What was it like inside the Reagan White House—and how does that legacy connect to Trump’s presidency today? In this powerful episode, The Honorable T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., former Assistant Counselor to President Ronald Reagan, joins Jenny Beth to share exclusive insights into the Reagan Revolution, the rise of originalism, and the conservative fight to reclaim America. From tax cuts and Cold War strategy to the roots of today's legal battles, Cribb reveals how Reagan’s bold leadership still shapes the modern conservative movement—and why Trump’s mission echoes that same spirit.
What was it like inside the Reagan White House—and how does that legacy connect to Trump’s presidency today? In this powerful episode, The Honorable T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., former Assistant Counselor to President Ronald Reagan, joins Jenny Beth to share exclusive insights into the Reagan Revolution, the rise of originalism, and the conservative fight to reclaim America. From tax cuts and Cold War strategy to the roots of today's legal battles, Cribb reveals how Reagan’s bold leadership still shapes the modern conservative movement—and why Trump’s mission echoes that same spirit.
Website: https://yaf.org/people/t-kenneth-cribb-jr-njc/
Twitter/X: @jennybethm
Hon Ken Cribb (00:00):
The Reagan administration was considered a revolution. It was called the Reagan Revolution, and the people who disliked it the most were Republicans of the old established. Of course, of course, of course. And in fact, I would say that ground zero for the anti Reagan sentiment in the country was the Republican National Committee at that time.
Narrator (00:20):
Keeping our republic is on the line, and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author of filmmaker and one of time magazine's, most influential people in the world. But the title she's most proud of is Mom to Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:52):
Today we're joined by Ken Crib, who is ahead of ISI, which is the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. He's also the treasurer for Young America's Foundation, which owns the Reagan Ranch. And his resume is quite extensive. He's on a lot of boards, so I'll let him tell you a little bit more about it. And he worked for President Reagan, the entirety of President Reagan's presidency and the year before in the campaign. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Hon Ken Cribb (01:20):
Well, thank you very much for having me, Jenny Beth.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:23):
So how did you get involved with Ronald Reagan?
Hon Ken Cribb (01:27):
Well, I knew it was the big one in my whole life. It was the big election in 1980, and I was about ready to take a three week vacation, and I was feeling guilty, so I knew the general counsel of the campaign. I called him up Lauren Smith and said, Lauren, getting ready to go to Italy, but I'm guilty and I'll work for you for $1 if you need the help in the campaign, but if you don't need the help, I'd really like to go to Italy. He says, can you get here tomorrow? So I did. And I think the reason he was a little overwhelmed at first and needed the help was it was one of the very first campaigns under the new FEC law. So lawyers were having to tell the campaign people how to spend every dollar, and not just in the national campaign, but in the 50 state campaigns.
Jenny Beth Martin (02:20):
Wow. Yeah. And the FEC really does just create all sorts of headaches.
Hon Ken Cribb (02:24):
Oh my gosh,
Jenny Beth Martin (02:25):
Everyone.
Hon Ken Cribb (02:26):
That's right. And everything we would doing as lawyers was setting precedents. It was one of the first elections under that law.
Jenny Beth Martin (02:34):
Wow. So there was no FEC before that.
Hon Ken Cribb (02:36):
There was an FEC, but they redid the law, and this was one of the very first presidential campaigns to
Jenny Beth Martin (02:45):
Okay, so then you worked on the campaign as an attorney, and then Reagan is elected and you went into the White House?
Hon Ken Cribb (02:54):
That's right. First we did the transition. Ed Meese was the head of the campaign. The chairman was Bill Casey, William Casey, who was later a director of the CIA, but Edwin Meese iii, who later became Attorney General, was me's, excuse me, Reagan's key aide, and headed the campaign as on day-to-day basis. And my department, the legal department reported to him and he asked me to do the Department of Justice and the executive and regulatory agencies in the transition in 1980. And we got off to a pretty good start with that work, and he wanted me to join him in the White House. And so I did that.
Jenny Beth Martin (03:36):
Okay. And in the transition that was helping staff the agencies or what was that? Doing
Hon Ken Cribb (03:43):
My part? No, there was a separate group that did personnel. My part did the planning for what would happen when these departments and agencies were under President Reagan's authority,
Jenny Beth Martin (03:55):
Sort of like the executive orders. Trump has been dropping, getting this, is that
Hon Ken Cribb (03:59):
Kind of thing, the substantive part of that planning.
Jenny Beth Martin (04:03):
Okay.
Hon Ken Cribb (04:03):
The personnel was very important too, but that was a separate operation.
Jenny Beth Martin (04:07):
And then Meese went into the White House and you went into the White House?
Hon Ken Cribb (04:13):
Yes.
Jenny Beth Martin (04:13):
And what were your roles there?
Hon Ken Cribb (04:16):
Yes, so Ed was counselor to the president and all policy reported through him, even the National Security Council, and he had several big offices that reported him. One of them was Cabinet Affairs, so he put me in Cabinet Affairs. The reason that was significant and why he wanted me there, it was the way issues were developed and put before President Reagan for decision. It was done through his cabinet. The reason that Meese designed it that way was so that the cabinet members came insiders in the White House representing the president out to those agencies instead of the other way around, which it normally, normally the State Department is in there fighting for their turf with the President. Instead, these cabinet officers were ambassadors for the president.
