherever you listen to podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, CastBox, and be sure to leave a five-star rating and review. All right, without further ado, let's get to my conversation with Collie Stimson about his new book, Rogue Prosecutors.

Well, crime is up across America, and today we're going to be looking at one of the possible reasons why that is. We're joined today by Cully Stimson. Cully is the deputy director of the Edwin Meese, the Third Center at the Heritage Foundation, where he also serves as manager of the National Security Law Program and a senior legal fellow. And Cully is author of the brand new book, Rogue Prosecutors, How Radical Soros Lawyers, Are Destoring America's. communities. Collie, thanks for being with us and congratulations on the new book. Well, it's always a pleasure to be with you and thanks. It was a labor of love. Yeah, well, it's impressive and it's a sobering book to read. I think as we dive in here, the first question we have to answer is what is a rogue prosecutor? And I think probably maybe the most effective way to do that is to share one of the many

stories of victims that you share in this book. Yeah. You know, we had to decide that question ourselves because we've been writing about these so-called progressive prosecutors for almost three years before a publisher approached us to write a book. And the way we've defined it, Virginia, is it can't just be any one of the 2,300 elected DAs across the country who we tend to disagree with. It has to be a specific type of prosecutor. And we defined it down to solely those who are funded by or inspired and supported by the George Soros network. And so George Soros has spent on direct expenditures $40 million in DA races. That doesn't sound like a lot of money in politics, but when you understand that most of these races are low visibility and very low

dollar, $100,000 goes a long way in a DA's race when the average DA race has $10,000. put to it. Oh, wow. And for those who aren't familiar with who George Soros is, give us a brief bio on him. Yeah, George Soros has, he's 92 years old now. He's been involved in liberal causes for years. He was born in another country overseas. He came here. He's done a number of things, which many people found to be destructive policy-wise. For example, he shorted the pound in the early 90s when the pound was on the fall, and of course, he pocketed almost a billion dollars in that. And he is the number one contributor to Democrats and Democratic candidates around the country and it has been for decades.

Okay, okay. So this book, in some ways, I mean, it's hard to read because of the number of just gut-wrenching stories that you've told of victims. And you've really given voice in such a powerful way to these victims and sharing their stories. in this book, Rogue Prosecutors. Share with us a couple of these stories. As you all have investigated, what is going on in these cities with these rogue prosecutors, what are the stories that you all have learned? Yeah, we have hundreds of stories in our book. Some of them have been told for the first time in our book, because people reached out to us from across the

country and gave us these stories. And, you know, Zach and I were both prosecutors. I was a defense attorney and a judge. And so we've sat with victims. for years advocating for them and for justice. And so we thought it was important to tell the story through the victim. So this is not a boring white paper that's turned into a book. This is a real crime novel that also has some of the policies that drove these people and allowed them to commit crime. So one of the examples, we have eight chapters on eight specific rogue prosecutors.

One of the chapters is on Marilyn Mosby, who fortunately was voted out of office in the primary here recently in the city of Baltimore, where she was the chief prosecutor. And the story we tell and that we've done a short movie on with the help of our colleagues is about a fantastic, loyal African-American officer named a deputy Glenn Hilliard. And he was in the Wycomico County, that's in the eastern shore of Maryland Sheriff's Department. And he was married to Tashika. They have three beautiful children. And there was a career criminal named Austin Davidson. And Austin Davidson was, had over two dozen contacts with law enforcement before he was 20 years old. And he was convicted of armed robbery with a handgun of a convenience store in the city of Baltimore, under the

leadership of Marilyn Mosby. And that is usually a five-year mandatory minimum. She and her office argues for probation before judgment. In other words, a slap on the wrist, no jail time, walk out the back of the courthouse sentence. The judge typically follows what the prosecutor wants, says, okay, gives him probation before judgment, puts him on probation. In other words, you can't violate the law again while you're on probation. He doesn't even go to jail after having robbed this convenience store with a gun. With a loaded handgun. And when the police asked them, why did you do that? He said, because I could. That's a quote from him. So he goes out the back of the courthouse door and then he commits four more felonies in three separate counties in

Maryland over the next year. Each time he commits one of these crimes, they notify the city of Baltimore in Marilyn Mosby's office, but because she has this reform, racial justice, woke mentality that these rogue prosecutors have, which are all pro-criminal and anti-victum, she doesn't direct her lawyers to violate his probation. In other words, yank him back in and have the judge sentence him to real time. So he's just on the lamb committing more and more crimes. Well, somebody spots him in a rural area of Wycomico County, on a Sunday.

