The man is enjoying his life. Lets not wreck it. Laugh so. Last question. Thank you for your time tonight. My question is regarding an article that Daniel Hemminger wrote for the journal. Maybe a month ago and he basically said that the strategy that republican should employ is to not attack obamacare and it would eventually fall under its own weight. This seems more realistic today than it did then and i was curious what you thought about that and personally i am skeptical because ive never seen entitlement taken away. He made that argument so i dont know if you are familiar with him but i thought you might have an opinion. Actually i concur with him. Entitlement to be taken away has to be instituted and it has to have some success in being implanted. This could be a very rocky entrance and a bombmaking or may not survive. Its not definitive and its more likely than not that it will collapse of its own weight. That has been what i was advocating during the shutdown. I thought tactically it was a mistake. There was no reason to call for the overthrow of obamacare by legislation when there is not a chance in hell that you could do that under our system. You really cant undo a law from one house of congress. There is no way it was going to be undone and we were heading into october the first when the shutdown began. It was also the day when obamacare this brandnew web site was going to revolutionize their health care signed up exactly six people. I mean, that isnt even enough to field a baseball team. There would be no outfield. [laughter] so i dont think that bodes well. Theres an old adage that i think i mentioned earlier when the other guys committing suicide, get out of the room. Hand him a pistol and maybe make it a little easier and cleaner for the csi people coming in later. But there was no reason to give it away and what republicans ought to do right now they sincerely believe as i do that obamacare is going to hurt the country it is not the way to go about attacking very specific and important problems and that is the uninsured which i think one could attack very narrowly in a way that wouldnt redo the entire 16 that the u. S. Economy. That actually is the essence of liberal overreach. Its whats wrong emanuel said. To waste when he basically said we are going to use this opportunity when we have control of the congress to instituted liberal nationalizing health care. There was no reason to reshape and remake one part of the economy as a way to attack the problem of the uninsured. I think this will in the end, it is very likely to collapse in and of its own weight in the gop has to be ready and conservatives have to be ready to address the moral issue. Its a serious one of the uninsured and we want to make sure all americans have access but there are ways to do it. There are conservative ways to do it, honest ways to do it in which you arent hiding the cost and pretending and lying about what the effects are going to be if your policy. I think that would be the essence of a conservative answer. I would say in the end that is going to be the outcome. Very likely to be the outcome and we have to be prepared to watch a dissolved and have them alternative and i think that will be relatively if we can do that in 2016. [applause] i know you have to catch a plane that i didnt want to leave without asking you a question about the past time that you love which is chess. Does chess fit into the kind of beautiful and the soft or does it fit into the lyrical . Its beautiful and the soft and elegant that i know a lot of people consider eccentric. I once drove from washington to new york to watch a chess game. Actually i did that twice. And people just shake their heads when they hear that. And i do have a comment on a pariah chess club where he described the group of us to play on monday nights at my house. Speed chess where you race against the clock. Its great fun. We are called a pariah chess club tickets at the time one of the players was Charles Murray who was not able to safely appear on campuses. The fourth of the founders was a perfectly respectable music critic for the Washington Post that he was grandfathered as the pariah because he associated with the three of us. So that was and chess is a very elegant game and there is a lot of music which i try to describe in the pros as a lot of fun but i have to admit that i gave it up a couple of years ago. I gave it up cold turkey. I was asked why and i said because its an addiction. Its a poison. You find yourself playing speed chess on the internet at 2 00 in the morning and you realize you are the equivalent of an alcoholic alone in a motel room drinking aqua velvet. [laughter] so im on the wagon or off the wagon. Ive never been able to figure out which is which but im in remission and enjoying it. [applause] thank you Charles Krauthammer for giving us a memorable evening and i think we should leave on that wonderful phrase that you used in your talk, things elegant and beautiful, hard and demanding is what life is all about. Its been a memorable evening i think for all of us and thank you president bush for being here and happy birthday mrs. Bush and thank you again Charles Krauthammer. [applause] thank you very much. Up next on booktv after words with guest host debbie hines former prosecutor and creator of illegals. Blog. This week abbe smith and angela hines contributing authors to how can you represent those people . The director and supervisor of georgetown law schools criminal defense and prisoner advocacy clinic discussed Defense Attorneys answers to the professional question they are asked most often, how they are able to do and those crimes. The program is about an hour. Host i am so glad to be able to interview you and your book, how can you represent those people . As i was telling you before, for me it was a very interesting and thought provoking book and i dont say that lightly because if it werent i wouldnt say otherwise but it was definitely brought out a lot of emotions from me, anger, sadness, laughter and humor. It takes basically ran the whole gamut so white you start happy by telling us how did you come up with the idea for the book . Guest first of all im really proud of it so im delighted that the response because there is nothing really like it out there. 