Jenny Beth Martin (05:09):
And that worked well.
Hon Ken Cribb (05:10):
It worked beautifully. I would recommend it.
Jenny Beth Martin (05:13):
And why? How is that different? How did it make a difference? Alright,
Hon Ken Cribb (05:18):
So if you are holding things tight in the White House, making all the decisions in the White House, then the cabinet members are not invested in that. They've not been part of it. They might not even like it because they haven't seen what the other options were. But instead, what we did was to appoint subcommittees of the cabinet in various areas like the legal area or the economic area, and say the Secretary of Treasury became the head of the Cabinet Council for Economic Affairs and other cabinet departments that were relevant to the economy were sitting on that. They were actually helping design the policy. In other words, you had the highest office of the land in the White House several times a week helping make the policy that they would later administer. So it made them, that's what I mean, that they became insiders and they became ambassadors for Reagan's policies.
Jenny Beth Martin (06:18):
That is pretty significant.
Hon Ken Cribb (06:20):
It had not been done since Eisenhower, and I think it was done much more comprehensively than even with Eisenhower.
Jenny Beth Martin (06:29):
Then what are the kind of things that Reagan did, especially we'll go to his second term, but in his first term, that there were different, that really changed the way Washington works, because that's what Reagan did. And until we had Trump and the White House, I don't think Reagan and Trump are the two in my lifetime who have disrupted Washington.
Hon Ken Cribb (06:54):
I think that's right. And I think probably they're the only two from the conservative side that have done that even since Coolidge. And by the way, president Reagan loved Coolidge, and one of the first things he did on day one in the West Wing, he had a big portrait of Coolidge put in the cabinet room. But yes, the Reagan administration was considered a revolution. It was called the Reagan Revolution, and the people who disliked it the most were Republicans of the old established. Of
Hon Ken Cribb (07:27):
Course,
Hon Ken Cribb (07:27):
Of course. And in fact, I would say the ground zero for the anti Reagan sentiment in the country was the Republican National Committee at that time. So it was very much a takeover, and he wanted to enlarge the scope of human freedom. Every policy he did could be boiled down to that question, and that divided into two great categories. One was the national security category where he wanted to win the Cold War, not to coexist with it as the previous Republican presidencies, but to actually win the Cold War. And then the other thing he wanted to do was to reduce the influence of the federal government in our daily lives. So that freedom became much more real for the average citizen. One of the chief ways he did that was to drastically reduce marginal tax rates so that people earning money would keep more of what they were earning.
Hon Ken Cribb (08:33):
So that was really the big push in the first couple of years was what was called the Economic Recovery Act. It's been a long time, and people probably forget how desperate the economic situation was under his predecessor Jimmy Carter, with interest rates in double digits, inflation and double digits. It was a bad situation and people were suffering. And so he attacked that with the one lever the president of the United States has. That makes the most change. And that is marginal tax rates because if you change the tax rate at the margin, say your tax rate is 40%, if you bring it down to 35 cents, you want to work harder to get that lower tax rate on those other dollars. He found that out in the movie industry because when he was in the movie industry, the top marginal tax rate was 90%. So he wasn't making too many movies after the 90% level. He just stopped working. And so did the other actors,
Jenny Beth Martin (09:41):
90%. Just con, to make it very clear, that means that for every dollar earned, he keeps 10 cents.
Hon Ken Cribb (09:48):
Right? Absolutely.
Jenny Beth Martin (09:49):
That's insane.
Hon Ken Cribb (09:50):
It is insane.
Jenny Beth Martin (09:51):
It's the opposite of the amount you give to God.
Hon Ken Cribb (09:55):
Yes, yes. Right. And the marginal tax rates when he took office were 70%, 50%. So he was drastically reducing them down to about 35%.
Jenny Beth Martin (10:10):
And at the Reagan ranch, they have photos of him signing that, right?
Hon Ken Cribb (10:13):
Absolutely. He happened to be, when those bills were finally passed through Congress, he was at the ranch and there's a table, which is called the tax table. Yeah, absolutely. But the way we got it through, we carried the Senate with us in the 80 campaign. I think Reagan carried 44 states, and that included about six to eight senators. I don't remember the exact number. It was a lot of senators, and we had a majority in the Senate. We never had a majority in the house. There was never a Republican house in the whole eight years of Reagan, but we had blue dog Democrats. They were real in those days where you had conservative Democrats, many of them in the South, but other places as well. And they actually wanted some of the same things for the country that Reagan did. So we had working majorities in the house of representative but not Republican majorities.
Jenny Beth Martin (11:10):
And so they passed this. And I was listening to Steve Moore, the Economist the other day, and he said one of the mistakes or the lessons learned, whatever we want to call it from the Reagan administration, is that it took entirely too long to get that bill passed.
Hon Ken Cribb (11:27):
Absolutely.
Jenny Beth Martin (11:28):
And because of that, there wound up being a recession, and the relief really started at the end of 82 and really took off in 83,
Hon Ken Cribb (11:35):
Right? Yes. The old policies were in place until the Economic Recovery Act passed. So unfortunately, that meant there was a lag in the prosperity. The prosperity came pretty quickly after the act was passed. But then you're right, it took a while to get it done.
