Darkest Hour, Tax Reform, and C.S. Lewis

HUGH HEWITT: Morning glory, America. It is the last radio hour of the week on The Hugh Hewitt Show. That means it is the Hillsdale Dialogue. Every week at this time, I sit down with either Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, or one of his wonderful colleagues from the Kirby Center, Dr. Matt Spalding, or one of his wonderful faculty in Hillsdale, Michigan, which is actually part of the United States, not part of Canada. People often forget that. And we talk about great issues, great books, great debates. Dr. Larry Arnn is, in fact, in the Hillsdale studio with me today. And Dr. Arnn, good to see you in person.

LARRY ARNN: Good to see you, too.

HUGH HEWITT: I want to begin by playing for you an interview that Gary Oldman-- you may be aware of him. He is an actor.

LARRY ARNN: Yes, yes, I know about him.

HUGH HEWITT: He plays Winston Churchill in a new movie.

LARRY ARNN: Coming to Hillsdale, Michigan, December 16.

HUGH HEWITT: Gary Oldman is?

LARRY ARNN: Yes.

HUGH HEWITT: Really?

LARRY ARNN: Yes. Because-- you may be aware or not aware, oh, ignorant host-- that I visited the set while they were making that thing. And there's a special screening of it in December with him there in Hillsdale. Everybody's invited.

HUGH HEWITT: We learned about that. In fact, I want to play for you some audio of Gary Oldman talking about the making of the movie-- what is it, Never Surrender?

LARRY ARNN: It's called Darkest Hour.

HUGH HEWITT: Darkest Hour. I saw a trailer for it yesterday, and we'll talk about that in a second. Here is the actor Gary Oldman.

- I needed to see Churchill looking back at me in the mirror to really-- for me to have the chutzpah to get up there and do him justice. And we found a lovely-- there's a lot of Churchill-- there's some of me-- there's a bit-- we found a good balance. So that was the first step.

And then, of course, as you say, there's over 500 books written about this man. Where do you start? So I located an historian, a Churchill expert, Larry Arnn. And he guided me to very specific things to read. And you slowly start to build the character because you have an-- I had an idea in my head of it being British, too-- of who Churchill was, but some of that is influenced by people who have played him.

So I pushed that all to one side and found, surprisingly enough, a great deal of archival footage of him. And from that, I then built-- you start to sort of build.

HUGH HEWITT: I found this historian, Larry Arnn. What does that mean?

LARRY ARNN: Well, I saw this curious man, and he was walking around, turning rocks up. And I thought, what are you looking for? First of all, that was a brilliant set-up. I didn't know he said that.

HUGH HEWITT: That's why I do this show. And Matthew was involved with it. We did set you up.

LARRY ARNN: I'm hard to trick. But it took you and [? Dwayne, ?] and that scoundrel Dwayne.

HUGH HEWITT: And Matt Spalding!

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, and Matt Spalding-- three disreputable guys. I want the audience to know, Machiavelli himself would be embarrassed by what they just did.

So I've known Gary Oldman for quite a long time. And I know well for a long time his partner and producer Doug Urbanski. And I just think Gary Oldman is a great guy. He's a modest guy. I think he's a tremendous actor.

And I heard about this movie. And they said, if you're coming over, come watch us film it. And my wife is English. So we went. And we visited anyway. I think we talked about that. But I think people will like the movie.

And the first thing I noticed about it was Winston Churchill was quick and lively. And you know, until he was old, he was very athletic. He was a tremendous polo player. He was the top fencer in school.

HUGH HEWITT: At Sandhurst?

LARRY ARNN: Well, no, at Harrow.

HUGH HEWITT: OK.

LARRY ARNN: We have a kid coming to Hillsdale from Harrow next year. Isn't that interesting?

So he plays him. The first clip I saw, he was moving, and his eyes were sparkling. And so he wasn't this guy talking with his chin down on his chest growling at everybody. And I just went, wow, at last.

HUGH HEWITT: [INAUDIBLE] Well, it was said about Spielberg's Lincoln that the greatest grace of the film, of which there were many, is that it got you close to being in a room with Abraham Lincoln for two hours. Do you think Oldman allows people like me, who-- I've seen newsreel galore, but you know, you don't really experience the war via newsreel-- to be in the room with Churchill?

LARRY ARNN: Oh, yeah. And there's only-- yeah, it does, as a matter of fact. And first of all, these are extremely tense days. These are not typical days in Churchill's life. These are among the greatest days in human history.

