The Supreme Court struck down a law allowing a gay wedding cake maker to refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex couple s wedding, and sided with the baker in a case that was brought to the court by a Colorado baker who refused to bake such a cake because it was in contravention of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In this case, the Supreme Court said that the cake was artistic expression, not a work of art, and therefore not subject to anti-discrimination laws. But what does that mean in practice? What does it mean in the world of civil rights and civil liberties? And who has the power to enforce it? This episode is brought to you by LaCie and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. The opinions expressed in this episode are our own, not those of our employers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of our companies or our government. We do not endorse the views expressed by our employees, employers, or other third parties. We are not experts in any of these matters, and we are not lawyers, judges, lawyers, or lawyers, and have no authority to determine what is and is not allowed to be said or not said in these matters. Thank you for listening and reviewing this episode. Please reach out to us if you have any thoughts or opinions on any of the topics covered in the show. Tweet us and we'll get them on the next episode! Timestamps: 0:00:00 - What are your thoughts on this week's episode? 6:30 - What do you think of the latest Supreme Court decision? 7: 8:15 - What would you like to see in a cake? 9:00 10:30 11:40 - What's your favorite piece of food? 15:00 | What is your favorite gay wedding song? 16:30 | What does your favorite restaurant? 17:40 | What are you would you be serving? 18:40 19:10 - How do you like a gay person s wedding cake? ? 21:10 22:10 | What s your biggest takeaway from this case? 23:30 -- Do you think the cake is gay? 26:00 -- would you want a rainbow flag? 27:40 -- what do you want to see me bake it in your wedding cake in your kitchen? 25:00 // 27:10 -- does it matter?
00:00:04.000The other one was on Joe Biden's decision to get rid of student loans, essentially to bail out all student loans in the United States.
00:00:11.000So, both decisions came down the right direction.
00:00:14.000The Supreme Court, which again, this is the big victory for Donald Trump, the lasting victory that Donald Trump is going to have had from his presidency, whether or not he becomes president again, that's another issue, but The big victory he's going to have had from his presidency is the remolding and reshaping of the Supreme Court.
00:00:27.000He got three picks on the Supreme Court, and all three of them seem to have been victories on behalf of conservative jurisprudence and originalism.
00:00:37.000This opinion was written by Neil Gorsuch, who was one of Donald Trump's appointments.
00:00:43.000He was actually his first appointment to the Supreme Court.
00:00:47.000It was the six conservatives versus the three liberals on the court.
00:00:51.000And this opinion concerned the question of whether a religious website designer could be forced to essentially create a website on behalf of a same-sex wedding.
00:01:01.000Now, you may say to yourself, this sounds exactly like the Masterpiece Cake Shop case.
00:01:05.000The Masterpiece Cake Shop case was a case in which there was a guy who was asked to bake a cake for a gay wedding, and he decided he didn't want to do that, and the Supreme Court said that's artistic expression.
00:01:15.000The question was, how broadly would that apply?
00:01:17.000To what level of services would that apply?
00:01:19.000Because they're essentially Two issues in American law that are in conflict right now.
00:01:22.000One is the so-called Public Accommodations Law.
00:01:25.000That comes from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
00:01:26.000I've suggested before that the Public Accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act are wrong-headed.
00:01:32.000I actually think that they are an overstep in terms of constitutionality.
00:01:35.000They essentially say that if you act in business, then you quote-unquote cannot discriminate.
00:01:43.000It was originally written in order to make sure that, for example, black people could stay at hotels and people who operate at hotels couldn't bar black people from hotels.
00:01:48.000So you understand exactly where it came from.
00:02:12.000Well, the Supreme Court has said in the past that it did apply.
00:02:14.000So, these two things come into deep and abiding conflict when you are talking not really about issues of race, but issues of activity.
00:02:22.000So, same-sex marriage is, in fact, an activity.
00:02:25.000So, there's a difference in the law between discrimination against quote-unquote gay people and discrimination against activities done by gay people.
00:02:34.000So, for example, if somebody came into your business, and you live in a state that has a strong anti-discrimination law, like the state of Colorado, somebody walks into your business, and they say, I want to buy a donut.
00:02:42.000And you say, are you gay or are you straight?
00:02:44.000That's a violation of anti-discrimination law in the state of Colorado.