Jenny Beth Martin (11:53):
And I think, I don't remember, you may remember when it was passed, I don't remember how long it took. It was
Hon Ken Cribb (11:58):
By the end of 81, but that's a whole year.
Jenny Beth Martin (12:00):
A whole year, which is one thing Steve Moore right now is warning people about with the package in Congress right now, that we want to make sure the reconciliation package that it sends the Trump tax cuts and adds any new tax cuts, if there are any, happens quickly because people need that economic relief right now.
Hon Ken Cribb (12:25):
That is so smart. I was actually having at lunch with Ed Meese today, and I missed that talk, so I'm glad to have that brief on it because I agree with that completely. Yeah.
Jenny Beth Martin (12:36):
Okay. And I'm not picking on Reagan, but it's important that part of the reason that we look back at history is so that we learn from it, and so we don't repeat.
Hon Ken Cribb (12:44):
Absolutely.
Jenny Beth Martin (12:44):
The goal is not to repeat the same mistakes. That's absolutely right. And when it took off, the economy flourished, so those long gas lines, the high interest rates, everything started coming back,
Hon Ken Cribb (12:55):
Coming back, huge number of jobs created. I think Reagan created more jobs than all the rest of the Western economies together. And during that period.
Jenny Beth Martin (13:05):
That's amazing, isn't it?
Hon Ken Cribb (13:06):
Yeah.
Jenny Beth Martin (13:08):
And during this time while you were in the White House, what were you and Ed me doing?
Hon Ken Cribb (13:15):
Well, of course, ed was Reagan's
Jenny Beth Martin (13:18):
Right hand man, really
Hon Ken Cribb (13:19):
Right hand man. And I was Ed's right hand man. And so we were all working on the same stuff. And early on it was heavily economic and we were sort of disciplined about that. We had a lot of educating to do with a democratic controlled house and everything. We had to work pretty hard on the outreach on that. But all the time he was making steps, making strategic moves, getting ready, prepping the ground to do something about the Soviet Union. And the main thing he was doing was entering upon the largest defense buildup in peace time in the history of the world, not just the United States, but of the whole world in terms of the billions that were put into it.
Jenny Beth Martin (14:07):
And why was that important?
Hon Ken Cribb (14:09):
Well, he invented the phrase that we still use now, peace through strength. And look, if you want peace, there's one way you should get it. You arm yourself to the teeth and no body will attack you. So that's the best way to get peace. It's naive to think that we can do it through a diplomacy alone. Human nature doesn't work that way. And we've had to learn that over and over and over in the course of 6,000 years of recorded history. But yes, and so when he went to bargain with the Soviets by 85, he was doing so from a position of strength, and they were actually not as strong as they had been in 1980 because they were struggling to keep up with our defense buildup. And in the past, the way they had done it was to steal our technology through spies. So one day in 1983, Reagan kicked every Soviet spy out of the country.
Hon Ken Cribb (15:14):
We knew who most of their spies were, they knew who most of our spies were. But because of a democratic administration preceding Reagan and Frank Church as head of the Intelligence Committee, we had basically been blinded. The CIA was no longer effective in human intelligence within the Soviet Union. Our satellite capabilities were greater. We could read a grocery list in the parking lot of the Kremlin, but we didn't have good human intelligence. So we didn't lose anything by kicking their spies out because we were already blinded. And so they could no longer steal our secrets. And that's when the strategic defense breakthrough came. We'd leapfrog the technology of nuclear deterrence by designing a capability that could intercept and shoot down incoming missiles. And they were desperate because they didn't have an answer for that, and they couldn't afford to develop the technology on their own.
Jenny Beth Martin (16:19):
When Reagan first said he wanted to end the Cold War, what did people think of that?
Hon Ken Cribb (16:24):
They thought it was unrealistic. They thought he was the only one saying that. And I will be honest with you, Jenny Beth, his aide also, where PE did not know how we were going to actually end the Cold War, at least on our terms, because it had been a complete stalemate all these years and under Democrats and Republicans. But Reagan had a certain vision on that that was born of his own experience battling communism in his own union. He was president of the screen actor's guilt. And of course, the communist figured out early that Hollywood was our soft underbelly. And if you wanted to influence opinion in the United States, one way to do it was to take over the entertainment energy industry. And so they went after Reagan's union. Reagan was a liberal Democrat at the time. He was a big supporter, had been of FDR, but that got him rethinking things.
Hon Ken Cribb (17:23):
And he stopped them and started, he kept them out of the screen actors gu, but he became a lifelong student of communism. So he knew more about communism than the so-called experts. And what he knew about them was that they too had a soft underbelly that all of the power was right at the top, and that the Russian people were not prospering and they didn't like the regime. And so he started collecting their jokes. He was a great collector of jokes from under communism. I'll give you an example. He said that a Comis communist re comes in to the peasant on his farm and says, Comrad, how are the crops this year? And the peasant said, oh, wonderful. So many crops you will be eating in luxury. He says, and the potatoes, he says, Comrad the potatoes, so many, if you pile them up, they would reach God, the feet of God. The says, this is the Soviet Union. There is no God. Husband says, that's all right. There are no potatoes either. So what was going on during the early eighties was in their effort to keep up with our defense buildup, they were just eating out their substance. They were in desperate economic situations, and that was showing up in the intelligence. And so Reagan decided it was time to talk. It was time to do some end dinner wrestling. And that led to the five, four, excuse me, four summits with Gorbachev.
