On each of our panelists and i will get started. I will start with joe sexton on the very end. Atis a Senior Editor republican new york city. Its independent nonprofit newsroom that investigates journalism in the public interest. The organization has 13 pulitzer prizes. Atbefore that, he worked the new york times. Won two pulitzer prizes. Papers editor that oversaw snowfall and multimedia creation that earned john branch the pulitzer prize. Editor on an unbelievable story of rape,hich won the 2016 pulitzer reported to be a schedule Television Series on netflix. As a reporter, joe covered politics, crime, and the haul of theer countrys legislation. Joe has done in all as an investigative reporter. Benson, who is right next to me here, is the Political Editor of townhall. Com. Ands a Fox News Contributor coauthor of end of discussion , published by random house in 2015. He is a familiar voice on radio. He regularly guest host. Having anchored the guy benson show from february 2008 until september 2015, he was named one of the top 30 under 30 conservatives in america by red alert politics. Magazine rms Forbes Magazine named him into the 30 under 30 policy roster. We are very lucky to have guy here. We have vicki huddleston, who i remember it was last year that vicki was also here. We are very lucky. She has been an ambassador throughout africa. She let the American Diplomatic Missions in mali, madagascar, ethiopia, and cuba. She was a Senior Advisor to the secretary of defense in the u. S. Military command for africa. She managed the u. S. Agency for International Development project in haiti. She was the Deputy Assistant of state for africa. She was acting ambassador to ethiopia, ambassador to molly and madagascar. She managed american policy toward cuba as the coordinator of Cuban Affairs in washington , d. C. She became a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute where she coled the project on u. S. Cuba relations. Writing arently memoir on cuba. Obviously, very lucky to have the ambassador here. Finally, steven hayward. He is currently senior resident scholar at the university of calgary and a visiting lecturer at a law school. He was previously the Ronald Reagan distinguished professor at pepperdine. He wrote to wonderful book on Ronald Reagan. He was also the inaugural visiting scholar at the university of colorado boulder. Forhen writes frequently the new york times, washington post, national review, and other publications. He is the author of six books, including a twovolume chronicle on reagan that i already mentioned. He writes a periodic online column performs. For forms. Rights for one of the nations most political red websites. Lets give a round of applause to our four fantastic panelists. [applause] the way we usually do this. Ere is explain the format each panel member will have 10 to 15 minutes to make a statement about the topic. After the statements, the panelists will respond to. Uestions the panelists have 10 to 15 minutes. The panelists are done, we will line the audience up and you can ask questions for the remaining portion of the panel. I think we are going to start we are going to start with joseph sexton. Joseph that is your first bit of bad luck. Andnt have a lot to say what little i do is probably profaned. You are fairly warned anyway. Im actually spectacularly unprepared. I need to get out of the way for the much more esteemed columnist panelists. Or thing i do do well is reasonably well is play the role of provocateur. I thought i would come at it this way. Im not going to talk at all about the two Political Parties becausedea of another america seems to face a much more essential civic question about its political life. Cant answer better than we have today, it makes a discussion of Political Parties 1, 2, 300, not for me terribly relevant. That is that folks in america dont vote. , then thet vote question of whether the twoparty system has come to an end feels less significant, almost irrelevant. I could go through some of the numbers, but you probably know them. You have probably heard them in your own civics classes or politics classes. Developed top 35 countries in the world with reasonably robust democracies, we come in 31st in terms of the percentage of our eligible voters who actually go and vote. 31st. Sad,. We spend a lot of time most recently in the last fevered 18 andhs talking about america what is america and what do we want. Gentleman weed the have elected. We have the government we voted for. But a tremendous amount of the country said it out. How is that possible . How is that defensible . I put it out there in part because i think if you kids are thinking about the big question of whether we can create another Political Party or how that , what little i know about politics suggests that that is a daunting sort of notion. The amount of money involved in politics is so extraordinary in the interests are so entrenched that you might think, wow, creating another Political Party thats fanciful, thats crazy. I think you might better grasp a more concrete idea liked what can we actually do to improve things . To make we actually do the notion of another Political Party or multiple new Political Parties practical . That is to get people to vote. Get yourself register to vote. Leaving aside partisanship, republican, democratic, whatever , help other people registered to vote and work them to actually get to exercise that right. That to me feels like something kids could do energetic, kids could see done and you could feel like you have a real impact. Me and imarkable to , but if i sound down double down on my dispirited any, if there are efforts that limit the peoples ability to further. People have selflimited and cells from voting either out of a lack of interest or a lack of knowledge or the inability to get to the polls, whatever accounts