00:02:48.000If, however, the person comes in and says, I want you to bake me a cake, and I want a giant rainbow flag, and a huge slogan on it that says, love is love, and you say no, well that would actually be speech.
00:02:57.000Right, no longer is this quote-unquote doing business or making a service that is available to everyone, simply available to gay people.
00:03:03.000Now you are asking for specific messages to be parroted.
00:03:06.000So in this particular case, which was about a website designer creating a same-sex marriage website, the question was, does this look more like the donut provider who is just refusing to sell donuts to gay people, or does it look more like the person who's being asked to put slogans across the cake?
00:03:21.000Now, in my world, you know, in the world of the original Constitution, without the revolution that was the Civil Rights Act, with regard to public accommodation, the Civil Rights Act is exactly right in barring segregation, barring illegal discrimination by government actors.
00:03:36.000Where the Civil Rights Act, in my opinion, goes too far, and this is sort of the libertarian view, is in dictating how you must operate your private business.
00:03:43.000It seems to me that the federal government doesn't actually have the power over that, constitutionally speaking.
00:03:49.000What this case really was about was whether this looks more like the donut shop provider who won't sell the donut to the gay guy or whether this looks more like a bakery that refuses to bake a cake with a gay rights slogan on it.
00:04:02.000And this is really important stuff because if you're a religious person, you're not just religious in your church.
00:04:06.000You're not just religious in your home.
00:04:07.000You're religious in how you practice your business.
00:04:10.000Cases like this come up all the time, where people want their messages purveyed by business providers, and business providers do in fact have a right to say, I don't wish to purvey that message.
00:04:21.000So the majority is written by Justice Gorsuch, and it's worth going through it, because Essentially, what's been happening over the past several years under Justice Gorsuch's jurisprudence is what has been called the Utah Compromise.
00:04:31.000The Utah Compromise suggests that there will be broad anti-discrimination laws that will apply to nearly everyone.
00:04:36.000You can't discriminate against somebody on the basis of their status as, for example, a gay person or as a woman, as a Jew, right?
00:04:44.000But there are carve-outs for religious people who say that certain activities that these people do are in conflict with their own religious practice.
00:04:51.000That's what Gorsuch is attempting to do right here.
00:04:54.000So Gorsuch begins the opinion saying, like many states, Colorado has a law forbidding businesses from engaging in discrimination when they sell goods and services to the public.
00:05:01.000Laws along these lines have done much to secure the civil rights of all Americans.
00:05:04.000But in this particular case, Colorado does not just seek to ensure the sale of goods or services on equal terms.
00:05:08.000It seeks to use its law to compel an individual to create speech she does not believe.
00:05:12.000The question we face is whether that course violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.
00:05:16.000So this would seem like a pretty clear-cut case, right?
00:05:19.000Why should the government be able to force you to parrot a message that you don't actually believe?
00:05:24.000Why should the government be able to do that?
00:05:26.000And the answer the Supreme Court gave is the government isn't able to do that.
00:05:30.000And not just because of religious objections.
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00:07:06.000Okay, so back to the majority opinion.
00:07:09.000So one of the points the majority makes here is that the plaintiff in this particular case, the website designer, is quote, willing to work with all people regardless of classification such as race, creed, sexual orientation, and gender.
00:07:19.000And she will gladly create custom graphics and websites for clients of any sexual orientation.
00:07:23.000But that's not what was being asked of her.
00:07:24.000It wasn't make a wedding website for this gay guy.
00:07:43.000Under Colorado's logics, says Gorsuch, he points out that Colorado protests this.
00:07:47.000Colorado believes they should be able to cram down on all residents of the state of Colorado their preferred messaging about same-sex marriage, which is unbelievably dangerous.
00:07:54.000Because once you believe that, then basically all religious people are under fire everywhere they do business in public life.
00:08:00.000Under Colorado's logic, says the Supreme Court, the government may compel anyone who speaks for pay on a given topic to accept all commissions on that same topic, no matter the underlying message, if the topic somehow implicates a customer's statutorily protected trait.
00:08:13.000Taken seriously, that principle would allow the government to force all manner of artists, speechwriters, and others whose services involve speech to speak what they do not believe on pain of penalty.
00:08:20.000The government could require an unwilling Muslim movie director to make a film with a Zionist message, or an atheist muralist to accept a commission celebrating evangelical zeal, so long as they would make films or murals for other members of the public with different messages.