Jenny Beth Martin (19:06):
And those were very significant. Yes, had we had those kind of summits at all with other presidents
Hon Ken Cribb (19:13):
Before we had, but we had never prospered in those summits because a dictatorship has an advantage over a democracy in those kinds of negotiations because the democratically elected head of state has to be looking over a shoulder. Do I have the people with me? How far can I go? This is not a worry if you're a dictator. And so you would find the phenomenon of presidents and even Republican presidents doing something popular with the electorate rather than doing something good for the negotiation. But Reagan changed that, and he was a tough negotiator, and he met with Gorbachev in Vienna, and the first thing he said to him, he leaned over the table and he said, Mr. General Secretary, let me tell you why we despise your system. And then he just went down the trampling on human freedom, the lack of an economy that would produce prosperity for the people. And it really put Gorbachev back on his heel, and he realized it was a different kind of a president he was dealing with.
Jenny Beth Martin (20:32):
And I think that that is one of the things that Donald Trump is very good at negotiating. And he walks in, it seems to me, from what I've heard, that he's walking in with these world leaders, and they're not used to his style, but where Reagan had the advantage of understanding from his life experience what communism was like, and having to fight communism. Trump has had to negotiate business contracts and understands that most people are willing to deal somewhere in there.
Hon Ken Cribb (21:07):
Yeah, absolutely. And there are other parallels like that. I mean, Trump went through a big defense buildup early in his first term, and after winning the Cold War, we had been spending down the peace dividend. When Reagan left, we had 600 ship Navy, and now I think it's between two 50 and 300 ship Navy. I mean, we are not strong as we were. And Trump wanted to reverse that in his first term. And he's making every sign to be wanting to do that again in this term.
Jenny Beth Martin (21:44):
And I think that with Reagan's vision of ending the Cold War, it shows he was a visionary and a leader, and he brought other people with him, and he thought of what could be done and aspired to it and convinced others to follow him down this path, sort of like John F. Kennedy saying, we're going to put man on the moon in less than a decade.
Hon Ken Cribb (22:13):
Absolutely
Jenny Beth Martin (22:13):
Not, because it's easy, but because it is hard.
Hon Ken Cribb (22:15):
It's interesting that you put it that way. Some people, Russell Kirk, for example, traced modern American conservatism to Edmund Burke in England. Burke had a phrase called the moral imagination, and he opposed it to the diabolic imagination. And he was saying that, yes, you have to paint a picture of a more perfect society if you want to reach that perfection or not approximate that perfection is a better way of saying it. So yes, Reagan had a vision of the world free of the Soviet Union. He said, over and over, it's echoing Lincoln that the world can't exist half slave and half free. And of course, under President Ford and under Henry Kissinger, that's exactly what they were settling for with Theon,
Jenny Beth Martin (23:04):
Right? That is what they were settling for. And I think that that Trump has that same kind of vision. And here's specifically where I think of how that is exhibited. When he went down the escalator in 2015, he talked about securing the border and people mocked him and laughed at him in the mainstream media. Oh, absolutely. And in the left, they were like, oh, the border's secure. We don't have to worry about this. He doesn't know what he's talking about. There aren't drugs coming across it, whatever it was that he said, they attacked it in recent polling before and after the election in November of last year. Americans, they don't just want to secure border now. They want to deport the people who are here illegally, all of the people who are here illegally, criminals and others, or hardened criminals and others. Because if you've come here illegally, you've committed a crime. But that takes a vision to be able to say, we're going to secure the border. And most people think it's impossible. We not necessary we're going to end the Cold War. Maybe they didn't think it was possible or necessary. And in both instances, they're convincing Americans to follow them.
Hon Ken Cribb (24:29):
Absolutely. That's a very good parallel. Right. And I must say that my experience in government was in those nine years of Reagan, and no one thought we could reform the immigration problems of those days. I mean, it did take a certain leap, a leap of imagination for Trump to figure out that this, why not? I saw problems like this in business. I can solve this. And he taught us all a lesson.
Jenny Beth Martin (25:05):
He did. And I know that our podcast isn't about Trump, but since I was just speaking of him, one of the things about Trump and Ronald Reagan, they did not come from politics. They didn't go to college to study law, to go into politics, to be legislators or whatever else. They lived a very full life before they ran for president. And I think that there is a visual demonstration of Trump's skills and ability that just seemed like such common sense. But in Washington, everything seems it's just upside down and backwards. So Trump, as president goes to North Carolina, sees that we're still dealing with hurricane and flood damage four and five months after maybe even more like six months, almost after the hurricane. And he sees this, and the very next day bulldozers show up and earth movers show up, and they're moving the fallen trees and the debris out of the way. Anyone else who has ever been to a construction site or has ever had to help their neighbor cut up a tree after a hurricane or tornado, which I have knows, there's only so much you can do with a chainsaw, you're going to need some bigger equipment to get this stuff out of there. There had to be people from FEMA in there and from the federal government who were looking at the problem, and all they knew how to do was push paper.
Hon Ken Cribb (26:40):
Absolutely.
