This is John Batchelor, conversation with Professor Richard Epstein of the Civitas Institute,

about the intention of the Trump administration for a federal law to control their eligibility for voting in the states,

having to do with ID, picture ID, and deep documentation if that is also required.

Richard answers variously.

He's not prepared this. He's not prepared that way.

It's a mixed picture. It has been for at least 40-plus years when the Supreme Court

looked at similar cases in a previous court, a court with Justice David Souter on it and Justice

Stevens. Here's Richard to explain. The SAVE Act, it's called, the idea of federal controls

of state elections. More tonight.

Well, I know what Trump thinks, and I have some sympathy with it.

He believes in no uncertain terms that the irregularities in the 2020 election stole the thing from him,

and he believes that in the key stages like Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, that the state officials were Democratic.

And what they did is they pushed aside the Republican electors or supervisors and ran the thing in the way they did.

So if you try to shake him from that particular belief, it is next to impossible.

Richard, do I say correctly that that is fiction?

No, I think it's much more complicated than that.

So, for example, in some cases, it's surely not fiction.

So when you have a statute in Pennsylvania, which says late votes cannot be counted,

and then somebody says there's a gooey equal protection argument,

which means that the statute can be overruled by the judges.

It's much more complicated because it was clear, in my mind,

that the judges in that case abused the authority of the legislature,

...