to our miserable record in voter participation. Now theres actually interest in eliminating that further. Manifestctually see it in a variety of forms in a number of different states. Facts are in the dispute. There is a ruling just this week in texas about the texas voter id law. Texas had several years ago adopted what many regarded as a very restrictive voter id law that you would have to produce if you intended to vote a form of identification that fell to certain categories. Case had people file suit and so this would discriminate against people of color and low income people in parts of the state. A federal judge heard the case. The u. S. Department of justice joined the plaintiffs. A federal judge held that that law was intentionally discriminatory and that its impact was discriminatory. On, went to at court of appeals. The court of appeals upheld part of that ruling and sent the rest of the case back to the District Court judge to live to litigate further on the question of intentionality. She ruled this week that indeed that is for finding that this law was intentionally conceived to limit peoples ability to vote. Interestingly the department of justice, which had spent years working on behalf of the plaintiffs changed sides. They decided it was actually going to sit that litigation out due to the change in administration. We dont need to make this partisan question. We dont need to make necessarily bogeymen out of republicans or democrats, but in a country with a demonstrated inability to get respectable numbers of people to exercise one of the fundamental rights are country was created to both conceive and the stone us bestow on us that there any efforts to further limit how many people get to vote seems quite frankly obscene to me. That the twoparty system is dead, maybe there will be third parties, maybe there will be additional parties, again put before you in an act of intentional provocation, and without having dropped an f bomb, it doesnt much matter if people dont vote. You guys can affect that. Dont let yourself become one of the people empowered and authorized to vote who chooses not to. I know you are all sitting there saying, thats let me. Not me. I will vote. How hard is that . You will be shocked in a couple of years when you are of voting. Ge how many of you dont you can control that. You cant necessarily create a new party, although god bless you for trying if you do. But you can certainly control that. Dont give it away. Thanks. [applause] thank you, joe. Guy thanks for having me. Im going to maybe be a little bit more on topic. Although i think that was correct. Everyone should vote. Get involved and the bottom line of what joe said, i heartily endorse. Some of the points that he made we will maybe dispute only talk among ourselves. Is the party over . Is that how are the two major Political Parties waning or is that a sort of fever dream or hope or aspiration . I would start with at least one anecdotal piece of evidence that maybe at least the party elites and the Party Establishments are losing some of their grip on how their own parties are run. I think you look back to the last election on both sides of sle. Ai if you talk to people who run the Republican Party before the process started, they would taken their money and said no chance that someone like donald trump would not have done well and to win the nomination was totally inconceivable and crazy. That turned out to be fake news as he might call it. 41 contests won in the republican primary. Won 45 of the popular vote and the repulsion primary. If youre one of the washington elite and you are watching this unfold, youre certain that it must be finally over for him. An early one being where he took the shot at john mccain and said i preferred shoulder soldiers that are not capture. D. Then all the little nicknames like are we in kindergarten . Like little marker, so short, sweats a lot. Really . This is a president ial campaign . Lying ted. Many people said his father killed kennedy, not my words. Thats a real thing that happened by the way. He did say that. B so low energy, so sad, believe me, believe me. Theres no way he is going to get to a general election. If he gets to it, what will he come up with . Crooked hillary. So crooked. [laughter] [applause] and now hes president. Thats a real thing happening in real life. If the party elite had any say over it and they tried to, then it wouldnt have happened. Jeb bush have 100 million in the bank and hugh won for delegates. Spent almost nothing and got a lot of free press and he won. On the democratic side, kind of the same deal in a different way. You had Hillary Clinton, who was sort of the heir apparent. She and the cabal at the top of her party really felt like she was entitled to this, like she had a great sense of entitlement and superiority, almost as if she went to Fairview High School or something. [laughter] thats a joke. Thisse anyone is recording , im sure there is wonderful people over there. She is like this is mine, everyone get out of the way. Who are these people . The former governor of maryland, who cares about him . ,hen there is this frumpy thick accent and old guy from vermont, who is like note, lets do this. There was a real sense of anger. I have a lot of friends who were democratic establishment people who were very upset with Bernie Sanders for having the temerity to challenge Hillary Clinton and do it pretty seriously. Wouldnt you know it . He won 13 million votes. He won 23 contests. He won 43 of the popular vote in the democratic nominating process. He did not win, but if the people who control the Democratic Party had their way, they would have cleared the field completely for hillary. It wouldve been a complete joke of a primary. There would have been no resistance. She would be gearing up for her general election basically from