Jenny Beth Martin (26:40):
And he comes in and the next day, they're literally moving the earth out of the way to clear it, to solve the problem and turning on the water in California. And it's like the people in Washington, the bureaucrats, they've lost touch with reality somewhere along the way.
Hon Ken Cribb (26:59):
And they did it a long time ago.
Jenny Beth Martin (27:01):
Yeah, you faced the same themes.
Hon Ken Cribb (27:02):
Absolutely. FEMA was one of the most impenetrable bureaucracies in the government, even in the Reagan days. But here we have a president who was doing something about it. I liked his instinct, and his instinct, remember, was to say, we don't need these decisions being made so far away up in Washington. This should be decentralized so that people closer to the victims in North Carolina and California are people who have an understanding of the local situation are making these decisions. That's what our founders envisaged in the whole federalism thing, when each state would be a laboratory of how to solve problems, and we'd figure out how the good ones work and implement those more generally.
Jenny Beth Martin (27:53):
When Reagan was building up the weapons and to have strength through peace, through strength. I remember in elementary school, no, I guess it was probably high school, so like 84, 85, I had a few teachers, especially a particular Spanish and French teacher who really did not like Reagan. I babysat for her kids. She was a very lovely lady, but she did not like Reagan. And she complained about Reagan. I heard other teachers and other chitter chatter about people saying, oh, Reagan is going to take us to a nuclear war. And there was some television show when I was maybe like 82, 83 when I was still in elementary school about the world collapsing because of a nuclear war. And yeah, they were wrong. It actually achieved peace. How was it for you and Meese and Reagan and others to have to fight that cultural battle?
Hon Ken Cribb (28:55):
Well, it was a real fight. I mean, people forget, it's been a long time, and people forget that even the kinder, gentler establishment press of those days was still left wing, and it still hated Reagan. I remember one time I called up the head of the FCC who had been co-counsel with me in the 80 campaign, and I was teasing him, but I said, mark, they're killing the president every night on the networks. What are you going to do about it? And he laughed and he says, nothing, but there are three networks now, and when I leave, there'll be 103 networks. So we addressed it with policy. In other words, we look to the future and say, well, if you really want to do something about the news monopoly, maybe you should democratize the news. And so that's when the explosion of cable channels came.
Hon Ken Cribb (29:47):
Wow.
Hon Ken Cribb (29:48):
Yeah. That kind of thing. So the president was speaking over the head of the media to the people. That was his main technique. He used a lot of Oval Office addresses. He resumed the Saturday afternoon radio cast fireside chats that Reagan, excuse me, that FDR had had.
Hon Ken Cribb (30:12):
But one of the main ways he did it was his demeanor. As he would walk to the helicopter on Fridays on the way to camp David, the commentators would be saying, yelling ugly questions to him, and the voiceover from the studio would be very anti Reagan. But what the people saw was the smiling genial man waving to the cameras and completely ignoring all that too much. So he sort Rosa above it. He used to tell us, Jenny Beth, when somebody would argue politically to him, and he would say, wait a minute. He says, what I need from you is your advice on the merits. I'll take care of the politics. So he really was trying to, he was not very curious about what was in the newspapers. And that's probably a good thing if you're president of the United States.
Jenny Beth Martin (31:10):
Yeah, I think so. But I think if you're any kind of public figure at all, just ignore what's in the paper as much as you can. Okay. Now, in the second term, ed Meese became Attorney General Meese, and you went with him?
Hon Ken Cribb (31:26):
Yes. He was named by the president, and he asked me to do his transition. So I had a good long time to work on it, because he had a long confirmation hearing. He was Reagan's most effective aide, and the other sides knew that the Democrats knew that. So they were desperate to try to prevent him from becoming Attorney General. It was a long drawn out process. So we had ample time to plan it very meticulously. And when we got over there, he said, now, remember, Ken, when you're bringing me recommendations for these offices at Justice, I value gray hair. And I went and I did my best. And I came back to him. I said, ed, there's no one with gray hair that agrees with us. So we went with younger, we went with younger, brilliant, intellectually savvy young people who still around a lot of them. And we put 35 year olds on the federal bench. And Edith Jones, who was later chief judge of the Fifth Circuit, which is based in Texas, but all those states down that way, she was 35 when we put her on the bench. And now she's still at it. She's still at it. And so that was part of the revolution. Part of the revolution was getting a farm team that could carry on beyond Reagan's Day,
Jenny Beth Martin (33:01):
You've got, there's this new book out, right? Yes. That you have told me about. Now, I interviewed Ed Meese for my podcast several months ago when the Reagan movie was coming out. This book was not out then.
Hon Ken Cribb (33:14):
Right.
Jenny Beth Martin (33:14):
And tell me about this book a little bit, and why is it important that there is a book about former Attorney General Edes?
Hon Ken Cribb (33:25):
Very good question. The book is important because for the first time, it tells the whole story of something called originalism. Originalism was a movement in the law started by Ed, and I can tell you a little bit about that, that wanted to get back to the actual Constitution, to the words of the Constitution instead of all the opinions and palor about it that had been encrusted over the years. And what had happened was by the time of Reagan running for office in 1980, there was really a lot of lawmaking from the federal bench by judges. It had started under Roosevelt where the Supreme Court was out, was ruling unconstitutional certain key elements of the New Deal. So the very first court packing scheme was Roosevelt's trying to pack the Supreme Court back in the thirties. It was about as successful as the one just now in nerves.