00:08:31.000Equally, the government could force a male website designer married to another man to design websites for an organization that advocates against same-sex marriage.
00:08:39.000As soon as the government says that they can now compel certain types of speech, that means that they can compel all types of speech.
00:08:46.000Okay, so we'll get to the dissent in a minute, which is truly an awful dissent by Sonia Sotomayor, who is a horrible justice.
00:09:03.000She proclaimed when she was appointed that she was a wise Latina justice, which, again, affirmative action attributes being added to your Supreme Court description is never very good for your reputation.
00:09:49.000Forget Colorado's stipulation that Ms.
00:09:51.000Smith's activities are, in fact, expressive, which means that they are, in fact, speech.
00:09:54.000The dissent chides us for deciding a pre-enforcement challenge, but it ignores the Tenth Circuit's finding that Ms.
00:09:59.000Smith faced a credible threat of sanctions unless she conforms her views to the state's.
00:10:03.000All despite the 10th Circuit finding that Colorado intends to force Ms.
00:10:06.000Smith to convey a message she does not believe, with the very purpose of eliminating ideas that differ from its own.
00:10:12.000Nor, says Gorsuch, does the dissent's reimagination end there.
00:10:15.000It claims that, for the first time in its history, the court, quote, grants a business open to the public a right to refuse to serve members of protected class.
00:10:22.000Never mind that we do no such thing, and that Colorado itself has stipulated that Ms.
00:10:26.000Smith will work with all people regardless of sexual orientation.
00:10:29.000Never mind, too, that it is the dissent that would have this court do something truly novel by allowing a government to coerce an individual to speak contrary to her beliefs on a significant issue of personal conviction, all in order to eliminate ideas that differ from its own.
00:10:41.000Now, to be fair, there's confusion that arises when it comes to LGBT issues.
00:10:46.000Well, because that's a question of self-identity.
00:10:48.000How would you even know if somebody walked into your business and they were gay unless they told you they were gay?
00:10:51.000I mean, that is literally the only way that you would know.
00:10:55.000Or, in fact, they asked you to do a message for gay marriage.
00:10:58.000Or they explained to you that they were married to another person of the same sex.
00:11:00.000There are a lot of people who have various characteristics who are gay.
00:11:04.000The gay community is, in fact, not quite as stereotypical as TV would make it out to be.
00:11:09.000Which means that very often, quote-unquote, discrimination against a gay person is not in fact discrimination against gay person, it is discrimination against behavior that is conducted by a person who happens to be gay.
00:11:41.000It has nothing to do with your behavior.
00:11:42.000It has nothing to do with your feelings.
00:11:43.000You are black, whether you feel black or whether you don't feel black.
00:11:46.000Whether you quote-unquote act black or whether you don't act black, obviously.
00:11:49.000In fact, there is no such thing as quote-unquote acting black, other than stereotypes.
00:11:53.000That is not the same thing when it comes to issues of sexual orientation, which is about interior feeling, it is about behavior in the real world, and that is why putting LGBT as members of a quote-unquote protected class under anti-discrimination law starts to get into very dicey activity as far as forcing other people to accept a behavior, not an actual objective state of the world that is visible to everyone else.
00:12:18.000The opinion says, in some places the dissent gets so turned around the facts of the case it opens fire on its own position.
00:12:23.000For instance, while stressing that a Colorado company cannot refuse the full and equal enjoyment of its services based on a customer's protected status, the dissent assures us that a company selling creative services to the public does have the right to decide what messages to include or not to include.
00:12:36.000But if that's actually true then what exactly are we debating?
00:12:40.000Finally, the dissent comes out and says what it really means.
00:13:10.000Obviously, I wish that it went even further, but it goes pretty far in at least guaranteeing the ability of religious people to act out their religion in their daily life, which of course is necessary.
00:13:19.000And not just religious people, anybody, to act out their principles in their daily life.
00:13:24.000Somebody went after me on Twitter for all this.
00:13:26.000They said, well, how would you feel if somebody rejected you because you went in there and you wanted some sort of Jewish message written on a cake?
00:13:32.000And I said, I'd feel pretty good because that would be America.
00:13:34.000And then I just walk across the street to a kosher bakery where they would do exactly what I wanted them to do.
00:13:38.000In just one second, we'll get to Sonia Sotomayor's dissent.
