The Heritage Foundation is a Washington think tank that appears in four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, chiefly through guests who have worked for it or alongside it. The excerpts never describe its founding, its budget, its leadership or its full policy program; they show it as one participant in coalitions and as an affiliation carried by individual guests.
Criminal justice reform
Brian Walsh, who says he used to work at the Heritage Foundation, describes it as one of several organizations that spent roughly a dozen years working on Capitol Hill to get Congress to legislate in a more principled and circumspect manner when creating new criminal laws “You’re Under Arrest!”: Overcriminalization with Brian Walsh (2015). He groups it with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and, elsewhere in the same episode, with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he says he then worked. The positive development he cites is a rules change adopted by the new House of Representatives, proposed about eight years earlier, making it more likely that the House Judiciary Committee would oversee all new criminalization; previously, he says, new and modified criminal laws floated through every committee.
Walsh also names the Heritage Foundation among the organizations that began working on Capitol Hill to reinstate first principles after the criminal law came to be seen as a tool for shaping behavior “You’re Under Arrest!”: Overcriminalization with Brian Walsh (2015). He dates the shift to the 20th century, when the guilty mind became less important, especially at the federal level, and says the common law had reserved criminal punishment for heinous, inherently wrongful conduct and required criminal intent. He describes the coalition as bipartisan, naming Representatives Bobby Scott, Bob Goodlatte and Louie Gohmert, and pointing to a bipartisan Overcriminalization Task Force in the House Judiciary Committee, hearings, and an Ohio law that would read criminal intent into a statute by default. In closing, Bob Zadek lists the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Heritage Foundation as doing great work on overcriminalization, and Walsh calls the effort a coalition.
Deregulation and the California electricity episode
A caller identified as David from San Francisco tells Bob Zadek that on the night before a vote on California electricity deregulation, there was common agreement from everybody from the Sierra Club to the Heritage Foundation, but that the next morning somebody put a new bill on the table and everybody thought it was the same bill and voted for it How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014). The caller calls this bait and switch and says Enron looted California on that basis. Bob Zadek’s own response concerns the structure of California deregulation, which he says was utterly moronic because it deregulated only wholesale rates and not retail rates. The excerpt does not say what the Heritage Foundation’s position on the bill was, whether it endorsed the substituted text, or what year the vote occurred.
Affiliations of guests
Bob Zadek introduces Stephen Moore as a former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board who has worked closely with the Heritage Foundation, in an episode about Trumponomics Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018). The description is Bob’s framing of Moore’s résumé; Moore himself does not discuss the foundation in the excerpt, which covers deregulation, tax cuts, supply-side economics, trade with China and the USMCA, and his book written with Arthur Laffer.
Jonathan Butcher is introduced as the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at the Heritage Foundation and author of Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022). Bob Zadek calls Heritage a wonderful think tank in Washington. In the excerpt, Butcher defines Critical Race Theory as a worldview that views everything in public and private life through the lens of race, rooted in Marxism, and quotes the theorists Angela Harris and Kimberlé Crenshaw; he does not speak about the Heritage Foundation’s own work in the segment.
Across episodes
The excerpts show no development in how the Heritage Foundation is treated. It appears in 2014 as a named participant in a California deregulation coalition, in 2015 as a coalition partner on overcriminalization, in 2018 as an item on a guest’s résumé, and in 2022 as a guest’s institutional affiliation; no episode revisits an earlier episode’s characterization or reports a change in the foundation’s position.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the Heritage Foundation was founded, who leads it, how it is funded, or what it publishes, beyond Brian Walsh’s mention of a piece he wrote with Heritage titled One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty. They do not say what the foundation’s position was on the California electricity bill, whether it endorsed the substituted text, or how its criminal justice work was received. They also do not describe any disagreement between the foundation and any guest, or any internal debate within it.
Guests and episodes
1 appearances by 1 guests, 2022–2022.
- Jonathan Butcher (Heritage Foundation Fellow) — Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022) — Critical Race Theory and the War on Truth.