Hon Ken Cribb (34:28):
It didn't go anywhere. But he had four terms to work on who the membership of the court. So over that time, progressive justices began legislating from the bench. They would make politic decisions for the people. The Republican presidents after Roosevelt and Truman were slow to pick up on that, and they weren't careful in their appointments. So that Earl Warren was appointed by Eisenhower, William Brennan, very liberal justice appointed by Eisenhower. Nixon appointed Harry Blackman Ford appointed John Paul Stevens. So by the time we were there, that was called the Burger Court. Warren Berger was a constitutionalist, but he was in the minority. He was Chief Justice, but he was in the minority. And in the very liberal majority of the Burger Court, there was only one Democrat,
Hon Ken Cribb (35:27):
Thurgood Marshall, all the others were Republicans. So we had a lot of work to do. In other words, we had to reform the entire process. And when Meese became Attorney General, the president said, now the main thing I want you to concentrate on is restoring fidelity to the written constitution. So that's what the Meese Justice Department was all about. And we tried to do it with a sort of a four pronged effort. And the book describes all of this. By the way, the book is written by two law professors, one from Yale and Northwestern, Steve Calabrese and Gary Lawson from Boston University and Florida Endowed Chairs know their business, but they're also worked in the Meese Justice Department back in the day. So they were eyewitnesses.
Jenny Beth Martin (36:23):
And Mark Levin did the fort. He worked for Meese as well,
Hon Ken Cribb (36:26):
Right? Yes. When I went back to the White House after they needed me because of Iran Contra and the cleanup after that, mark Levin became chief of Staff of the Justice Department,
Jenny Beth Martin (36:39):
And he's taught, I've learned so much from Mark Levin reading his books and listening to his program. And when I get really frustrated and down about America had just turn on his show, and I'm like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Hon Ken Cribb (36:53):
He's fighting for us every
Jenny Beth Martin (36:55):
Day. Yes, he's
Hon Ken Cribb (36:55):
Absolutely.
Jenny Beth Martin (36:56):
Most people are like, wait, mark Levi gets you excited and cheers you up. Yes, that's my
Hon Ken Cribb (37:02):
Life. Underneath all that passionate argument, he is a brilliant constitutional lawyer.
Jenny Beth Martin (37:07):
He is, and that's what I love about him. He takes the issues of the day and he ties it to the Constitution and explains why we should fight and what the underlying principles are that we're really fighting for. It's not just the issue of the day, but there's a principle in there that we're standing for.
Hon Ken Cribb (37:22):
Absolutely. So what did we do differently, which was how we got started on this from the other Republicans, from the Republicans who had proceeded us and not done much about the problem. First thing we did was to elevate judicial selection to the very top of the administration. It wasn't an afterthought. It wasn't something that we did quietly over the Department of Justice. It was staffed at the Department of Justice, but then the Attorney General and his people would bring it over to the president's chief officers. We would meet in the Roosevelt Room, just steps from the Oval Office and really hash it out at that level, at a cabinet level,
Hon Ken Cribb (38:03):
And then take it into the President. He'd make his choice. And then the President, it wasn't just us working on it. A very important development was one of the scarcest commodities in the free world is the time of the President of the United States. Right. He would call every single nominee for to be a judge on the telephone, tell him what the stakes were, what he was expecting about reviving the Constitution. And so that was a huge investment, an unprecedented investment, presidential time. It was a signal of how important it was. And the other thing we did was we stopped asking conclusory questions. Like we didn't ask the candidate, do you believe in judicial restraint? They would always say, yes, of course they wanted to be a judge. Or I said, would you legislate from the bench? No, of course they wouldn't.
Hon Ken Cribb (38:54):
So what we would do, we would actually just put a fact situation to them. That's all we would do. Say, here are a bunch of facts. How would you rule? And then it was on them, and we could pick up whether they would be an activist or the left or the right. We wanted the constitution followed and not manipulated by anyone, including by conservatives. And so that's how we did that. I mentioned the farm team. Not only did we populate the government with brilliant young lawyers, a new organization had been formed in those days called the Federalist Society. And they were pretty young right out of law school, but they knew what they were doing. They had Judge Bork, judge Robert Bork and Judge Antonin Scalia as their advisors. And so we hired many of them into the Meese Justice Department and into the Reagan administration generally. And then they matured and got better and better and better. So by the time Reagan and Meese leave office in 1989, federal Society is a thriving organization. It's now 70,000 strong. It's organized at every single law school. It has lawyers chapters in all the major cities. It does not take positions on red meat, controversial policy questions, but it does all the intellectual work getting people ready to do that in their own lives.
Hon Ken Cribb (40:36):
Judge Scalia later, justice Scalia, ed Meese, and Judge Robert Borg, all three told me in different conversations over a period of about two years, that they considered the Federalist Society as the institutionalization of their own work. So Jenny Beth, when we are starting to win these big cases before the Supreme Court, now, it took 45 years to get there, but the process that carried us there is still vibrant and strong.