And Tashika and Glenn Hilliard had just come back from church. Her father is the pastor where they go to church. And she told him, I have a weird feeling right now. I don't think you should go to work today. And he's like, oh, you know, maybe it's something you aid or just relax and everything's going to be fine. He goes off to work. And with his partner, he gets the APB, all points bulletin that this Austin Davidson

is out in their community. They approached Mr. Davidson, who sees the police officers, runs in the opposite direction, but as he does so, he stops for a second, turns around, and shoots and kills Glenn Hilliard, a father of three. Now, it doesn't matter really in the criminal justice in who's black and white because everyone should be treated fairly. But the only reason I mention that Austin Davidson is white is because most of the victims in this failed social experiment are black. And they typically aren't police officers themselves, although numbers have been killed by these career criminals who should have been in prison, just like

Austin Davidson. The average person who's killed as a result of these career criminals who these rogue prosecutors don't put in jail are black and brown minorities in the inner city, over 80 to 90 percent in most cities, and 90 percent of those are men. Wow. So how common is this story? Because I think people would say, well, you know, you can pull out extreme stories from anywhere to make an argument. How often is this happening? Every day. Every single day. It started in 2016. Actually, in the fall of 2015, when an employee of George Soros and an employee of the ACLU, Chloe Cockburn, and another young lady got together, and they decided to unseat

three pro-death penalty elected district attorneys in the same. South because in their mind the death penalty is immoral, illegal. Of course, it's not. The Supreme Court has held that it's perfectly legal. It's mentioned in the Constitution three different times. And they got a million dollars from Soros, and they set up a political action committee, a PAC. Usually you see them called safety and justice and then fill in the name of the state.

And they recruited and placed three candidates into office, and they won. And then they decided to go national. So instead of just going after pro-death penalty DAs, they would go after DAs who just enforced the law. And so the first person they went after was a minority female, Anita Alvarez, Democrat, who was the first elected DA in Chicago, and she was a Latina. But because she did not bend a Nita BLM, and because she did not prosecute an officer who did have a illegal shoot. of a young black man named Laquan McDonald, they primaried Anita Alvarez with a lady named Kim Fox. And Kim Fox won the primary, and in Chicago,

if you win the Democratic primary, you're going to win the race. And so she was installed into office. And as soon as they saw the game plan, set up a million dollars, put it into a pack, which is what they did. They divided into two packs in the state of Illinois, all of which went to Kim Fox, then they went national.

So now there are over 70, two Soros bought and paid for rogue prosecutors around the country in major cities. And the eight major cities that we feature Virginia are San Francisco, Chesa Boudine, George Gascon in L.A., which is a magnificent chapter because we have so many stories and so many internal emails from that office and policies that you won't find anywhere else. Boston with Rachel Rollins, who just resigned a disgrace as the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts because of her unethical behavior. Alvin Bragg, people will be very interested in Alvin Bragg. It's not a surprise when you read our chapter that he engaged in political overreach by charging a former president. Then you have Larry Krasner, who's probably the most evil and slimy of these rogue prosecutors.

He got over a million dollars of Soros money when he ran in 2018 and murders doubled in that city immediately. It became the carjacking capital of the United States, and then, of course, Baltimore, and the one I failed to mention, also she resigned in disgrace, and that's Kim Gardner in St. Louis for her unethical lapses and her poor judgment. She was totally unqualified to be the DA in the first place. And so this did not need to happen. That's the interesting thing about it. I mean, there's 18,000 police departments. There's 2,300 DA election. the DA offices around the country in 3,143 counties. A lot of DAs are the prosecutor in several counties because they're very sparsely populated. And our crime spike, crime has been going down,

Virginia, in our country since the last spike in 1992. It's been going down dramatically. Why? Because people like me have worked in drug court, domestic violence court, and all these other things at the state level, realize we can't prosecute our way and we can't incarcerate our way out of this crime tsunami, which happened in the 60s and 70s and late 80s. And so we created hundreds of alternatives in incarceration. We created drug courts and domestic violence courts and family justice centers and veterans courts, peer and teen courts for high schoolers to understand the criminal justice system. And that drove down crime and states passed a lot of laws that put the worst of the worst in prison for long periods of time. When you combine all of that, that

drove the crime rate down and also drove incarceration rate down, because that started going down dramatically since 2008. We don't have a mass incarceration problem in our country. In fact, we have an under-incarceration problem in our country, unfortunately. Half of murderers get away with it, and 95% of rapists and thieves and aggravated assaulters get away with it. So if you think a murderer should go to prison, and I think most normal people do, and a rapist should go to prison, and I do, then 95% of those people get away with it. So, Yeah, we have a higher incarceration rate than other countries, but we also have more violent crime than most countries. So what is the trend that we're seeing now?

