Only a portion of this interview is online, but there’s a lot to take in.
Fallon, a great host in his own right, is a real buddy-buddy kind of guy, and you aren’t going to get any substantive questions or responses to answers from him. However, Colbert is great at interviews with these non-entertainers and engages with them respectfully and earnestly.
The drawback of being a talk show host is the crowd, and I’ve seen it with all three presidential candidates he’s had on the show. His crowd only knows him from his old show in which he was a caricatured version of a political conservative pundit, so there’s some carry-over. The crowd is young, enthusiastic, and loud, which distracts from the interviews, especially when you only have like five to seven minutes with a guest. But you have to hand it to Colbert when the boos started, he shut that down quickly, and did it tactfully.
In this segment, they talk about how Reagan might be perceived today, constitutional interpretation, and how it applies to state rights and gay marriage.
I had this exact conversation with my wife – Fallon is good with celebrities and getting them to be silly, but Colbert has done a great job of substantively interviewing his guests, especially the non-celebs.
The "we shouldn't hand over the rights of 300 million people to 5 unelected lawyers to decide the rules that govern you" argument is blatantly unconstitutional and panders to the lowest common denominator. I expect that kind of argument from someone like Huckabee, whose entire campaign is built on pandering, but I know that Cruz understands that what he described is exactly how the Constitution is set up. So, in my mind, that means he's blatantly lying in order to generate anger and/or fear in voters. And that's all I need to know about him as a candidate.
As a side note, it's ironic how the same crowd that jeers the 5-4 decision in Obergefell as "5 unelected lawyers writing new law" had no problem with 5 unelected lawyers "writing new law" in the Hobby Lobby and Citizens United cases. Or any other 5-4 decision, for that matter.