HUGH HEWITT: Darkest hour being 19--

LARRY ARNN: The Germans are coming.

HUGH HEWITT: The Germans are coming.

LARRY ARNN: But then there are those moments that show Churchill was fun, and friendly, and big hearted. And so that occurs in there. And so, yeah, you do get to be with him.

HUGH HEWITT: In the trailer that I saw yesterday-- Kenneth Branagh has a movie out, Murder on the Orient Express, which is delightful, but it's puffy, it's pastry, it's not meaty. But it had a trailer attached to it for Darkest Hour. Mrs. Churchill is completely wonderfully portrayed as I hope she actually was, though perhaps a little less robustly built than Mrs. Churchill actually was. Well, did you see her film, as well? And what did you make of her take?

LARRY ARNN: Well, I've seen the whole thing in New York after it was made. And I saw that in September, I think. But yeah, she's great. And she especially in this time-- by the time 1940 comes along, Churchill is 65. And he's been married since 1908. So they're in their 33rd year of marriage. And they're an old married couple.

HUGH HEWITT: They anticipate each other's words.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, you and I have learned obedience. And it's been so good for us. And so she is stable. And sometimes she had a lot of trouble in her own life, too. But in these months, she was--

HUGH HEWITT: A rock.

LARRY ARNN: And she wrote him a letter in the middle of this time, just a little, short note with a picture of the cat drawn at the bottom. She was the cat. He was the pig. And they could both draw very well, right? So you got kind of artful looking little things at the bottom of their letters between each other.

And she says, you know, you're sour. And you bark at people. And you've got to stop that because they only want to help you. And they look up to you. And you dispirit them. You've got to stop. And he did.

HUGH HEWITT: Did he really stop dispiriting people. It is a problem with great leaders through history that they are often indifferent to their scribes.

LARRY ARNN: Well, no, so the people who worked around Churchill were deeply loyal to him, as a rule, almost always. So there's a woman named Kathleen Hill. And she went with him. All these secretaries are like this, Mrs. Pearman. And you know, they worked for him to exhaustion.

And they record that watching him dictate his speeches and taking them down, it was like going to the greatest performance you could go to. And that they learned that he did not like to be interrupted. You are not to make a noise. But also, he liked to have you there. Once, he barked at one of his secretaries-- I mean, just think what he did.

Remember, Winston Churchill wrote 50 books. And they're good. And he did everything else he did, too-- wrote all his own speeches. The correspondence is massive. He wrote that. So he was an incredibly productive human being. And he didn't like-- and he hurried himself all day long.

So he barked at the secretary. And she got a tear in her eye. And he noticed it. And he reached over and touched her on the arm and he said, don't mind me. We're all toads under the harrow.

HUGH HEWITT: So he's aware of his impatience, which is itself a saving grace about him. And I am looking so forward to this movie. And I hope it receives the Oscar. There are a lot of fine movies this year. There are a lot of superb acting performances out there. Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project is amazing. There are a few others that are escaping me right now. But it will be hard on critics to credit Oldman, I think, because they're not going to like the idea of liking Churchill.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, it just so happens that I talked to some people who are promoting the movie, whose job it is to do that. And I said, look, who are you worried about offending? The Nazis? I mean, the bad guys in this movie are the Nazis.

HUGH HEWITT: But they're not going to like the idea of liking Churchill because he stands for a conservatism that is not on our spectrum today. It's a character of conservatism.

LARRY ARNN: Well, I hope that there-- and see, I encourage people away from that. And the reason was, first of all, Churchill was not a naturally partisan man. Churchill was always trying to build a party of the center.

Second, Churchill brought the socialists into the government and treated them with great respect and worked with them very closely all through the war. And so in his understanding, a war against Nazism is the thing against which we can all unite.

HUGH HEWITT: When we come back from break, we're going to talk about that. Churchill was not that much of a partisan. He was a partisan. He was a party man. But he was not crazed by it. And it is an important lesson, especially in the times in which we live right now, as we are on the precipice of watching the Republican Party throw itself off of a 50-story building. I'll talk about that with Dr. Larry Arnn when we come back. Don't go anywhere, America. It's The Hugh Hewitt Show.

Welcome back, America. It's the last hour of the week. That means it's the Hillsdale Dialogue, that hour of the week set aside when I sit down with Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, or one of his colleagues. All things Hillsdale are available at hillsdale.edu. All of our conversations dating back to 2013 now are found at hughforhillsdale.com.

