Welcome to today's podcast, sponsored by Hillsdale College. All things Hillsdale at Hillsdale.edu. I encourage you to take advantage of the many free online courses there. And, of course, I'll listen to the Hillsdale Dialogues, all of them at Hugh for Hillsdale.com or just Google Apple, iTunes, and Hillsdale. All right, and Grace, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. Welcome to the Wednesday edition of the Hugh Hewitt show. There's a lot to cover today, but I'm very, very grateful that a majority leader of the United States Senate, John Thune, has joined me this morning. Senator, welcome back. Good to have you. I believe it is the case that when you sign up to be majority leader, there's a clause in your contract that says you're obliged to defend the filibuster, even when people who want you to defend the filibuster deny

so on camera. Isn't that not in the small print? Yeah, I think you are correct, there you. This is a

conversation, as you know, has gone on for many years, many decades, and through

multiple administrations and congresses, and it's just a, you know, I mean, again, the founders,

when they designed the country, one of the ways they divided power was they took the Article

one branch to the government and made it a bicameral process in which one of the institutions,

United States Senate, was non-majoritarian.

They wanted a counter-majoritarian institution.

The Senate represents that.

It's hard sometimes.

I know people, it's hard to explain and not something that we all learn in physics growing up,

but there's a reason why the Senate is the way that it is,

is designed to slow things down, make it more deliberative, and to give the minority in the country of voicing our government.

Now, Leader Thune, last week, 10 days ago, President Trump was my guest, and normally I just asked the president questions,

and he's the best interview in America. No offense,. But he is. He just is. But in the middle of that, he turned around and said, well, you don't support the filibuster, do you? You want to say, yeah, yes, I do, Mr. President. He did not ask me to explain that I think it's the first line of defense to the Supreme Court being attacked and that it's therefore

important to keep it where it is. How do you defend, and by the way, my listeners hate the

filibuster and they get on me whenever I defend it. How do you tell people? How do you explain it to

them? Well, I mean, I think that historically, and you know this better this better than anybody, you know, if you're a conservative and you want to protect conservative policies, priorities, principles, you know, the Democrats have been the majority in the Senate more years than not, and their agenda is a aggressive, expansive agenda because they're all about growing government.

And conservatives through the years have been able to use the filibuster to protect against a lot of crazy ideas that Democrats have, like expanding the Supreme Court.

And, you know, adding D.C. and Puerto Rico estates and federalizing our elections and abortion on demand and, you know, redistribution of wealth in the kind.

I mean, there's a whole bunch of just, you know, sort of crazy left ideas that they would turn to, were it not for the fact that Republicans were able to, because of the legislative filibuster, prevent that

from happening. So it's something that's protected, conservative is a lot more than it has liberals,

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