A group of Senate Republicans walk into a lunch, and decide to publish a book together. What sounds like the introduction to a joke turned serious when Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.) and nine of her colleagues authored a new book, We Do Not Consent, which debuted earlier today.
Lummis’s book is about pushing back on a broad swath of the Biden-Harris administration’s policies, which she said in an interview with the Washington Reporter are both “bad for the country, and they’re outside the realm of the statutory design of the Founding Fathers, where the Congress legislates, the executive branch implements, and the judiciary interprets.”
“It’s going to be a national bestseller,” Lummis said. “We’re going to sell out. We might have to publish another round of books because it’s going to be such a significant bestseller that everyone will want to read.”
All proceeds from We Do Not Consent will be donated to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), “because we wanted to push back against a Biden or a Harris presidency,” Lummis said. She ran the idea by Sen. Steve Daines (R., Mont.), who chairs the committee — and not only did he green light the idea, but he green-lighted the NRSC to sell the book on its website.
Lummis already had another solo book, Think for Yourself, that was nearing completion when she decided to embark on this joint publishing endeavor with Republican Sens. Daines, Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), John Cornyn (Texas), Ted Cruz (Texas), Ron Johnson (Wis.), Mike Lee (Utah), Roger Marshall (Kan.), Rick Scott (Fla.), and Dan Sullivan (Alaska).
“You can snack on this book,” Lummis said. “Each chapter is geared towards pointing out how the Biden administration, with Kamala Harris in tow, has twisted the constitutional mandates that our Founding Fathers prioritized in the U.S. Constitution.” She particularly recommends Lee’s chapter on the weaponization of government: “It’s a standout.”
The idea for the book came over the summer, and senators had to submit their chapters by the start of the Republican National Convention. A wrench was thrown into the publishing plans when President Joe Biden dropped out. However, Kamala Harris’s policies are so similar, that they were able to seamlessly replace “Biden administration” in the book with “Biden-Harris administration” and call it a day.
“All of these policies that we are pushing back on were promoted, developed, supported, and had the fingerprints of the Biden-Harris administration on them, so it didn’t require too much change,” Lummis said.
Each senator chose a topic close to their hearts. Johnson’s chapter, which Lummis said is more “academic” than she expected given his fiery advocacy in the Senate, is about the government’s overreach during COVID; Blackburn’s is about “culture wars,” and Lummis asked her to write it primarily based on the Tennessean’s infamous questioning of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson; Cruz’s is about illegal immigration; and Sullivan’s is about energy, because Alaska and Wyoming stand alone to Lummis in “absolutely [being] targeted by the Biden-Harris administration and the Department of the Interior.”
Lummis said that several of her colleagues were “more passionate” about We Do Not Consent because “it’s their own voice, their own words, their own topic, about which they hold very strongly held views.”
“There’s emotion in this,” she said. “Whereas when you’re writing legislation, it’s a little more detached and dry, but you could feel people’s passion and emotion in their writing.”
Those interested can purchase We Do Not Consent here.
Below is a transcript of our interview with Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.), lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
I haven’t done a book review or a book report in a longer time than I’m willing to admit. This appears to be your first book. Is that correct?
Sen. Cynthia Lummis:
It is. I actually have a complete book that I wrote by myself that is with an editor and a publisher right now. So some of my forewords actually borrowed excerpts from my book, but in terms of the one that got in print, this is my first.
Washington Reporter:
Which book idea came first, the solo or the collaboration?
Sen. Cynthia Lummis:
I had my solo book complete and with an editor before We Do Not Consent happened.
Washington Reporter:
And unlike Biden, you are plagiarizing yourself and not other people.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis:
You got it. I plagiarized myself.
Washington Reporter:
How did you come up with the idea for the first book, and then how did this collaborative book come about?
Sen. Cynthia Lummis:
Well, it’s been about a year and four or five months since I started my personal book. My personal book is entitled Think for Yourself, and it is more about the journey that brought me to emphasize and support Bitcoin and other digital assets. I’m trying to use my book as a way to educate people about Bitcoin and other digital assets through the eyes of a Wyoming ranch girl, who’s older. I’m not the most likely proponent of digital assets, but that has kind of become a carve out area of expertise for me in the Senate, so I want to use a life lesson story to talk about how that happened.
As for this book, in just this most recent June, I was sitting with some other senators, discussing how frustrated we were with the guilty verdict in New York against Donald Trump, and how it just appeared to be a travesty of justice, and we talked about what things we could do to push back. Every senator has a different skill set. Some are really good on TV and are regulars on TV. I don’t necessarily fit into that category. So I proposed to my colleagues that we take some of these subjects that have been absolute disasters that the Biden-Harris administration has brought about, and write about them. And they agreed, and we began parsing out the subjects then and there, and the only person who dropped out of the process was JD Vance, who was originally part of our chapter-writing team, but he got distracted by becoming the President’s running rate.