Jenny Beth Martin (41:06):
I think that's one of the important things for people to understand. The Tea Party movement recently turned 16 years old. And when we look at why we started Constitutionally limited, government free markets and fiscal responsibility, which we now talk about in terms of personal freedom, economic freedom, and a debt-free future,
Jenny Beth Martin (41:30):
There have been days in the last 16 years where it just seemed like those were really nice sounding values that we would never actually see again in America. But we kept standing for it and working for it, and we studied the Constitution along the way, and by studying the constitutional along the way, we realized that change takes a long time to achieve in America. And there's a reason for it, because if things change on a dime, it creates chaos. People don't like change, and that makes them, it can lead to uprisings in a country, but if you get people to agree with you and you bring them along the way and you get more and more people to support your cause, you can make a difference and have something like Doge happening. Right.
Hon Ken Cribb (42:20):
No
Jenny Beth Martin (42:20):
Question. Which is what we're having right now.
Hon Ken Cribb (42:22):
The Tea Party also was a revolution, and it took its name from a revolutionary example, right?
Jenny Beth Martin (42:29):
That's right. That's right.
Hon Ken Cribb (42:29):
Yeah, absolutely. And it was constitution based. It is constitution based, just as the Reagan's work was and is. So that's so important. And your insightful words about how sudden change can sometimes be counterproductive. The founders understood this. They had made a huge study of the Greek republic and the Roman Republic and the ancients, and then the modern kingdoms and nation states in Europe. And they understood that the enemy of self-government is power, and power is what one uses when one makes sudden changes. So they made it difficult to make sudden. What they did was, the phrase I like to use is they divided power against itself.
Jenny Beth Martin (43:24):
Yes.
Hon Ken Cribb (43:24):
And they did it horizontally with the separation of powers between the three branches and vertically between the federal government and the national government, and then many other checks and balances all throughout. So you can act more quickly in the British parliamentary system, but you can also ruin the United Kingdom more quickly. And what we have opted for is a process that sometimes is frustrating because it slows things down, but it does preserve freedom.
Jenny Beth Martin (44:01):
And that's why it took 45 years in some instances for you to see the fruits of your labor. But it still, even when it takes a long time worth standing for and fighting for, even when sometimes you look around and think you're the only one standing out on a limb.
Hon Ken Cribb (44:16):
Yes, that's absolutely correct. That is correct. And so organizations like the Tea Party and the Federalist Society actually counteract that loneliness. You see that you are not the only one that sees this problem, and it gives you courage.
Jenny Beth Martin (44:36):
It does. And it keeps you going. And then you watch as other things pop up, there are all these Trump groups and MAGA groups now, and they want what's best for our country, and they want more freedom in their own
Hon Ken Cribb (44:51):
Lives.
Jenny Beth Martin (44:52):
And we have that struggle between freedom and power. I think there's a third element to it with the human nature,
Hon Ken Cribb (45:02):
The
Jenny Beth Martin (45:02):
Tug of war, it's freedom and power and security and all three are constantly pulling against the other.
Hon Ken Cribb (45:13):
I like that. I like that human nature. You mentioned, and I think Madison said that if men were angels, you wouldn't need a government. And they aren't angels. And that's what we call human nature. And so you have to be realistic about the fact that actors in government are going to want to acquire power, and eventually it's going to corrupt them, and they'll have too much power for the good of liberty. So what you want to do is have other powerful entities contending with them. And I think Madison said in the same passage, let ambition counteract ambition,
Jenny Beth Martin (45:53):
And it works well, and we have a lot of ambitious people. That's right. In America, as you look back, Reagan accomplished his goal. He ended the Cold War. What did you think when that happened? And the Soviet Union came down and the wall came down in Germany.
Hon Ken Cribb (46:11):
I remember where I was because I was going to give a speech in Puerto Rico, which is not as far as from, I was in Philadelphia airport, it's about three hour flight. The speech, I couldn't give the same speech the day the wall came down, but three hours was enough to write a speech. And so I remember thinking that when Reagan said in his speech to the British Parliament in 19, yes, 1982, early, he said that before we were done, Marxism would be on the ash heap of history. And that's the day that we knew that to be true. So the other thing I was thinking about was his tear down this wall speech, which is prominently displayed in the Reagan movie
Jenny Beth Martin (47:10):
That
Hon Ken Cribb (47:10):
You were talking about. By the way, I think that movie gets Reagan, right? Finally, there's a movie that actually gets him right. But the Senate rather right after tear down this wall is I saw spray painted, this is Reagan. I saw spray painting on the wall. This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality. And once again, that's the moral imagination. Once again, you have to be able See, he spoke it. He was giving them an image of the wall coming down. He said it wouldn't fall to bombs or bulldozers. He said it would fall to ideas.
Jenny Beth Martin (47:52):
And it did.
Hon Ken Cribb (47:52):
And it did.
Jenny Beth Martin (47:54):
And he fought the Cold War. But we still are fighting the remnants of Marxism. And I'm not sure when we'll be done with that completely, but we are still fighting. I mean, we've seen that play out even in America in the last five years with the Covid lockdowns.
Hon Ken Cribb (48:12):
No question.
Jenny Beth Martin (48:13):
It isn't that they were, well, some of it really, DEI and critical social justice theory, those are rooted in Marxism to be sure.
Hon Ken Cribb (48:23):
Right. Why isn't inequality, it's equity, not equality. They don't want equality. They want to favor certain groups over other groups. Right.