Doctor, when we went to break, I was about to tell you about yesterday. On Thursday's Hugh Hewitt Show, I had Senator Pat Toomey-- he's a very good man-- on. And I expressed to him my growing dismay with the Senate of the United States. And that four senators, Senators Collins, McCain, Murkowski, and Rand Paul, had destroyed the promise of the Republican Party to repeal and replace Obamacare. And that, on Thursday morning, Ron Johnson announced he wasn't going to vote for the tax bill, which endangers the tax bill.

And I was, basically, distraught that a party cannot act as a party. And that the Senate is completely-- it's not McConnell. McConnell is a fine leader. It's that individuals arrive in this town, and they begin to believe that they are the only people with the keys to the kingdom, that they don't in any way owe the party anything.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah. So, first of all, Mitch McConnell is a very intelligent man. And I'll bet he's a reader of CS Lewis. And I'll bet then he knows that CS Lewis makes the argument that it's always hard at any given moment to tell whether or not we're in purgatory.

HUGH HEWITT: I've never heard that.

LARRY ARNN: He must be thinking, what's going on here? So think of the logic of the situation. The Congressional Budget Office is a very bureaucratic agency. And it might be made up of accountants, but they lack a sense of humor. And so they score these things according to rules that are simply crazy and extremely unfavorable to any conception of human freedom.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes.

LARRY ARNN: Now, they score this thing to reduce the tax burden on the American people by $1.4 trillion in round numbers over 10 years, which of course, any such estimate is laughable.

HUGH HEWITT: It is.

LARRY ARNN: What's your budget over the next 10 years?

HUGH HEWITT: It's absurd.

LARRY ARNN: You can't even calculate your own. But never mind. They score it that way. And what that means-- and they count nothing-- nothing-- but the fact that that $1.4 trillion would be left in private hands where all the wealth in human history has been produced and is produced every day in America.

And so first of all, if you have even an important objection to this, if you believe in limited government, why would you not vote for this thing? And the particular objection that's named by Senator Johnson is, it treats corporations better than it treats individuals, and the individual businesses, privately held businesses-- personally held, I guess you'd say. And the point is, fix that next! Why not? So I am amazed and chagrined and am keeping my fingers crossed, my prayers said that Leader McConnell will put it back again.

HUGH HEWITT: Let me pose to you-- not in the context of any individual senator, but generally-- what I have diagnosed the problem to be. I've been back in Washington a year now. And it is an incredible ego inflater to live here.

And people talk to each other. And there are only about 500 people that they talk to, there's maybe 1,000 people that they talk to. And they reinforce each other's opinions of each other. And nothing gets in. They are indifferent to the arguments from outside of the sphere of genius that is Washington, DC, and therefore, their egos get bigger, and bigger, and bigger. And I don't know the solution to this. It's like an island governing the country.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah. Think of the advantage you've lost, which I still retain. I'm from out of town. I'm an expert.

HUGH HEWITT: I used to be out of town.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, that's right.

HUGH HEWITT: I still talk to out of town.

LARRY ARNN: But it is not a one-horse town. It's a one-conversation town.

HUGH HEWITT: Well put.

LARRY ARNN: And there's a set of opinions about the conversation. And they divide left and right. And innovative opinions are rare. And so, if you're from out of town and you haven't heard all the talk for a month, and you say whatever you think about it, it's bound to sound different. And people are kind of amazed.

HUGH HEWITT: And more often than not, they dismiss it because it's not from the hive. And if it's not from the hive, it can't be good for the hive if it's not from the hive.

When we come back from break, I want to ask you about CS Lewis and That Hideous Strength. Because if NICE ever existed, it's here in the city of Washington, DC. NICE being the National Institute--

LARRY ARNN: Continuing Experiments.

HUGH HEWITT: Continuing Experiments, from That Hideous Strength. Don't go anywhere, America. It's The Hugh Hewitt Show.

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. Hillsdale College owns this bit of radio real estate. It is the last hour of The Hugh Hewitt Show. And my great sponsor, Hillsdale College, sends forth Dr. Larry Arnn to do battle with me each week and to slay me again, the eternal dragon that is all beat down at the end of the hour. And we have fun, but sometimes I give way to my inner distraught, actually, with the way things are in Washington, DC. And Dr. Arnn talks me off a ledge. So we're doing that today.