00:13:41.000She's an awful justice and she proves it with her dissent first.
00:13:44.000Let's talk about how you make your home look better.
00:13:46.000So, one huge thing for me is how natural light flows into my home.
00:14:48.000Now we get to Sonia Sotomayor's dissent.
00:14:50.000So remember, we were this close to having a left-wing Supreme Court that would absolutely greenlight the shutting down of rights in states across the nation.
00:14:57.000So Sonia Sotomayor says this, quote, today, the court for the first time in its history
00:15:00.000grants a business open to the public, a constitutional right to refuse to serve members
00:15:05.000Okay, so first of all, that is just a lie.
00:15:07.000Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the cases that followed hard upon, that basically overwrote the Constitution in favor of certain provisions like public accommodations and the Civil Rights Act, the reality of the world is that for most of American history, it was no shoes, no shirt, no service.
00:15:24.000And up to and including ugly discrimination none of us would like.
00:15:27.000Now you can say that stuff is ugly and it should be banned by cities or it should be banned by states.
00:15:33.000But the reality is that American law did not only not prohibit that sort of stuff, American law guaranteed your right to freedom of association throughout all of that, understanding and believing, I think correctly, that if there was a business that discriminates against black people, a business will open across the street that does not discriminate against black people and it will out-compete the business that discriminates against black people.
00:15:53.000This, by the way, is actually the story of the early civil rights movement.
00:15:55.000If you look at, like, 1960, the Woolworth counter sit-ins, those were not legislatively crammed down desegregation.
00:16:02.000That was people sitting at the counter, and this becoming such a public relations issue for Woolworths that they had to desegregate their lunch counters.
00:16:10.000In any case, Sonia Sotomayor goes on because she's wrong, obviously.
00:16:14.000Specifically, the court holds that the First Amendment exempts a website design company from a state law that prohibits the company from denying wedding websites to same-sex couples if the company chooses to sell those websites to the public.
00:16:24.000And then we get into the Salon.com, Slate.com pitch meeting for Sonia Sotomayor.
00:16:28.000This is how you know the difference, by the way, between the intelligent justices on the court and the ones who are not particularly smart.
00:16:33.000The ones who are unintelligent write opinions that sound like they are direct from the Letters to the editor page of Jacobin Magazine.
00:16:41.000The ones who are actually smart, like Elena Kagan.
00:17:37.000A business open to the public seeks to deny gay and lesbian customers the full and equal enjoyment of its services based on the owner's religious belief that same-sex marriages are false.
00:17:45.000Now, again, you could read just directly in that sentence that this isn't about the quote-unquote sexual orientation of the people who are coming into the business.
00:17:53.000It's about the particular business request they are making.
00:17:56.000If they had asked, presumably, for some sort of quick website fix, then the Business owner would have provided it, but that's not what they were asking for.
00:18:04.000They were asking for a website that explicitly endorsed a message.
00:18:08.000The business argues, and a majority of the court agrees, that because the business offers services that are customized and expressive, the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment shields the business from a generally applicable law that prohibits discrimination in the sale of publicly available goods and services.
00:18:26.000Sonia Sotomayor continues, The legal duty of a business open to the public to serve the public without unjust discrimination is deeply rooted in our history.
00:18:33.000I mean, first of all, given the fact that you guys believe that American history is replete with racism, I'd like to see the evidence on this one.
00:18:41.000But, continuing, the true power of this principle, however, lies in its capacity to evolve as society comes to understand more forms of unjust discrimination and, hence, to include more persons as full and equal members of the public.
00:18:51.000So, by the way, we should point out here that Neil Gorsuch and Bostock suggested the Civil Rights Act applied to, quote-unquote, transgender status.
00:18:57.000So this means that according to the leftist minority on the Supreme Court, the dissent, If a person walked into your business and demanded that you put a trans flag on the cake, you would have to do it.
00:19:08.000This is according to Sonia Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson.
00:19:13.000They would have it that if you, a person who writes speeches for a living, gets a call from a trans activist, you have to take the call and you have to write the speech because you are a publicly available business.
00:19:26.000There is no limit on this sort of power.
00:19:29.000This is all Orwellian kind of stuff, but this is what the left would like.
00:19:32.000Quote, LGBT people have existed for all of human history.
