FUNNY! Secy of State Marco Rubio Pokes Fun At Democrat Garcia With “Lawyer Up” Joke

You know, primarily I am here in this collection of lawyers. How many lawyers? Are there any lawyers here? Good. Thank you. Because on election night, there was a congressman that said we all needed to lawyer up. So here we are. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Was that cool or what? My kids, I used to bring them on stage and show them off. Now they're introducing... I don't know where she got this. That's no stage fright. She's not afraid to speak. I mean, I don't really like public speaking that much, but she, she, she, on the other hand, that's fantastic. That's great. Thank you, Danielle. You did very good. She's a third year law student at the University of Virginia. I heard that's a good law school. I hope it is. I hope it is because it's expensive law school. I hope it is. No, she's great. And of course, my wife, Jeanette, is here as well. Well, and... You know, I was also a lawyer, but I was a different kind of lawyer. I was a land use and zoning attorney. And I always tell them, as a land use and zoning attorney, if you ever wind up in court, something went horribly wrong, she on the other hand is going to be like a real lawyer. So she's fantastic, and it's an honor to be with all of you here today, and thank you. And, you know, primarily I am here in this collection of lawyers. Are there any lawyers here? Good. Thank you. Because on election night, there was a congressman that said we all needed to lawyer up. So here we are. Anyway, anyway. So on a serious topic, you know, less than two years into Ronald Reagan's first term in office, you know that everything sort of seemed headed in the wrong direction. It's hard for us to remember that right now, but that's what it was like after his first two years in office. Things seemed headed in the wrong direction. He had won a Stunning landslide victory. He had been hailed as a conservative, which was hailed as a conservative revolution and upended the political establishment. He'd been swept into office with this ambitious political mandate. He survived an assassination attempt, and he promptly delivered on a signature campaign promise, which was a historic tax cut. And he did all of this in the first eight months of his presidency. By early 1982, Which, by the way, I think I was in sixth grade. But by early 1982, celebrations had given way to a growing sense of gloom. The Reagan administration was facing its first major political crisis. In less than a year, the approval ratings of the Reagan administration had plummeted by 25 points, from 68% down to 43%. By March of 1982, think about this, what I'm about to tell you for a moment. By March of 1982. President Reagan was four points less popular than Jimmy Carter at the same point at his term. The economy had taken a nosedive. In fact, it faced a full-fledged recession. Unemployment was approaching double digits, the worst it had been in 40 years, with many, fairly or unfairly, blaming the president for all of this. Even his foreign policy ambitions were beginning to lose ground, with rising fears of nuclear war, with Russia spilling out into a popular revolt, Against his efforts to take on the Soviet communism around the world on all fronts, the Reagan administration and the conservative movement at that time was on the defensive, but it was against that backdrop that I just described to you in 1982, which, by the way, also culminated in a devastating losses for the president's parties in Congress. It was against that backdrop amid the plummeting morale, the anxiety, the despair that something new began to stir. And it was, at that time, it was little more than just an idea. It was germinating in just a few law schools, in the common rooms of several law schools and lecture halls. But soon, what was stirring would remake the whole landscape of American politics and law, forever changing the course of the nation. In April of 1982, in the middle of everything I just described to you, there were four law school students that organized a symposium on federalism in New Haven, Connecticut. About 200 people came. One of the speakers that came was this 46-year-old professor from Chicago. His name was Antonin Scalia, and he diagnosed a basic problem to the room. He said conservatives have simply been outgunned at the federal level for half a century. And, of course, nowhere was that more obvious at the time than in the courts. Republicans had won three of the last four presidential elections. Seven of the nine justices at the time on the Supreme Court had been appointed by Republican presidents, and yet none of it seemed to matter much at all. Nine years earlier, the court had delivered its ruling in Roe v. Wade. Five of the seven votes for the decision were Republican appointees. The majority opinion was written by a justice who had been nominated by President Richard Nixon. The most consistent conservative on that court was William Rehnquist. And he spent much of his time as the lone voice of dissent, so much so that his law clerks gifted him a doll of the Lone Ranger. At the time, only one major law school in the country had a conservative student journal. By the way, it happened to be Harvard. It had been founded four years earlier. And the very term originalism itself. It was only two years old, and it wasn't coined by an originalist. It was coined by a liberal Stanford professor in an article written to criticize and refute the concept. Just a few years later, a sitting justice in the Supreme Court would dismiss this idea of originalism. He would dismiss it as, quote, little more than arrogance cloaked as humility, sneering that its advocates were persons who have no familiarity with the historical record. This was how the Federalist Society began. But your critics aren't sneering anymore. The Federalist Society helped to change and advance America. And there are many lessons for us to learn today from that success. One of those lessons is that politics requires more than simply winning elections. Because the government is not the only source of political power. Power also lives in the universities. Power lives in the press. Power lives in the whole expanse of civil society. All of the institutions that define and shape our understanding of ourselves as a nation and as a people. Every society, and I mean every society, has an elite, has a ruling class. And in ours, that class resides not just in the White House, not just in Congress or the courts, it also resides in academia, in powerful nonprofits, and in non-government organizations. It resides in corporate boardrooms and C-suites, in think tanks and journals, in foundations and in mass media, stretching across the commanding heights of business and education and culture. This is something that the left, over the last six decades, has frankly often understood better than the right. Elections, elections decides who holds office for a season, but elections, they do not decide by themselves. What our institutions teach, or what our lawyers believe, which ideas are treated as respectable or normal, and which are deemed beyond the pale. The government, of course, can and does play a critical role in shaping these things. But the government can't fundamentally transform them into two or four, or it can't transform them in just two, four, or eight years. That kind of change, that kind of change is implemented over the course of a generation or more. And even then, Only through the dedicated work of a coalition of allies across institutions, working together both inside and outside of the state. The Federalist Society's victories were built on this insight. It's not just about placing good judges in positions to interpret the law. It's about shaping the world in which they do so. About shaping the norms and the values, the ideas and beliefs, the expectations and the assumptions that underpin how they think and reason and act. Who defines these things? And to what end? That is what power is. That's not unique to our country's legal system. At the State Department, we have seen the same thing firsthand in the realm of what is called international law. We've heard the concept international law invoked against nearly every major foreign policy decision or action of this administration. So, for example, when President Trump ordered our military to sink cartel boats in the Caribbean, we were told that they were violating international law. The founding chief prosecutor of the fake and illegitimate International Criminal Court even accused us of crimes against humanity. When American forces captured Nicolas Maduro, a fugitive of American justice, And brought him to the United States to face that justice. We heard the same, when we did that, we heard the same accusations from the highest levels of the, I'm going to call them a name, the United Nations. Congratulations. Even the enforcement of our own immigration laws. Even the enforcement of our own immigration laws here on American soil has faced this attack. Earlier this year, for example, groups like the ACLU were petitioning the United Nations to investigate ISIS blatant violations of international law. Here in the United States, over the past decade, we've received an endless barrage of claims about America's alleged violations of international rules and norms, ranging from our foreign policy to our border enforcement, to even what they call what they call our systemic racism. Subscribe to One India and never miss an update. Download the OneIndia app now.