The framers did not intend this to be easy. They intended it to be hard to pass a law. But it does make me crazy that the rules of the Senate allow for 30 hours of debate on a person for whom they will be voting anyway, that the opposition, the minority, has been allowed to gum it up. The framers did not intend that. They intended the Senate to be a check by virtue of its six-year term, not by virtue of its arcane and absurd rules. When did we lose sight of that?

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, well, the Senate process is-- I'll tell you why it's critical right now. It's critical. First of all, you're right, it was supposed to be hard. And the Senate-- senators were elected for a different term of years and by a different constituency than the House. Not quite so true anymore as it used to be, because they used to be elected by state legislatures, which was a good idea, by the way.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes, it was.

LARRY ARNN: Helped the authority of the states represented in Washington, DC, which was the plan. But now, you see, the government has become so misshapen that to get the Constitution back, there requires to be some radical steps of restoration or change-- which are synonyms. And that means that Congress would have to resume the legislative power. And I'll tell you what that means.

In the last Congress, two-year Congress, they passed 300 bills. That's 150 a year. And that's about the average since the middle of the 19th century. But last year, in a single year of the Obama administration, 87,000 pages were added to the federal register.

And that means that Congress passes a tiny percentage of the actual laws. And the complicated laws that they're trying to pass now would restore elements of the legislative authority back to the people who are elected for it. And it's danger if it's not there. Because we don't know where all these things come from. And they are so numerous, so legion that we have to hire experts to keep up with them. And even then, if you're accused of anything, there's millions of words to know, and nobody knows them.

So the point is, this not functioning of the Senate is critical right now because here is an opportunity to take significant steps back toward limited government. And when they thwart that-- by the way, they are thwarting their own station.

And remember, the reason I think that there's hope here-- I do think it, very much-- I think, first of all, this president would sign bills that-- advocate bills that-- would restore the legislative power to the Congress, which means take it away from these agencies that are ostensibly in the executive branch, although nobody controls them. He would do that. And they are doing revolutionary things about controlling the bureaucracy in the White House Counsel's office, in the Office of Management and Budget, extremely well led places in the White House.

And then, you see, Madison says, the reason separation of powers will continue is because the ambition of the people who hold the office will keep it. And it took 80 years of trying, but in the '60s, the Congress gave away the legislative power. And they did it for ambition. They did it-- they thought, we can erect a vast system to control and manage and guide much more, and we can be at the heart of it. That was a sophistry to which they succumbed.

HUGH HEWITT: And they've been eaten alive by the people that they created.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, but that makes the opportunity because they're actually openly held in contempt by the bureaucracy.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes, they are.

LARRY ARNN: Which doesn't answer their letters, doesn't respond to their subpoenas. And so if they would just wake up, they could see--

HUGH HEWITT: That's the big if.

LARRY ARNN: --that they could be one of the greatest congresses.

HUGH HEWITT: The person who is most despised in the Trump administration not named Trump is Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Because he is most rigorous in returning the agency to its actual delegation of authority, not its presumption of power, which is what the Obama era did with the Clean Power Plan, and their water-- and Scott Pruitt is an originalist. He's actually a constitutional lawyer. And he's carving it back to what it is supposed to be-- clean water, clean air, particulates at a certain level, what they told it to do, what the Congress actually delegated, but not what it imagined it might want to do.

And so he's held-- he's one of the nicest men in the world. And he's very, very smart. But the left hates him as a result of that.

So the left understands what's at stake here. Why don't Republican senators, Larry Arnn, understand what is at stake here? Or are they-- and this is really the question-- are they really Republicans?

LARRY ARNN: Let me just say that I'm against remedial education, but I'm shaking on the question. I mean, I will just tell you that I am astonished. I mean, first of all, to put the argument together about what the government used to be like and what it's like today takes some thought and some historical knowledge. And those are in short supply. And to focus on fundamental things takes both.

And you described the city earlier. Isn't everybody just distracted by this endless swirl? Isn't it true that if you try to follow the policy issues that unfold in this city-- we're talking about taxes this morning and CS Lewis, which would be better. But there's a million things we could talk about this morning because they're all going on all over the city right now.

HUGH HEWITT: Let me play for you-- Senator Tom Cotton, a friend of ours, took to the floor of the Senate on Wednesday of this week and gave forth this little oration which I like a lot.

- So, Mr. President, I'm glad that you're here to replace me as the presiding officer of the Senate. I just spent the last hour of the Senate presiding myself. For those of you here in the gallery here who don't know these things, I'll pull back the curtain a little bit. They call it presiding officer duty, not presiding officer privilege or honor, because it's reserved for the young senators who are new to the Senate, like Senator Sullivan and I. But it also means that you actually have to listen to your colleagues speeches, which doesn't happen very often around here anymore.