word one. Instead she ended up having quite a fight on her hand. Those are pieces of evidence that maybe the bosses are not quite in control as much as they used to be. That being said, i think its important to sort of have a reality check. The party is not over. The two major parties are the only show in town for the most part still and i will probably be the case for quite some time. Heres the stark reality. , thevember 8 of last Year American people voted and we all do what happened. One thing when you look at the exit polling data, which is a vast amount of information collected all across the country , it is sort of shocking. You had Hillary Clinton and donald trump two of the least popular people ever to seek the presidency running against each other. They both had majority disapproval among the electorate. Hilly clinton 55 disapproval and donald trump had 60 disapproval. That is the guy who won. She is the woman who won the popular vote. These incredibly unpopular figures, they needed each other in some way. To out awfuling each other, which they did consistently throughout the process. It was sort of impressive to watch and stomach churning. Despite the fact that the American People really solidly have negative views of both of these human beings, they combined to win 94 of the popular vote because they were at the head of the two major parties. One of them was going to win and those are your options. That is reality. The other thing i would point of politicalwer parties and increasing polarization of the parties where they are walking much more ideologically in lockstep than they used to, there used to be more cross politician pollination and we are coalitions of moderates and conservative and cry at liberal republicans and it was less predictable on how someone would vote based solely on their party affiliation. That is not really true anymore. If you look a just the huge fight that they had in washington over the Supreme Court nomination of neil gorsuch, a boulder native actually, you look at his final vote tally. He got all the republicans to vote for him and only three democrats, which is historically extraordinaire. Their attempted to filibuster. They attempted to filibuster. Get into allppy to those exciting details in the q a if you like to hear much more about that. I know all of it because its part of my job. Going back not that long ago, you had Antonin Scalia of, whose ando seat was open gorsuch is now filling, very conservative was unanimously confirmed in the senate. Restated Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed 96 to three. Become hards have pitch and zerosum. Some people say if only we had a system like another country, like a parliament in Great Britain or canada or wherever. In order to adopt a completely different electoral process, that would take massive constitutional changes. I dont think its realistic. One thing that i do think we ought to at least take a look at is the system of voting that they have in australia. I have a cousin who works in conservative politics in australia and i visited him a couple years ago. They were in the middle of an election campaign. If you think we have tough ads here, attack ads, some of those Australian Attack ads were brutal. I was like, oh man. Anyway, the way that they do it is they have what is called a ranked voting could the more. The more that i thought about it, the more i liked it. The way that it would work is or at least the way it works here is that lets say you have four or five people running for any given office. Lets say its president. And the person that you really like the most, lets say you are a liberal. Maybe we have a few of those in the repair. In the room here. Really deep down youre not a big fan of Hillary Clinton at all and you wish that ernie had won the thing. Jill stein maybe shes nuts, but shes closer to me than hillary. I really wish that i could but for jill stein. But if i felt for her, im sort of throwing away my vote. May be helping donald trump in some sort of perverse way because you are taking the vote away from hillary. Lets say you want to go for gary johnson, because your Biggest Issue is limiting government or lowering taxes. Or pot. Guy thats one of his issues. Ultimately you dont want hillary to win, but maybe you suck it up and vote for donald trump because you do not want to deny him a potential vote headtohead against hillary. People make these cancellations collations all the time and they pick the lesser of two evils in their mind. I think in 2016, people really thought that they really were two evils, literally. What they do in australia is they have all four names, you rank them by preference. So you could say, alright, jill stein one, hillary, to, johnson hillary 2, johnson 3, donald trump 4. As an example. All the votes get put into the pot. They tabulate them and if nobody has a majority of first place votes, they take the lastplace person out of the running and it is down to three people and is a recount again. And if there is still no one with the top vote majority, they eliminate the next person until they finally have one person left with all of the rankings evened out who has the majority. That way, you can vote in good conscience for the person who represents you best, without the fear that you would end up helping the person that you want the least to win. You can vote for gary johnson or evan mcmullen, or whoever, and then if you are a conservative, you could have trump second and hillary last, without the risk of helping, in this weird system that we have, Hillary Clinton. I think that would be a worthwhile pursuit for the United States to think about. Maybe states can adopt it. Local municipalities can adopt it, and it would give people the opportunity to really vote their conscience and then sort of have a backup plan that does not allow the greate