Jenny Beth Martin (48:33):
And so we are constantly still having to go back and make sure people understand what freedom and liberty and capitalism are about. But I think we now, we're at a turning point in the country yet again. And that is a good thing, as long as we remember what our founding principles are.
Hon Ken Cribb (48:52):
Absolutely. I've always thought that it being hard to ruin America because of our constitutional system that we always had time to come back. But part of the attack over the last four years was on the Constitution itself. And I was really wondering what it would take to get us back. But now it's happening more quickly than I hoped with this last election and with the new administration,
Jenny Beth Martin (49:25):
Donald Trump is unlike any other figure we'll ever know in our lifetimes.
Hon Ken Cribb (49:31):
Correct.
Jenny Beth Martin (49:33):
And I think part of the reason for it is because he, like Reagan, they didn't become president as children. They didn't become politicians. They lived a rich, deep, meaningful, productive life before they ever made the sacrifice to run for office.
Hon Ken Cribb (49:52):
And they were older when they were elected. Yes. Reagan was the oldest president at the time. He was elected in those days, no longer, but in those days.
Jenny Beth Martin (50:01):
Right. And the gray hair comment that you said that Ed me said, I mean, not that Donald Trump actually has gray hair. We all have seen, it's not quite gray, but there's wisdom as you get older. And it's easy sometimes when you're young, when you're in your teenage years and your twenties and even your thirties, to discount that wisdom. But I think it's a wisdom that in both instances with Reagan and with Trump, that future generations will look backend and say that wisdom helped save America.
Hon Ken Cribb (50:35):
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jenny Beth Martin (50:38):
One last question for you. There are people who are going into the Trump administration right now. Some of them were in the first administration and some of them were not in it at all, and you were there for the entirety of Reagan's presidency. What would you tell someone who's in that position to hold onto while because they're in the middle of it and they're drinking from a fire hose and they's so much going on and they probably aren't taking the moment to savor it, but what are the most important lessons you would give them?
Hon Ken Cribb (51:13):
I'd give them sort of an ethical advice, but also a tactical advice. Let me start with ethical advice, ice. What I found is that if you're coming in there for the right reasons, you're not worried about how the job in government is going to help you in private life later. That is part of human nature, that kind of calculation. And that is not a good calculation. And what I've seen there, Jenny Beth, is that the people that come in and actually do their duty understand that only one person has been elected president and are honest about that and not playing false, playing out on both sides of one's mouth. They're the ones who actually prosper as opposed to the ones who are always maneuvering. People that are always maneuvering get found out and people quit working with them. So I would say be true to the ethical reason.
Hon Ken Cribb (52:16):
The first principles, reasons that you want to come into government and then the tactical, you're so right, is that the urgent overwhelms the important, there's been a study of the Meese Justice Department by a fellow named Steve Teller, I think is his last name. I couldn't have that last name off a syllable, but he called it transformative bureaucracy. I don't like the word bureaucracy, but what he meant by that is that you need to actually design structures that help you address the long run that will force you to address the long run. For example, we had something called the Judicial Strategy Group. And the Judicial Strategy Group determine how we would use the litigation authority for the entire government because Justice litigates for the whole government before the appellate courts and the Supreme Court to help do an audit on the Reagan agenda in all the other departments. In other words, that you're not just scribbling at your desk because of what's you've read in the Washington Post, but that instead you, you're working on the long run. It's not easy. So you have to actually invent little structures like the judicial strategy group in order to make that happen.
Jenny Beth Martin (53:52):
Okay. That's very helpful. Well, I think this has been very interesting. I hope people appreciate and what they've learned from you. And when we sat down, I didn't exactly know I was going to tie a lot of it to what we're seeing with Trump, but as you're talking, I'm just like, oh, and this, there are a lot of similarities.
Hon Ken Cribb (54:11):
Absolutely.
Jenny Beth Martin (54:12):
In the two presidencies.
Hon Ken Cribb (54:13):
Well, I'll give you a last similarity. They called Reagan the Great Communicator. It was true. I don't think that was the most important thing about him, but it was a decisively important thing about him. And one of the surprising insights that President Trump has come up with in both elections, well all three, but both terms, the one that's really got my interest in this cycle is how one of his chief criteria for high office and high cabinet positions is the ability to communicate. And it's already making a difference. I can promise you that was not a high priority in previous Republican administrations. It's almost like we went with the dullest people we could find,
Jenny Beth Martin (54:56):
Right?
Hon Ken Cribb (54:56):
That wasn't our purpose, but we were going for gravitas and that sort of thing. And Trump understands the importance of that communication. And already in the first month, you're seeing them all over the media doing. And what it does is instead of one big megaphone, you've got a big one and then a lot of medium sized ones. And I think it's really the echo effect is helping.
Jenny Beth Martin (55:21):
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Ken. I really appreciate you sitting down with me today.
Hon Ken Cribb (55:25):
Thank you. Jenny Beth. Enjoyed it.
Narrator (55:28):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Mohan and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (55:48):
If you like this episode, let me know by hitting the light button or leaving a comment or a five star review. And if you want to be the first to know, every time we drop a new episode, be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for whichever platform you're listening on. If you do these simple things, it will help the podcast grow, and I'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much.