So this morning, I had the privilege of listening to the Democratic leader's speech about our tax bill and the fact that we are going to repeal the hated mandate of Obamacare as part of this tax bill. And I just can't let stand what he said without correcting the record. First off, the senator from New York said that we're injecting health care into the tax bill-- injecting health care into the tax bill. I would remind him and all the other Democrats who have been denouncing this decision on the Senate Finance Committee that the individual mandate is a tax according not to me, not to Republicans, but to the Obama administration.

That is what they argued in 2012 with the Supreme Court even though he contended throughout the debate on Obamacare in 2009 and 2010 that it wasn't a tax. In 2012, they argued to the Supreme Court that the Obamacare mandate is a tax. And the Supreme Court in 2012 upheld it as a tax. And I'm willing to bet-- I'm willing to bet-- that the Democratic leader issued a statement in the summer of 2012 applauding that decision, which held that the individual mandate is a tax. After all, it's collected on your 1040. It's collected by the IRS. It doesn't get much more tax-y than that.

HUGH HEWITT: First-- it goes on-- "tax-y" not being a word, and you might want to remind your friend, Senator Cotton, that it is not, in fact, a word. But what he's doing here is making an argument. And no one ever does that anymore.

LARRY ARNN: If you believe that-- so first of all, we were going to become persuaded by the modern understanding of equality, which means you have to have equal outcomes. And that means we're going to have to regulate Tom Cotton arguing with Chuck Schumer. That's not Chuck.

HUGH HEWITT: You know, Chuck Schumer did not rush to the floor. In the old days, they used to rush to the floor when you were being called out.

LARRY ARNN: That's right.

HUGH HEWITT: And he did not rush to the floor. That would have been taking a knife to a gunfight.

LARRY ARNN: But mark how brilliant that was, though, see. Because it was not a tax when they were getting it passed. And that was right up there with keep your doctor.

HUGH HEWITT: Yeah.

LARRY ARNN: And then it goes before the Supreme Court. And John Roberts-- and there are stories of John Roberts being in some kind of personal trial over this thing-- he cast the deciding vote to call it a tax. And as a tax, it's constitutional, he said. And they all saluted that.

And now, isn't it wonderful? It's like Brave New World. It's like 1984 [INAUDIBLE].

HUGH HEWITT: Now it's being injected into tax debate.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, that's right.

HUGH HEWITT: [INAUDIBLE] And now I happen to believe that the Chief Justice acted under the old adage that if a law is passed, you must find a way to uphold it if there's any way to uphold it. So I've always defended his decision in Sebelius. That's the Obamacare decision. But that does not excuse Chuck Schumer attempting to say you're injecting health care into the tax debate when it's, in fact, a tax.

But here's what gave him some hope this week. Tom Cotton came up with this idea two weeks ago. And it was such a good idea that the Senate actually adopted it. So that wasn't on the table two weeks ago. And two weeks ago, Kevin Brady, the chairman-- very smart guy, very nice guy-- told me, that's not going to happen.

And two weeks later, it is going to happen in the house. And so people do listen if they pay any attention. The problem is nobody ever pays any attention.

LARRY ARNN: Well, you're right, that's so hopeful, right? Because a good idea, where's it born from? It's not born from creativity. It's born from understanding first.

Tom Cotton knows a lot about the Constitution. And he's an interesting senator because he doesn't get attention through stunts. He gets attention through things that senators would do. And he seems to know what that is.

HUGH HEWITT: And The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin wrote a profile of him that was grudging in its admiration. I love the tone of the whole thing. He couldn't believe he was on a hog farm in Arkansas, Senator Cotton's cattle farm, and that Senator Cotton's father couldn't shake hands with him because he just birthed a calf. He couldn't actually believe that that was happening to him. And I would recommend it to everyone.

When we come back, we're going to talk about NICE and CS Lewis and what has happened to the Senate, and what the stakes are in this tax debate. Don't go anywhere, America. It's The Hugh Hewitt Show.

Welcome back, America. The last segment of the radio week, Dr. Larry Arnn and I are back at CS Lewis here because in his last book, in his science fiction trilogy That Hideous Strength, he posits a giant bureaucracy in which everybody talks but nobody answers. And nobody listens. And nothing is accomplished. And there is no plan.