We were on that steady, steady, steady decline. Now are we seeing a spike back up? Yeah. When you have that toxic trio, Virginia, of defund the police or demoralize the police and the election of a sorosoled and paid for a rogue prosecutor, crime exploded. And don't buy the myth that this all came about because of COVID. and lockdowns. It preceded 2020. This is, for example, Chicago, which we have a whole chapter on Kim Fox.

This is 2016 when she was elected. These are number of homicides per year in Blue. See how it spiked in 1992 and went all the way down. All of a sudden, Kim Fox gets elected, boom. Homicides in Chicago. Philadelphia. Larry Krasner gets bought and paid for by George Soros, and these are shooting incidents by year.

The second he gets elected, starts taking up and then wham. Same thing for shooting victims. Wham goes up. And same thing for murders by year in Philadelphia. Just a great increase. Almost double the murders. Wow. Same for carjackings.

And so in those cities with that toxic trio, crime exploded. And the really interesting thing is when you compare apples to apples, like the city like San Diego and Philadelphia, both tied as the seventh largest cities in the United States. The difference between a real prosecutor in San Diego with Summer Stephan and a rogue prosecutor like Larry Krasner absolutely impacts your public safety privilege last year. And both big cities, gangs, you know, San Diego is right on the border by Tijuana, Mexico, drugs, Phillies on 95, so the corridor between Baltimore and New York City. So, you know, you've got a lot of pressures there, right? big highways. Last year in Philadelphia, over 550 murders. San Diego, guess how many?

Gosh, was it double? Fifty. Fifty, okay. Ten times less. Ten times fewer murders. And when the George Floyd murder took place and all these race-based riots started happening around the country, crime didn't spike in San Diego. There weren't stores looted. There weren't protests out there. Crime didn't go up. Residential burglary, commercial burglary, car. thefts remained a steady or went down in San Diego since 2015. Yet in those other cities that we talk about in our book, they all exploded. They're trying to pretend their policies that have nothing to do with the crime spike. But this is why the sheriffs are talking out against them. This is why the chief of police are speaking out against them. This is why even the liberal

city councils now are starting to question whether these policies. And you know who's really driving this narrative? The victims. Minority victim groups. You see, you know, liberal leftists in San Francisco recall Chesa Boudin. Five percent of people in San Francisco are registered Republicans. So this wasn't a Republican coup. George Gasco in L.A. Two recall attempts, over 750,000 signatures, Democrats. Yeah.

Minority victims groups. Rachel Rollins stepped on her own sword because of her. lack of character and her immorality. She, when she was put into office, Virginia, listed 15 crimes on her website that you can commit in Boston, including possession with intent to distribute any drug. We have a fentanyl crisis, breaking and entering the dwelling house of another, as long as you want to get out of the cold or something like that. All traffic offenses are no problem.

And in all of these cities, to these rogue prosecutors, here's the driving force behind this movement. Two things. One, they believe the entire criminal justice system is racist. Okay. It's obviously not. There is no system. There are systems all around the country. They're not.

And secondly, they think that the way to fix it. that is to reverse engineer and dismantle the system as you know it. That is their words, not ours. And how do you do that? We have an adversarial criminal justice system. If a prosecutor who's ethical and hard charging against a defense attorney who's ethical and hard charging, I've been both. But you need both to get to the truth. And you have to force the government to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, right, in front of a jury, in front of a judge, a neutral, detached judge who calls balls and strikes, they don't like that. And so because to them, prisons are the new plantation, those are their words, not mine. It's a form of slavery. Their words not mine.

You get rid of the prosecutor and you put in a pro-criminal anti-victimsyllet so you don't send more people to the plantation. And so their policies, among others, are don't prosecute any misdemeanors, literally. What kind of message does this send to police? Well, what do you think? Don't come to work. Don't arrest people. Because here's the ingenious and deviless aspect of this movement.

