On Thursday April 8^th, Phoenix.org was able to spend a half-hour conducting an exclusive interview with J.D. Hayworth, a local talk show radio host who is challenging longstanding incumbent Senator and two time presidential hopeful, John McCain, for Senator McCain’s position in the United States Senate. During this valuable interview we were able to ask Mr. Hayworth strait forward questions regarding our current economy, the discrepancies in federal salaries vs. private salaries, federal neglect of the 10th amendment and even local Phoenix hot spots that he prefers.

The transcript of the interview is below. Since the interview was conducted orally what you are reading is a transcribed version. Any error or omission in the grammar or structure of the transcript is the fault of Phoenix.org.

Phoenix.org has requested an interview from Senator John McCain’s campaign but as of yet the campaign has not responded.

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Part 1 of Phoenix.org’s interview with J.D. Hayworth

Troy Hallewell/Phoenix.org: Mr. Hayworth, the 10th amendment of the US Constitution states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Many people claim that our federal government has ignored this declaration and has taken rights away from the respective states and attempted to conglomerate as much power as they can in the federal government. Do you agree or disagree with this statement and if you agree that states rights are being taken away what is an example that you believe illustrates the problem?

J.D. Hayworth: Well yes, I do agree with it and I think that one of the ways in which Washington has done that is with, for lack of a better term, the “power of the purse”. For example, to enforce what Washington wants to see nationwide, let’s say with reference to the age of legal majority or a legal drinking age, Back when that was disputed in the last couple of decades Washington said to the states, either you raise your drinking age to 21 or we, Washington, will withhold federal highway funds. So in that circumstance Washington was inflicting on the states Washington’s will.

It’s done in various ways through what are called “unfunded mandates” but that is a fairly clear example when Washington attempts to hold the states economically hostage to invoke Washington’s will and you are quite right, that has existed. One of the reasons ironically has to do with the way that we select senators because as we know with our study of the constitution, the 17^th amendment to the constitution changed the way in which we elect senators. We now elect senators by popular vote. Earlier in our history senators were elected by the respective state legislators in their respective state legislatures and many constitutional scholars and historians believed that that helped ensure that the 10^th amendment remained alive and well. So it is somewhat ironic that we open our conversation with that but that is one of the elements of history that led to the diminution of the 10^th amendment.

Troy Hallewell/Phoenix.org: Are you saying that at that point we began a transformation from a republic to a democracy?

J.D. Hayworth: Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But I do believe in the fullness of time if you take a look that the two amendments passed very early in the 20^th century, at the dawn of the so-called progressive era, that very much changed the nature of our constitutional republic. The first was ratification of the 16^th amendment which led to the direct taxation of personal income and the second was the 17^th amendment which we just discussed. There are many articles about it. Regarding the 16^th amendment Raymond J. Keating wrote for the Foundation on Economic Freedom an article titled “Original Intent & the Income Tax” showing just how inflated the tax rates have become and quite frankly the real spending of the federal government. And then of course we just talked about the 17^th amendment, so yes, it profoundly changed the nature of our republic, I don’t believe it completely eliminated it but I do believe it brought some real change to it.

Troy Hallewell/Phoenix.org: If elected as a United States Senator what would be your top three priorities that you would work to accomplish? Do you believe that you will be able to accomplish these things?

J.D. Hayworth: The top three things that I would like to accomplish go back to what we have just been talking about which is the preservation of a constitutional republic. The first thing that I would do is reintroduce a bill that I introduced in the house called the “Congressional Responsibility Act”. This is an effort to regain the original intent, if you will, of our founders. Again, back to the dawn of the progressive era, I believe that the 20^th century will be remembered historically for the rise of the de-facto 4^th branch of government, the rise of the bureaucratic regulatory state.

Originally, for some laudable purposes, a decision was made to set up agencies to monitor the food supply and ensure public health and all the good stuff. Well, like any good idea the idea was taken and changed somewhat. Fast forward to the 20^th century and you see congress seeding its legislative authority, its lawmaking authority, from article 1 section 1 of the US Constitution, which reads “all legislative power shall be vested in the congress of the United States” congress set up within the executive branch regulatory agencies and funds them, and there you have regulatory lawyers creating regulation and as you know those regulations carry punitive consequences if you fail to adhere to them.

Troy Hallewell/Phoenix.org: Absolutely

J.D. Hayworth: Those are laws. What I advocate is that we can let those regulators continue to promulgate regulations, but here’s the thing that would make it different, a way to restore the clear intent, instead of having a situation where regulators promulgate the regulation and then have a period of public comment and then print them in the federal register where they carry the weight of law, instead under the “Congressional Responsibility Act” every one of the proposed regulations would be submitted to the House or the Senate for an up or down vote. So that way original intent would be restored because you would have constitutional officer acting on what would in essence be legislation and it would hold us accountable. That would be the first thing that I would do.

The second thing I would do is regarding the constitutionality of legislation. It is the requirement that anytime a bill is brought up federally, that the authors of that bill show it’s constitutional citation. In other words, that the authors of the bill show where in the constitution the legislature of the house and the senate have the authority to act on this manner in the first place.

Troy Hallewell/Phoenix.org: Well, you would probably be seeing a lot of cites strait from the commerce clause, knowing how abused that clause has become.

JD Hayworth: That is what they try to do, the commerce clause has become so perverted and I think the up side of the “Constitutional Citation Act” would be that it would be a very teachable moment to see just how maligned and how misused the commerce clause has become. So I think it would be important in that way. So that would be the second piece of legislation, what I call the “Constitutional Citation Act”.

The third priority of mine would be mindful of article 4 section 4, “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government and shall protect each against invasion”. In response to this I would reintroduce my “enforcement first act” to deal with the border. The enforcement first act is what it says, you enforce the laws and in that way you strengthen border security because once you start enforcing the laws very interesting things happened, in that people start to obey the laws.

There is more to the “Enforcement First Act” that I wrote about in my book, “Whatever it Takes”. It involves the utilization of our military on the border and I regret that but the situation has grown so urgent that sadly we have to do that now, especially in the wake of Robert Krentz’s murder a couple of Saturdays ago on the border. As you may know, New York City has at least twice as many policemen as we have border patrol officers. So something is wrong and we have to enforce the border.

So those would be the first three pieces of legislation that I would want to introduce. But what I would like to do in addition to these things is something that we have been doing in the campaign so far. That is to continue to go around the state for a regular series of town hall meetings and to make sure that I am accessible as a United States senator because I think it is very important that the next senator be a senator “for” Arizona, not just “from” Arizona. So that would be something, not legislatively but instead attitudinally that I would bring to the office. I heard from a woman in Sierra Vista recently that asked me a question that was strait and to the point. She asked me “Are we only going to see you once every six years” I said “No M’am, I’m gonna be back regularly”.

This also leads me to another point and I don’t know if it was going to come up in your questions but if not I would like to mention that after a lot of talking with my family and a lot of listening to Arizonans, I have made up my mind that it is important that I voluntarily limit my terms, if the voters will have me, to two consecutive terms and then at the end of 12 years it will be time for me to step aside and then another citizen can serve in the Senate.

Part 2 of this interview can be found at :

http://phoenix.org/blog/phoenix-org-exclusive-interview-with-j-d-hayworth-2-of-2/

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