Bill Thompson

And this other guy who's a slower-moving constitutional conservative who might be a free market absolutist and a classical liberal, he's not being funded.

But under the state architecture, you might have been a better representation of the state.

And that's why the legislators had to vote for you to put you in as a senator.

You had to represent the whole state.

But now all that someone who wants to be a senator needs to do is go to the Republican National Committee or the Democrat National Committee and say, I'll do all the things you tell me to do, fund my campaign, and I'm going to go stump in Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota and the hell with the rest of the state.

It's very important.

It's a very important sleight of hand.

And when that happened, you made a redundant House of Representatives, and the state no longer was protected at the federal level.

And what happened was all of the power from all of these states and these legislatures and these individuals got sucked up into the federal government.

And then after that, you see all of these things that would never have been passed by a state getting passed, things like Obamacare, things like the Patriot Act, certain war resolutions.

All kinds of things where it just further erodes the power of the state.

And federal government wants that because it puts all of the power up in the federal government.

And people always say we need to get money out of politics.

No, we need to get power out of politics.

That power that they've taken over the last 130 years or so used to exist at the state and local levels because they wanted these thought experiments happening where we could pluck the best things out of them and forget the rest.

But all of that power has now gone up to the federal government and the federal government won't ever release that power.

And they only want more budget and more spending to execute that power.

And that's also because the interest groups that want to go, they don't want to have to go and convince a whole state of whether or not something is good that people are going to vote on.

They just want to go take a lobby and

and go up to the federal government because they want all of the power up there as well.