00:19:34.000Now we just get the rote kind of GLAAD talk from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
00:19:40.000LGBT people have existed for all of human history.
00:19:42.000And as sure as they have existed, others have sought to deny their existence and to exclude them from public life.
00:19:46.000Those who would subordinate LGBT people have often done so with the backing of the law.
00:19:50.000For most of American history, there were laws criminalizing same-sex intimacy.
00:20:03.000I'm going to get to the most amazing part of this insane opinion, this dissent from Sotomayor in just one second, because it truly is wild.
00:20:09.000I mean, it's just complete misstatement of facts.
00:21:28.000It's just a way for her to sound off on what she agrees with.
00:21:31.000Quote, A social system of discrimination created an environment in which LGBT people were unsafe.
00:21:37.000Who could forget the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard?
00:21:40.000Matthew was targeted by two men, tortured, tied to a buck fence, and left to die for who he was.
00:21:44.000Okay, so first of all, that's probably not true.
00:21:47.000There are excellent books and excellent documentaries about Matthew Shepard, and the most plausible conclusion is that Matthew Shepard was actually likely an alleged meth dealer who went crossways with some of his clients and then got murdered for his trouble.
00:22:01.000I mean, so she's citing just... If you think, by the way, that that's an exception, is that she's citing a bad situation?
00:22:47.000Well, I mean, what they actually seek is to make you mirror all of their preferences, which is why they demand that you use their pronouns.
00:22:52.000It's why they demand that you fly their flag at the White House.
00:22:55.000It's why they demand that you post a gay rights flag in your profile.
00:22:59.000It's why they demand that you use your own pronouns.
00:23:35.000That is so even though the portrait photography services are customized and expressive.
00:23:38.000If the business offers school photos, it may not deny those services to multiracial children because the owner does not want to create any speech indicating that interracial couples are acceptable.
00:23:50.000Again, interracial couples are not the same thing as a man and a man.
00:23:56.000And again, all this involves is a category error by identifying behavior and then including that behavior alongside immutable characteristic.
00:24:06.000But, says Sonia Sotomayor, concluding, quote, The unattractive lesson of the majority remains this.
00:24:12.000What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours.
00:24:14.000The lesson of the history of public accommodations laws is altogether different.
00:24:17.000It is that in a free and democratic society, there can be no social case.
00:24:20.000So I just want to ask what the converse of that is.
00:24:22.000She says that the unattractive lesson of the majority opinion is what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours.
00:24:27.000Would the opposite be what is yours and mine and what is mine is yours?
00:24:32.000Because I'm pretty sure that's not the American creed.
00:24:35.000The notion that you have a right to my services, the belief system that what is mine is owed to you, is deeply un-American and deeply unfree.
00:24:43.000That, of course, is what the left would like.
00:24:44.000Okay, so they lost in that particular case.
00:24:46.000That was one big victory on behalf of constitutional conservatism on Friday.
00:24:50.000The other one that came down late on Friday was an opinion striking down, again by a 6-3 vote, Joe Biden's attempt to cram down a student loan bailout.
00:24:59.000So he does not have authority under the law in the United States to simply declare the student loan subsidized by the federal government.
00:25:17.000He says, quote, the secretary, the secretary of education, may issue waivers or modifications
00:25:21.000only as may be necessary to ensure that recipients of student financial assistance under Title
00:25:25.0004 of the Education Act or affected individuals are not placed in a worse position financially
00:25:29.000in relation to that financial assistance because of their status as affected individuals.
00:25:32.000So in other words, there is an emergency provision of the Education Act that basically said that if
00:25:37.000there's a war and the people who are affected by that war or there's a terrorist attack and
00:25:41.000you can't pay your bill because of a terrorist attack, then the secretary has the ability to
00:25:45.000to issue waivers or modifications as necessary.
00:25:48.000During the first year of the pandemic, the Department's Office of General Counsel issued a memorandum concluding the Secretary does not have the statutory authority to provide a blanket or mass cancellation, compromise, discharge, or forgiveness of student loan principal balances.
00:25:59.000And then Biden took office and he flipped that.
00:26:01.000The Secretary of Education asserts that the so-called HEROES Act grants him the authority to cancel $430 billion of student loan principal.
00:26:10.000We hold today the act allows the Secretary to quote-unquote waive or modify existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite the statute from the ground up.