And I got to give him credit where credits do. They realized that it's not the cop, it's not the sheriff, it's not the mayor, it's not city council, and it's certainly not the governor who's the gatekeeper to the criminal justice. system. It's the DA. She and she alone can decide who is prosecuted and who is not prosecuted. And so they just wave their regal wand once they're parachuted into office with a lot of SOROS money. They don't prosecute any misdemeanors. They water down most felonies to misdemeanors. They don't add sentencing enhancements. You know you hear the left talking about, oh, it's the guns. We got to get rid of the guns. Really? Because in those cities, when people are caught committing

felonies and they have a gun, then they'll charge them with the gun enhancement. So it's not about the guns, because guns don't jump off of tables and kill people. People kill people. And they use hammers and knives and all sorts of other stuff and, yes, handguns. They don't send any juveniles, especially really vicious, violent juveniles, to adult court. Nothing. They don't allow the death penalty to take place, even though it's authorized in that state. They won't ask for life without parole for even the most heinous of heinous.

They won't ask for three strikes or one strike. In L.A., under George Gascones directives, the biggest DA's office in the country, a thousand lawyers, imagine that, thousand lawyers in the DA's office. He won't let his lawyers attend parole hearings where a convicted murderer is up for parole. So those victims' families have to go to that hearing all by themselves. They don't know the legal system. And they have to make an argument, a legal argument of why that person should say. stay in prison because Gascon thinks it's an abuse of his resources when in fact it's his duty

to represent victims. So these lawyers that that serve under these DAs, they're pretty much told what they can and can't do. It sounds like sometimes their hands are tied, even if they want to be on the front lines of holding criminals accountable, it doesn't sound like they get to really decide. It's what the DA says goes. Right. Well, what most people don't realize is that, that in most DA offices around the country, the deputy DAs are at-will employees. So what you've seen, and we chronicle in our book, because we have emails and we have internal documents from all these other offices, these DAs come in and they just fire the law and order DAs.

Like Larry Krasner comes in, the day he's elected, a day he gets sworn into office, he fired 31 of the most career, the career top-notch homicide and violent crimes prosecutors. You know what he called them in an email to Rachel Rollins? Ticks. He said, my advice to you, Rachel, was fire more ticks early. But in some offices, like in the Los Angeles County DA's office, they're civil service protected. And so they can't be fired willy-nilly or at whim. And so that DA's association, which is the union that represents the DAs, has sued George Gascon for putting them between Iraq and a really hard place.

It's like they say in their motions, you know, how can we comply with the law where California state law says we must add this sentencing enhancement for a person who is a felon in possession of a handgun when he commits a violent crime when you have a directive from your boss saying you can't add enhancements? And so that litigation is ongoing and they've won some of their cases so far. But the typical knee-jerk reaction for these rogue prosecutors is to either fire the ticks, quote-unquote, or real law and order people who went to a DA's office to be a prosecutor, they leave. Because just like the police's morale is just in the tank, and they're having a hard time retaining and recruiting people, because why would you arrest anybody if you know the gatekeeper to the criminal justice system is not even to charge them? So you see the police force here in D.C. is down $600.

officers, New York, 1,000 officers, San Francisco, several hundred officers, L.A., over 1,000,000, officers. So public safety goes down, and who does that hurt the most? The people in the vulnerable communities. Who, by the way, want more police in their neighborhoods? They don't want fewer police in their neighborhoods. They want police who look like them, police who they trust, and police who they can rely on, but they don't want fewer. So this defund the police movement, is run by people who don't live in those neighborhoods who have no clue and, in fact, are at odds with the real needs of the community

in those vulnerable communities. Colley, hearing you talk, it's hard not to get depressed. I mean, this is, it's a tragic situation, and it's tragic to see reading the stories in this book the lives that have been so altered and just detrimentally changed. what's the path forward here? I mean, I think it's so powerful to let people know this is what's happening, to raise awareness.

How can change actually come? Well, first, buy the book and buy five copies and give it to your liberal friends. Because we make very clear in our book, Virginia, this is not a red or blue issue. It's not a Democrat or Republican issue. This isn't a left or right issue. This is a law and order versus chaos issue. people come to this country, many legally, many illegally, for a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons is law and order.

We live in a civilized society where the law matters and people should follow it. Right. And so I want to leave you on an optimistic note. Thank you. I appreciate that. Because I can see your face. This is tragic. These are tough topics, right?

It is. It is. This movement's failing. Thank God. It's not feeling fast enough. But the solution is to get the word out, to show the real world consequences to these really radical, stupid, dangerous policies. I mean, if you really believe black lives matter, then you can't support any one of these sorrows bought and paid for rogue prosecutors because their policies are killing black lives. More than we're killing in Afghanistan and Iraq, as we know it in our book, at the height of the search, especially in Chicago.