15 thoughtful essays that answer the question that defense lawyers referred to alternately as either the Cocktail Party questions and that is where tens of the astra just plain the question. To have assembled such a diverse crowd was the great tang that half women a quarter africanamerican men ranging in age from 28 to 85. So the idea and that was part of the idea tooth has different voices and not the usual suspects talking about criminal law. Kind of evolved. My coeditor Monroe Freedman and i coauthored a book which is a Traditional Law school treatise on legal ethics. That was a really interesting project but it wasnt nearly as fun as this was or is timeless and its timeliness and said theres always a big case that raises that question. I think the two of us were talking about the work that we both do. We are both academics. I still consider myself to be a criminal defense lawyer just fancier gigs than when i was a public defender in Monroe Freedman had his own time where he was involved actively in criminal practice. We are both members of an Organization Called the american border of criminal lawyers so we were kind of aware that there was a need for a book like this and there is a market for it and it would he so fun to put people together to write thoughtfully and personally. I think one of the great things about the look is it has a personal voice to it. Host most of the stories and that is what makes it so interesting. They are from the heart in the stories told about the stories that come to mind from the various authors. I know there are 15 different authors that tell us about some of the people who wrote for the book. Guest her essay is one of my favorites because she talks about and i will give her a chance to talk about it she talks about the influence that her grandparents were civil rights activist hat on her career path. Some of the others include Barbara Babcock who i think of as the dean of criminal defenders certainly of the literature. She wrote something a lot of us think of as a kind of classic piece on criminal defense called defending the guilty. Its more than 30 years old now and she writes a new interesting kind of a dated essay. One of my favorite lines from her is she gets the question how can we represent those people from people like her hairdresser and for recently her oncologist. I thought that was a great line. Michael is another hero who does this work. He has represented any number of highprofile controversial defendants who has his own typically a signature. He is kind of a renaissance man and he writes about his representation with the oklahoma bombing case. Joe writes about his representation of the guantanamo detainees and authors with a brilliant essay discussion of criminal defense since September September 11 and what their policies were before and after that pivotal event. Meghan shapiro and William Montrose are the only coauthors and a write about people on death row. I think its a particularly moving very strong essay about something that most people dont realize. The clients and the clients families and the lawyers themselves. Youve really have to kind of take a part of life and put it back together to understand how a person is born in this world to do something so horrible that it seems to prompt the worst punishment of all, death by execution. Piper carrington who teaches at ole miss writes for the District Of Columbia and one of the funnier essays. He tells about his representation of the woman who he tried to send mail to take a plea and thought it was sheer craziness to go to trial in this case. She was going to get so much time and contrary to visit vice a jury finds her not guilty and its a wonderful story that i dont want to give away the punchline to. Are there others that come to mind . He writes about his experience representing people accused of crime in the role his jewish faith plays. David singleton a former public defender in new york and washington d. C. Now writes a criminal Justice Policy oriented litigation called the ohio justice and policy center and he writes wonderful essay about his efforts up sex offenders a phrase he doesnt especially like for people convicted of those kinds of defenses. He took on the state of ohios sex offender registration laws. Renting a fledgling donation funded organization to take on the powers that be and makes a strong case about how the American Public and elected officials certain kinds of crimes and when a bad crime happens its very distorting and we do all kinds of misguided things. One of the clothes he makes in the essays are policies and practices with regard to people convicted of sexual offenses makes them more dangerous. We isolate them and we marginalize them. We dont let them reintegrate into their families or communities so they become more dangerous and i think thats a smart thing to share. He has a personal voice about how he represents people who do hideous things. Host that is one of the things i wanted to explain other than it was just different age groups and races because just the compilation of people you got, it was so interesting to read their different perspectives because they really in my point of view they really werent doing the same type of representation. They were doing all types of representations but still and we will talk about some of the issues and the problems and the flaws with the system. Abbe i dont want you to do all the talking. Why do you tell us about your background and how you came to represent the clients he represents . Guest represents . Guest first of all im so pleased that abbe included me in the book. I came to this for as i was inspired by my grandfathers legacy. My grandfather was a civil rights advocate and he was he came of age in the 60s in mississippi and he was part of the naacp and the voters league. He and his family were targeted. This was before i was born. That inspired me and i went off