The New Civil Liberties Movement

Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly recently said on CNBC that he has always opposed vaccine mandates like the one recently announced by OSHA under President Biden's executive order, yet he has reluctantly chosen to enforce it as a matter of legal compliance. Even apart from the heavy fines threatened by the order, airlines like Southwest receive federal contracts from the government, which they might lose if they fail to follow the legally dubious order.Philip Hamburger first joined my show in 2014, warning of the threat of the administrative state, which has only grown since he released his prescient book – Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Now, he has followed up with the sequel: Purchasing Submission: Conditions, Power, and Freedom, which examines a frequent tool used by the "fourth branch of government" to further circumvent the Constitution. Hamburger explains that by imposing conditions on the recipients of government largesse, the administrative state has cleverly been able to evade the usual constitutional considerations.I was recently joined by Hamburger's colleague at the National Civil Liberties Alliance – Jenin Younes – who has been fighting against unconstitutional vaccine mandates. However, Hamburger joined me to step back from the specifics of any single instance of administrative overreach and see the bigger picture. Tune in to learn about the patterns and mechanics of how the government gets away with its new assaults on civil liberties by essentially purchasing our constitutional rights through various conditions on its special favors.