00:26:22.000The Secretary's plan has modified the cited provisions only in the same sense the French Revolution modified the status of the French nobility.
00:26:28.000It has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely.
00:26:31.000The Secretary has not truly waived or modified the provisions in the Education Act authorizing specific and limited forgiveness of student loans.
00:26:38.000Those provisions remain safely intact in the U.S.
00:26:39.000Code, where they continue to operate in full force.
00:26:42.000What the Secretary has actually done is draft a new section of the Education Act from scratch by waiving provisions root and branch and then filling the empty space with radically new tax.
00:26:50.000So in other words, they just rewrote the law.
00:26:52.000So as I say, Elena Kagan's dissent in this particular case is not convincing, but it is much smarter than the dissents by Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown-Jackson in the Affirmative Action case and the Religious Freedom case, respectively.
00:27:02.000Those dissents are just disaster areas that are straight from the op-ed page of a college newspaper.
00:27:07.000Kagan's dissent is, um, wrong, but at least somewhat interesting.
00:27:11.000First, she suggests that states did not actually have the standing to sue under this particular case.
00:27:17.000So standing is the issue that I can't— Like, let's say you get hit by a car.
00:27:20.000I can't sue the person who hit you with the car.
00:27:23.000So one of the questions was, if student loans are bailed out, who exactly is damaged?
00:27:27.000The court held that states can sue because there are, in fact, bodies inside the states established by statutory law in the states that help to collect on all of these payments.
00:27:36.000And then the state makes money from that.
00:27:40.000Kagan says that she doesn't believe that's true, that these agencies are established as separate agencies, so really they don't have standing.
00:27:46.000I don't think it's persuasive, but it's an interesting argument at least.
00:27:50.000Then she suggests the statute provides the secretary with broad authority to give emergency relief to student loan borrowers, including by altering usual discharge rules.
00:27:57.000What the secretary did fits comfortably within that delegation, but the court forbids him to proceed.
00:28:01.000Congress delegates to agencies often and broadly, and it usually does so for sound reasons.
00:28:05.000Because agencies have expertise Congress lacks.
00:28:07.000Because times and circumstances change, and agencies are better able to keep up and respond.
00:28:11.000because Congress knows that if it had to do everything, many desirable and even necessary things wouldn't get done.
00:28:16.000In wielding the major question sword, last term in this one,
00:28:18.000the court overrules these legislative decisions.
00:28:20.000So basically she is suggesting that Congress delegated all this power to the executive branch.
00:28:24.000Now, what she says there is really overbroad.
00:28:27.000It basically says that Congress could theoretically just create a law saying,
00:28:33.000make good rules and send it to the executive branch and let all the executive branch agencies fill it in.
00:28:40.000But at least she attempts to make a legal case unlike her colleagues on the Supreme Court,
00:28:44.000just to prove that not all leftists are equally foolish when it comes to their writing of the law.
00:28:48.000Okay, so two big decisions go against Joe Biden.
00:28:51.000That followed hard on Thursday's big decision that went against Joe Biden over affirmative action, striking down affirmative action as an element with regard to college admissions.
00:29:01.000Joe Biden has reacted as you would expect him to.
00:29:04.000He has mumbled from his face hole incoherently.
00:29:08.000So here's Joe Biden suggesting that the court misinterpreted the Constitution, which is weird because literally a day ago, Joe Biden was suggesting that the Declaration of Independence is the Constitution.
00:29:32.000And then he was asked a great question.
00:29:34.000So a Fox News reporter asked Joe Biden, question, why did you sign an executive order waiving student loans when you knew full well you could not?
00:29:41.000Again, internal papers in the government show that, I mean, Joe Biden himself had said, I don't have the power to simply overturn student loans, and then he went ahead and did it.
00:29:47.000In the same way that Barack Obama once suggested he had no power to unilaterally make immigration law, and then he just did it.
00:29:53.000So Joe Biden was asked by Fox, why are you promising people things that you obviously couldn't deliver?
00:29:59.000The question was whether or not if I would do even more than was requested.
00:30:03.000What I did I thought was appropriate and was able to be done and would get done.
00:30:08.000I didn't give Boris false hope, but the Republicans snatched away the hope that they were given, and it's real.
00:30:35.000My executive order today, President Shapiro, this executive order says,
00:30:39.000from the treasury of the United States, a check will be delivered to every household
00:30:42.000in the United States with the amount of $10 million on deposit for each of you in your household.
