GLENN: Here's the story from the New Yorker. Tenaha -- is that right? Tenaha, Texas. Have you heard of it?
PAT: No.
GLENN: Tenaha, Texas. Couple passing through Tenaha, Texas. A bunch of cash to buy a used car. They were pulled over. Brought to the local police station and given a choice. Either they could sign a document handing the cash over to the town, or they could be charged, despite any -- despite lack of any evidence at all.
They would be charged with money laundering and child endangerment.
PAT: My gosh.
GLENN: Meaning that they would be immediately sent to jail and their children who had been riding in the backseat, taken from them. If they signed the document, there would be no charges at all.
PAT: So if you're driving through Texas or any city in America, especially a border state, and you have cash with you and you're going to use that cash for a used car. It doesn't matter what you're using it for.
JEFFY: Yeah, it doesn't matter what it's for.
PAT: My cash could be confiscated, and I could be threatened with my children being taken from me?
JEFFY: You might be doing something wrong with that money, Pat.
PAT: Well, prove it. If I am, prove it.
STU: That's supposed to be a fundamental tenet of our society.
PAT: If I'm doing something wrong, prove it.
GLENN: That's what makes us America.
PAT: Yes.
JEFFY: Yeah.
GLENN: That's what stops our police forces from being corrupt.
PAT: Wow, that's just --
GLENN: If they can just take it --
PAT: That is just as unconstitutional a thing as I've ever heard of.
GLENN: The couple would later learn this was something of a tradition in this county. There have been a raft of complaints from out of town drivers who claim they had been stopped and stripped of cash, valuables, and at least one case, an infant child without clear evidence.
STU: Hmm.
GLENN: I -- you know, I want to tell you an unrelated story here.
This weekend, I was standing outside -- it was beautiful in Texas. While the northeast was being hammered with snow and all of my relatives were out shoveling snow, I was shoveling the sunshine like crazy. I couldn't keep up with it.
PAT: It was 87 on Saturday.
STU: My kids went in the pool.
JEFFY: Yeah.
GLENN: It was just hammering with sunshine. Some -- I had to scrape the sunshine off my windshield.
JEFFY: Nobody ever hurt their back shoveling sunshine, Glenn.
GLENN: I had to not turn my car on for 20 minutes to let it heat up.
PAT: In fact, you had to have it cool down a little bit.
JEFFY: Right.
GLENN: Right. I was outside, and I was looking at the yard. And it was like spring. And I said to Tania, I said, "I want to plant some wisteria on the front fence."
PAT: You want to plant the stuff that shut down the Bluebell plants?
JEFFY: Yeah. Why would you?
GLENN: No, that's Listeria.
PAT: Oh, okay.
GLENN: This is wisteria. So she said, "Honey, if you don't maintain that stuff, it takes over everything."
So I start looking it up. And it's an amazing thing. When you read it, it says, "Plant it only a great distance from any other plant."
PAT: Hmm.
GLENN: Because it will latch on to it and it will choke it to death and kill it.
And if you -- unless you have a lawn that can be mowed in between, you should not plant this.
Now, if you look at the pictures of wisteria, it's beautiful. It's like grapevines. And they -- they twist, and they're gnarled, and they're beautiful.
And then they have big, huge -- almost like lilac trees. Big, beautiful flowers on them. And they grow and they crawl on everything. But they also -- the roots are so powerful that they go down and they can crack the foundation of your house. They can actually crack the foundation of your fence.
I mean, they are really powerful. The thing is, they're beautiful. They will do exactly what I want it to do to the fence. But you just must be on it all the time. You have to trim it back all the time.
The minute you take that for granted and you're like, "Eh, I'll get it to it later." It will literally choke a tree to death. Okay? We had a problem with at our house. We have this rod iron fence that I don't like and I think it's ugly. And it makes me feel like we live in a prison.
And I wanted to cover it. I wanted to beautify the front lawn. So I'm going to plan wisteria. But the minute we or the next owners of the house forget that that wisteria is also deadly to everything around it -- if you forget that, it will choke everything else to death.
We have a problem in our nation. And we have put these things in, that unless you pay attention, will choke the Constitution to death. And that's what's happening.
We put this -- we put something like this in because we happened to fight the drug cartels. But there's other things that are happening in our nation now. And it's being used because we never pruned it back.
It should have never been planted because the people who own this particular house don't pay attention to all of the stuff in their yard. They plant it, and they think it's going to be beautiful, and they like it because, "Oh, look, it will cover up that hole. And it will take care of that. And it will look beautiful."
And you didn't notice because you're a lazy gardener, that it's wrapped itself around all of the other things in the garden.
We have to take this stuff out by its roots. That fence might be ugly, but that fence protects the Constitution, and we've got to see that fence.