And it seems to me he had the Senate in mind, Larry Arnn. And it is becoming that quicksand-like to try and advance any idea through the Senate. And that will not last.

LARRY ARNN: And the reason we're concerned about this is that the NICE is actually the National Institute for Continuing Experiments, which has taken over the whole of Great Britain in this novel. And just think-- there's 150 or so agencies. And they pass nearly all of our laws. And we don't know what they are. And the courts respect them way too much, although the very great Neil Gorsuch might have some adjustment in that coming.

And so we've noticed the dysfunction of the Senate because there's something great for them to do and to do it right now. And I happen to know because I asked him. The leader would like to see that stuff done. Well, they got to get these things out of the way, and then they could go on about the business. And see, if you make the regulatory agencies responsible to the representatives of the people, that makes the people more powerful. And if they can't get that through their thick skulls and vote that way, then, gosh, we need to get others.

HUGH HEWITT: Well, Patrick Leahy-- I hope [INAUDIBLE] has this tape available. Patrick Leahy-- who I call Senator Mumbles, from Vermont represents-- I don't know-- 80 people-- took on Don Willett, the Justice of the Texas Supreme Court who's been nominated to Fifth Circuit. And here's what he said to him.

- You talk about respecting precedent. Every nominee before this panel-- those that Senator Cornyn has voted for and those he's voted against-- has said they respect precedent. But of the Obergerfell decision, you equated that constitutional right to same-sex marriage with a constitutional right to marry bacon. You've argued that the Supreme Court Chevron decision is to have a--

HUGH HEWITT: Stop right there.

HUGH HEWITT: What he's referring to is that Don Willett is very funny. And in a tweet after the Obergefell decision, he tweeted, I'm for the right to marry bacon. Because he loves bacon, it's a funny joke. And someone has handed this to Patrick Leahy, who has no more idea what he's saying than Matt knows about what I'm going to say next, and he--

LARRY ARNN: Or you of me.

HUGH HEWITT: --and he comes back at it. And that's what passes for discussion in the United States Senate. And I think that's a crisis, actually.

LARRY ARNN: Yeah, and the point about precedent is that we have two long strains of opposite precedents in American history now. And so you're going to have to pick. And precedent was never anything except respect for earlier decisions that are made according to some principle.

And so, I mean, look, there was a long series of precedents that said-- what-- that the federal government does not have the right to forbid or to fail to protect slavery in the territories not yet incorporated as states. And the Republican Party was born to change that practice. And they did it on the basis of the text of the Constitution of the United States. That is the ultimate precedent.

HUGH HEWITT: And if we could simply come to that agreement, that the Senate gets to make its own rules, and that the Senate can change its own rules, and that it ought to change its own rules quickly-- because I think that's where we're going. Pat Toomey is pretty upset with the situation. The blue slip is dead as of this week. I think-- what do you say? Fundamental things are afoot? I think they're afoot in the Senate, as well. Do you share that optimism? And Ron Johnson may have brought it to a head. People are just disgusted.

LARRY ARNN: There's a mess in Alabama. And so these are trying days. Surely they must respond. And you've played some tapes from the leadership. They're pretty good! There are some very talented people in the Senate. If people will perk up and listen, there's a way to go.

HUGH HEWITT: If they will think-- and I guess I close here. Disraeli was the great proponent of party in Great Britain. And you said at the beginning of the hour, Churchill was not that great of a party man. But there are times to be a party man. And sometimes he was.

LARRY ARNN: Like Lincoln, and like all the greatest statesmen, Churchill responded to principles that are beyond party almost always through party.

HUGH HEWITT: Explain that. We've got a minute left. Explain that.

LARRY ARNN: Well, the thing is, in America, political parties have no constitutional standing. They're only decried during the founding. And then immediately, when the current government was set up--

HUGH HEWITT: They spring up.

LARRY ARNN: --they set up political parties so they could coordinate action across the branches and geographically across states. That's what they're for.

HUGH HEWITT: And so if our Republican Party-- if you're listening as you drive to work today-- please coordinate your actions across the branches in pursuit of the principle of tax reform and a larger principle which is you're all going to lose your jobs in 2018 if you don't get anything done. And thus far, Neil Gorsuch is on the scorecard and a dozen appellate judges. And that's about it.

Dr. Larry Arnn, always a pleasure. I'll be on MSNBC tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM, America, continuing the conversation on my missionary work there. Don't miss that. And I'll be back on Monday on the next Hugh Hewitt Show.