to college and then to law school. I wanted to be a civil rights attorney. As i started to look into what kind of law i wanted to practice is spent some time in mississippi working on a classaction case on behalf of the death row inmates in mississippi and that was my first real exposure to the criminal Justice System. Later i spent a summer working at the San Francisco public defender and i saw a lot of parallels. The state is 50 africanamerican but San Francisco is less than 5 of the population yet all of our clients or a big majority of our clients were black and it ran that gambit unlike you representing people in mississippi charged with serious offenses. In San Francisco i was working on behalf of clients at every stage of misdemeanors and felonies so when i saw that i was really inspired to do this kind of work. I also spent time in the clinic when i was in law school, the juvenile defender clinic and saw that every single one of our clients was africanamerican and some of them with petty offenses as you can imagine. I tell a story about a kid who kicked a soccer ball at a Police Officer and was charged with assaulting a Police Officer and snowballs being thrown with kids being charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. Those sorts of things stuck out with me. Kids gogo to schooling get in a fight at school and had the police called. That never happened at the prep school that i went to on scholarship. The police would never be called so seeing the way our criminal Justice System unfairly targets people of color and poor people is what inspired me to do this work. Host there are several takeaways i got from i think it is your chapter that the mess age ended up you and did a ding a civil rights attorney. One of the greatest civil Rights Problem we have is the mass incarceration of lacks in i was struck by one of the stories in the book about a woman who was charged with prostitution for giving a to an undercover Police Officer. Obviously she was hungry and those are people if you are on probation there are those kinds of problems. In terms of the mass incarceration issue and by way of background for people that are listening i was also struck because i have heard it worded different ways. I was struck at the fact that there are more black men particularly in jail and the criminal Justice System either waiting for trial have had a trial or that is staggering because that puts it into perspective of what we are we are talking about with mass incarceration. I talked to people and in some of the people that i talk to that are more conservative, they say black people commit more crimes. I just want to have you guys speak to the problem of mass incarceration and how do we get to it. How did we get there and what are some of the policy issues we can deal with to work towards a more just system . Guest is certainly horrifying the statistics. One in three africanamerican babies born today are destined for jail if our policies of mass incarceration continue. Its just certainly a civil rights issue of our time and a human rights issue of our time. And look at the conditions of our jails in this country are like. I think when you hear people say africanamericans are more likely to commit crimes, it really is unfair. There are neighborhoods are unfairly targeted. If you take drug use for example, africanamericans are actually less like he to use and abuse illegal substances but the chances of them going to prison and jail for committing those offenses is so disproportionate. And so when you look at these numbers there really is something that i hope these people step back and look at. Host i know eric holder is trying to at least do something with regard to lessening sentences for the nonviolent cases but beyond that and i dont know if this is your area but beyond that are there things you can do that you guys are representing people on a daytoday basis in the past but that is only assisting the system. Thats not doing anything to change the system. Guest thats a fair question and sometimes we are asked, are you really affecting social change or social justice by representing individual criminal defendants, poor people accused of a crime . I actually think and i share vidas view that criminal defense and social work is criminal justice work in human rights work. I think its a social justice work of our time because in that individual representation you are making a difference in an individual life and i think you are casting some light on a really terrible problem. We know, those of us in the trenches every day, something has to give. At a certain point. I would like to be optimistic about eric holder. I was glad that he spoke out. He probably should have spoken up sooner. I wish he would do more and i hope u. S. Attorneys around the country are doing what eric holder suggests they do it not that the quantity of drugs in the criminal charging documents and there is some flexibility in sentencing because its so harsh in the federal system especially but also in the states. I also think we are misguided and this is a more controversial thing to say because we often your people talking about releasing people from prison for committing nonviolent offenses. The truth is we keep people in for way too long for all kinds of offenses even violent offenses. People commit crimes for a host of reasons. Some art deep systemic social reasons but others are in a bad moment in a moment of rage out of impulse. There is a reason that crime seems to be disproportionately young people between the ages of 18 to 25 because studies show that our brains are not fully formed yet, that the frontal part of the brain is still growing. Thats the part that helps us to control our impulses but a lot of people do a foolish thing in a moment of loss of control and more people are dying in prisons. They are not posing a risk or danger to other people at a certain point. We spend gobs of money which raises a moral reason to let people out but we are outliers is a western democracy. There is no other country that resembles our country. They lock people up for as lon