00:30:49.000And then, when it turns out that's wildly unconstitutional, I have no basis or authority to do it, I say, how dare the evil people who oppose me stop such things?
00:31:53.000It's the only thing keeping me alive right now, given my lack of sleep because of baby, because of three other kids, because of dog.
00:31:58.000If you're nervous about buying a mattress online, you don't have to be, because Helix has a sleep quiz that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you.
00:32:05.000Everything else in your life is personalized.
00:32:06.000Why not the thing you're spending eight hours a night on?
00:33:11.000Okay, so all of this, all these decisions, this of course is leading to a new spate of Democratic calls to basically destroy the Supreme Court.
00:33:18.000Shock of shocks, the irrepressibly stupid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, congresswoman from Twitch, she is leading the way.
00:33:25.000She suggested that it's the justices who are destroying the Supreme Court because they won't do what she wants!
00:33:31.000Are you also saying that the justices' power should somehow be limited?
00:33:40.000I truly do, and this is not a new development in history.
00:33:45.000This is part of our system of checks and balances.
00:33:48.000The courts, if they were to proceed without any check on their power, without any balance on their power, then we will start to see an undemocratic and frankly dangerous authoritarian expansion of power.
00:34:01.000And the Supreme Court has not been receiving My favorite is when she forgets her lines in the middle of lines.
00:34:08.000preserve their own legitimacy and in the process they themselves have been
00:34:12.000destroying the legitimacy of the court which is profoundly dangerous for our
00:34:26.000Guys, remember, what's profoundly dangerous to democracy is if you, a business owner, are allowed to actually run your business as you see fit.
00:34:50.000Democracy also means that the President of the United States can, without any check or balance, simply wipe away half a trillion dollars in actual student loan debt.
00:35:16.000I mean, what Justice Clarence Thomas wrote there, I believe, is profoundly disrespectful.
00:35:22.000I just think it was profoundly disrespectful to his colleague.
00:35:28.000It includes sweeping assumptions about her worldview, whereas when you look at what the response was from Justice Katonji Brown, we saw that her dissent was grounded in fact.
00:35:44.000It was grounded in the facts of the case.
00:36:01.000Elizabeth Warren is openly calling for avoiding the law.
00:36:05.000In fact, she's calling for packing the Supreme Court.
00:36:06.000She put out a tweet saying, She's not an extremist.
00:36:11.000She's a mainstream thinker who also advocated for modern monetary theory, which is the theory that you can spend endless amounts of money without inflation kicking in.
00:36:19.000To rebalance this institution, we must expand it.
00:36:22.000In the meantime, I'll keep fighting back against their damage to make sure we still deliver student debt relief, to protect abortion rights, to defend our freedoms, says Elizabeth Warren.
00:36:29.000Well, she definitely needs to protect affirmative action since she got into some of her positions apparently as a fake native.
00:36:36.000American speaking of people attempting to avoid the consequences of judicial decisions by simply ignoring the law Entire piece in the New York Times today titled with end of affirmative action a push for a new tool Adversity scores.
00:36:47.000They're gonna try and find now the the workarounds that we talked about last week These these pathetic workarounds where they're like, so how disadvantaged are you and the person writes on there?
00:36:55.000I say I'm black and it's like well, that's not a disadvantage Necessarily.
00:36:59.000I mean, you actually have to explain why that would make you disadvantaged in some way.
00:37:32.000When was the last time you asked the disadvantaged background of your pilot on a plane?
00:37:37.000Or were you just mostly interested that they not crash it into the ground?
00:37:40.000In his role at the medical school at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Henderson has tried to change that, developing an unorthodox tool to evaluate applicants, the Socioeconomic Disadvantage Scale, or SED.
00:37:51.000The scale rates every applicant from 0 to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education.
00:37:57.000Admissions decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays, and interviews.
00:38:08.000Well, I mean, here's my real question.
00:38:10.000How many of those diverse doctors are really, really good at their jobs?
00:38:13.000Because it seems like I would really, really just want a good doctor.
00:38:16.000Which is sort of the point of avoiding affirmative action, is that when you lower the standards, and when you artificially allow people into a particular club that requires merit, then you are lowering the standards.
00:38:25.000That this actually ends with some pretty bad ramifications.