It's more dangerous to be in certain neighborhoods in Chicago on any given weekend than it is. than it ever was to be in the combat zones in Iraq or Afghanistan to the height of the surge. That's how dangerous it is. They are literally war zones. But it's failing. It's failing because people look around their neighborhood and they're like, you know what, I don't have the greatest neighborhood, but I deserve my public safety privilege. I want my kid to be able to walk to and from school.

I don't want my kid recruiting into a gang. I deserve to go to a Walgreens or a Wawa. These stores are leaving the inner city. Where can I go shopping now in San Francisco? When the Walgreens was my local grocery store and my pharmacy, they're leaving, they're up and leaving. So businesses are leaving these cities, which drives down tax revenue. Stores are closing, Starbucks, Target. This is before the Target whole freaky stuff that they're doing with transgender.

This is just basic stuff. Target had $1.5 billion in shrink. technical term for theft and loss across the country last year because of organized crime and thefts. Wow. So this is impacting tax revenues, quality of life, safety of your life, and so it's failing. The caveat I'll add to that, and this is probably a Debbie Downer comment, is George Soros, who's 92 years old over the weekend, just announced to the world that he's turning over the

reigns of his empire, $25 billion bucket of money to his son Alex, who's 37 years old. And Alex said he's, quote, more political, unquote, than his daddy, which is scary. I didn't know there was more room on the left for more political. Yeah. And they're funding these DA races, along with Carrie Tuna and Dustin Moscovitz, the co-founder, Facebook, and others. So they're going to double down. And look, when I say funding, I don't mean, you know, 1,000 here, 2,000 here.

I'm talking about 75% or more of this DA race. In other words, these people would not have even been known, much less competitive in the Democratic primary. But they're failing. They're failing because they got blood on their hands. And everyone realizes that they got blood on their hands. Businesses are leaving town. Cars are being stolen. Insurance rates are skyrocketing in these cities.

And politicians, you know, are pretty good. at one thing, getting themselves a re-elected and they need money for that. And when they realize that that person, the gatekeeper to the criminal justice system, is causing political harm for them, they usher them off the stage, which is exactly what happened to Chicago. Last month, Tony Preckwinkle, the county executive, probably the most powerful politician in Illinois, ushered Kim Fox off the stage, even though she's the one that brought her onto the stage when Kim Fox was her deputy chief of staff. Why? Because the Democratic National Convention is in Chicago next year, and they know that crime is the number two or three things on the top of people's minds politically. And you can't have Kim Fox on the front page of the paper every day when homicides and all the rest of it are skyrocketing.

So I'm an optimist, as you know, and I think our policies help everybody. regardless of your skin color, age, where you live. And, you know, Law & Order is a political thing. It is the bedrock of our society. This is a failed social experiment. It's just not failing fast enough. So by the book, there'll be an audio version of it. Listen to it when you're driving to and from work.

Give it to your friends because it reads like sort of a John Grisham crime novel. It's not a boring think-tanky white paper on steroids. and, you know, there's 1,200-plus footnotes, and almost everybody in every outlet we're quoting is the left talking about how great this is or how bad the crimes are. So this isn't us making up stuff. This is heavily footnoted, but it reads, I think, tough read, because I, you know, you and others said, boy, it's a tough one to read, but it's an important thing to read to be aware of your public safety privilege.

And, you know, crime and border control is one of our seven policy priorities. And everyone is invested in the rule of law and everyone should be invested in their public safety privilege, especially for the vows most vulnerable in our communities. Yeah. Well, the book is out officially on June 27th. It's available for pre-order that I believe right now. It is. It's rogue prosecutors, how radical Soros lawyers are destroying America's communities. And for all of our listeners, if you or your friends are passionate about justice, if you like true.

crime. You're really going to enjoy this book as gut-runching as it is. It's powerful. And, Colley, we really appreciate your work, the work of Zach Smith, as you all have taken great pains to describe in detail what is happening in these eight cities across America. Thank you. Well, thanks for having me. I love your show, and you do a great job. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks for joining it here on the Daily Signal podcast to kick off your Monday. If you haven't had a chance, be sure to check out our evening show. It's right here in this exact same podcast feed where every day around 5 p.m., we bring you the top news of the day. Also, take a minute to subscribe to the Daily Signal,

wherever you like to get podcasts. It really helps us to reach more listeners when you take a moment to just leave a five-star rating and review. We hope you all have a wonderful week, and we'll see you right back here at 5 p.m. for our top news edition. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Luey and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheris. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geiney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.