Washington Reporter:
Was there any turf war between the senators on who was going to take each topic? I was looking at the table of contents and that all seems fairly logical. But did someone say, ‘Ted Cruz, I’ll play you in basketball — which I wouldn’t recommend, having done it — over doing the immigration chapter’?
Sen. Cynthia Lummis:
It was absolutely self-evident that that was Ted Cruz’s personal passion. And then, of course, Roger Marshall is a physician, and so he’s been very active in highlighting the consequences of illegal immigration and fentanyl, and he has developed a considerable area of expertise there. So that was perfectly logical for him. I have an area of expertise in energy, and so does my colleague, John Barrasso, but we chose to go with Senator Dan Sullivan from Alaska, because there are two states — mine and Alaska — that have absolutely been targeted by the Biden-Harris administration and the Department of the Interior, because both states have so much public land and so much energy, so many oil and gas and other hydrocarbon resources that the Biden administration, along with Kamala Harris, have absolutely targeted our states, and there are dozens of executive orders that Biden-Harris has used as weapons against Alaska. Senator Sullivan has really been good about raising awareness of that. He jumped at the chance to write the chapter on energy, and then Marsha Blackburn in her role, both coming from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where she developed some expertise in online attacks on youth in terms of the manner in which their personal well-being is preyed upon by marketing that exploits their personal insecurities, has really been terrific on some of the culture wars. And then further, the reason she was the right person to write the chapter on culture wars is because she spoke the ultimate question that showed how pervasive the culture wars are in our society when, during the confirmation hearing of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, she asked her, ‘can you provide me a definition of a woman?’ And that was such a key moment in exposing how twisted progressives are in warping even some of the most intelligent minds in the United States about the most simple facts of life. So Marsha became the obvious choice to write the chapter on the culture wars. It’s been that kind of thing, and everybody was eager. That was so fun. So we hatched this idea in June, and it was on a very short timeframe, because we knew we were writing a book that needed to be available during the election cycle, the general election cycle, so everyone had their chapters in before the Republican National Convention, and that was the deadline to have your draft. And then we had it to the publisher by the end of July. And then my chief of staff, in her August break free time, was writing to the publisher, in my non-office time, and in Stacey’s non-office time, in my chief’s non-office time, we did some scrubbing and editing, and then, of course, we wrote it when Biden was the presidential nominee for the Democrats. Right before it was going to go to publish, just to mess with us, for that specific purpose alone, they switched candidates. And so we had to tweak it a little bit, but not much, because all of these policies that we are pushing back on were promoted, developed, supported, and had the fingerprints of the Biden-Harris administration on them, so it didn’t require too much change.
Washington Reporter:
Was it really just one of those things where you just said, instead of ‘Biden administration,’ you said ‘Biden-Harris administration’?
Sen. Cynthia Lummis:
Yeah. That was it, that was all we did.
Washington Reporter:
Their plans didn’t mess with you that much. Is it safe to say that this going to be a nationwide bestseller the minute you go to print?
Sen. Cynthia Lummis:
It was up last night for the first time on the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s website, and even during its first hour, it sold four copies. So yes, absolutely, it’s going to be a national bestseller. We’re going to sell out. We might have to publish another round of books because it’s going to be such a significant bestseller that everyone will want to read it.
Washington Reporter:
Was it easy to find a publisher?
Sen. Cynthia Lummis:
It was actually pretty easy. Our priority was on who could do it the fastest because of the quick turnaround we put ourselves in. And fortunately, it’s out, it’s available, and it’s for sale.
Washington Reporter:
Did anything surprise you about how it was similar or different working on a book instead of on legislation with a group of senators?
Sen. Cynthia Lummis:
People were more passionate about this because it’s their own voice, their own words, their own topic, about which they hold very strongly held views. There’s emotion in this. Whereas when you’re writing legislation, it’s a little more detached and dry, but you could feel people’s passion and emotion in their writing. I really enjoy their work and working with them on this. Interestingly, I would see passions come out in their writing, in people who don’t appear to be as passionate in terms of their personal advocacy and vice versa. For example, one of my most passionate advocate friends in the Senate is Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, and he wrote a chapter on government COVID policy, and the propensity of government to cover up vaccine injuries and to treat the public as if they weren’t having their own health interests in mind. But the government seemed to need to take over that role, and he feels very strongly about it, but the chapter he wrote is very academic. It is footnoted with all kinds of references and validation to academic studies and to medical studies, so his passion didn’t come through as much in his writing, because he took a very detailed, reviewed, academic approach.
Washington Reporter:
You made the decision to route all of the profits, which I’m sure will be in the millions of dollars, to the NRSC. How’d you come up with that idea, and how do you think the next 48 days are shaping up?
Sen. Cynthia Lummis:
We ran it by Steve Daines, who’s the head of the NRSC, because we wanted to push back against a Biden or a Harris presidency. Their policies are bad for the country, and they’re outside the realm of the statutory design of the Founding Fathers, where the Congress legislates, the executive branch implements, and the judiciary interprets. And the Biden-Harris administration took over the role of legislating from the minute they walked in the door. They ignored securing our borders, which is a constitutional mandate, and the laws built around that mandate that we secure our borders, and they flung our borders open to all kinds of illegal entrance, and those illegals have come in the millions and wreaked havoc on our country. We want to point that out, hence the title of We Do Not Consent. As you know, in the Declaration of Independence, we state that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and our government is currently not exercising its powers in a just manner, and we do not consent to be governed like this. Each chapter is geared towards pointing out how the Biden administration, with Kamala Harris in tow, has twisted the constitutional mandates that our Founding Fathers prioritized in the U.S. Constitution, which limits the power of the federal government, and specifically delineates and articulates what those powers are, and then reserves the remainder of powers to the states and to the people. The Biden-Harris administration has exactly the opposite approach to governing. Their approach is that the federal executive branch, the presidential powers, are totally unlimited, unconstrained by the Constitution and the law and that they’re going to do whatever the heck they want, and what they have done is produce a catastrophic result in terms of fentanyl, human trafficking, illegal crime in this country, the lawfare focused on former President Trump and on and on, using government to tell people, ‘if you don’t get a certain shot, your human rights will be constrained,’ and on and on. So it was fun to write. It was really fun to edit. I highly recommend the Mike Lee chapter to you. It’s a standout. He wrote about how even going back to when Jen Psaki was at the Department of State as a spokesperson there, it almost looks like they derived some of their strategies to prosecute and persecute former President Trump from banana republics, and he draws an interesting correlation between the two. It’s a very interesting read. And the fun thing is, you can snack on this book. You can read a chapter one day and then get up and read another chapter another day, because they’re short. They’re very substantive, very dense and very readable and absorbable. But collectively, they help create a portion of the domestic policy disasters that have been the Biden-Harris administration, and how we can expect more of the same from Kamala Harris.
Washington Reporter:
Did you get roped into editing this, or were you able to have someone do that more full time than you doing it in between Senate hearings?
Sen. Cynthia Lummis:
I volunteered.
I did a lot of it at home on the weekends, and that’s one of the luxuries, I hate to say, of being a widowed person, is you have all kinds of time to yourself. I worked on it on airplane flights. As you know, when I fly from here to Denver, and then sit in the Denver airport for hours waiting for a connection to Cheyenne, I’ve got all kinds of time on my hands. My windshield time, as we call it in Wyoming, in airports and in airplanes, gave me plenty and plenty of time, and I didn’t do much editing to members’ work, because these are their words. They are U.S. Senators. They are at the pinnacle of their careers, and I don’t want to clarify what they write. So what you’re seeing in terms of the various chapters is their personal work; their staffs didn’t write these chapters for them. They wrote these chapters. I wrote a foreword for every single chapter, and those are my words. Now, as I said, I did pull from my personal book, Think for Yourself, in writing some of the forewords because some of the topics that members chose to write about I had previously written about in my book, Think for Yourself, one of them being specifically having men compete in women’s sports. That dovetailed nicely with Marsha Blackburn’s chapter. I wrote another chapter on government COVID policy, and how they shut down the medical professionalism and research of some fine doctors, and berated them when these doctors came to different conclusions about hydroxychloroquine and other off-label treatments that have been used historically to treat things like COVID. So I already had that work done. I thought when RonJohn chose that topic, I know exactly what I want to include in the foreword. I actually asked Marsha if she would write the one on the woke culture wars, specifically because she had asked that question of Ketanji Brown Jackson. But the chapter that she gave me, again her words alone, I was pretty blown away by how seriously she took this. I was blown away by how seriously everybody took this. And I think part of the reason they did was the timing of it. We were all so frustrated, so angry when the New York court used a stale argument that had been rejected previously multiple times to prosecute President Trump, distort and just twist the law, and then find him guilty. It’s the dumbest thing. You don’t have to be a lawyer to figure out that that was stupid. And yet they did it, and we were all so angry and so frustrated that I think it caused everyone to sort of throw their anger and frustration about this into this project. It gave them a project, sort of a raison d’etre at that moment, and I think the time in that book made it more successful and caused everyone to accept their role of getting their chapter, in their words, done on time. If I tried to do the same project today, it would fail, I believe, because the same urgency is not there, it was just the perfect time to do this.
Washington Reporter:
You’re now a published author, who did you look to as literary inspiration?
Sen. Cynthia Lummis:
My favorite author is a living author. His name is Eric Metaxas. I have never met him, but I am a fan. He wrote a book called If You Can Keep It, of course, based on Benjamin Franklin’s response to the woman asking him ‘what did you give us?’ And he replied: ‘a republic, if you can keep it.’ I absolutely love that book. I have given a copy of it to every single member of my staff and have asked them to read it. I think it’s that important and impressive. And then, interestingly, he also wrote a biography of Martin Luther, and he’s not a Lutheran, he is a Greek Orthodox member, but for some reason, he wrote an excellent biography of Martin Luther that I read. I am such a fan of the way he writes.
Washington Reporter:
From one editor to another, thanks so much for chatting, Senator Cynthia Lummis — published author!