00:38:29.000It turns out that basically all the schools are now telling on themselves.
00:38:32.000I mean, they're setting themselves all up for lawsuits.
00:38:33.000So, for example, Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, he recently was caught on tape explaining how he avoids the law in the state of California that bars affirmative action.
00:38:42.000What I mean by unstated affirmative action is, what if the college or university doesn't tell anybody, doesn't make any public statements?
00:38:53.000I'll give you an example from our law school, but if ever I'm deposed I'm going to deny I said this to you.
00:39:01.000When we do faculty hiring, we're quite conscious that diversity is important to us.
00:39:08.000And we say diversity is important, it's fine to say that.
00:39:11.000But I'm very careful when we have a Faculty Appointments Committee meeting.
00:39:14.000Anytime somebody says, you know, we should really prefer this candidate over this candidate because this person would add diversity, don't say that.
00:39:34.000Meanwhile, the Harvard president-elect, Claudine Gay, she basically says the same thing.
00:39:40.000She says, yeah, yeah, we still need diversity.
00:39:41.000And by diversity, she means ethnic diversity.
00:39:43.000And we'll keep pursuing ethnic diversity, but we'll pretend that we're not.
00:39:46.000So, uh, Asian students, sorry, you're still not getting in.
00:39:49.000The Supreme Court's decision on college and university admissions will change how we pursue the educational benefits of diversity.
00:39:58.000But our commitment to that work remains steadfast.
00:40:01.000It's essential to who we are and the mission that we are here to advance.
00:40:06.000For nearly nine years, Harvard vigorously defended our admissions process and our belief that we all benefit from learning, living, and working alongside people of different backgrounds and experiences.
00:40:19.000We will comply with the Court's decision, but it does not change our values.
00:40:24.000We continue to believe deeply that a thriving, diverse intellectual community is essential to academic excellence and critical to shaping the next generation of leaders.
00:40:35.000Unless you politically disagree with us.
00:40:37.000If you politically disagree with us, that's not diversity.
00:40:49.000So again, the courts are going to be busy in upcoming years.
00:40:52.000I was talking to a college student Yesterday, actually, about the results of the affirmative action cases.
00:40:57.000What I said is basically if you're in the Northeast, don't look for lots of change.
00:41:00.000If you are in an area governed by a conservative circuit court of appeals, then look for policies to change rather radically at a lot of these colleges.
00:41:11.000The Supreme Court is Donald Trump's biggest accomplishment as President of the United States, without a doubt.
00:41:17.000The fact that three Supreme Court justices were added during Trump's four years is a massive victory for constitutional conservatism, and we saw the fruits of that not only in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but in the death of affirmative action, the upholding of religious freedom, and the death of Joe Biden's garbage student loan bailout.
00:41:31.000So all of that is good news for those of us who care about balance of power, as well as the actual Constitution as it stands.
00:41:39.000Alrighty, meanwhile, I would be remiss if I did not comment on the situation over in France.
00:41:43.000So, France has now arrested something like thousands and thousands of people.
00:41:48.000On Friday night, they arrested a thousand more people.
00:41:51.000Two of the country's top police unions are threatening a revolt unless Emmanuel Macron's government restores order after protests broke out over an officer's shooting of a teenager outside of Paris, according to dnyus.com.
00:42:02.000Today, the police are in combat because we're at war.
00:42:03.000Tomorrow, we'll enter resistance and the government should be aware of this, they said.
00:42:07.000Apparently British travelers are now being warned not to visit France.
00:42:20.000He was presumably of North African descent, I believe.
00:42:23.000And he was shot point-blank by a police officer.
00:42:25.000He was pulled over for traffic offenses.
00:42:27.000And then he continued to try to drive his car after he was told by the cops not to do so.
00:42:32.000So remember that time that America is uniquely racist and terrible and George Floyd and $2 billion in property damage?
00:42:37.000Well, France has the same issue over there.
00:42:40.000Uh, except their issue is, in many ways, significantly worse, because it also cross-cuts not just in terms of race, it also cross-cuts in terms of religion, because a lot of the people who are rioting right now happen to be Muslim immigrants to the country.
00:42:53.000Alright, time for a quick thing I like and then a very significant thing that I hate.
00:43:58.000Well, I mean, I don't hate this apparently as much as Joe Biden hates his granddaughter.
00:44:02.000That is my only takeaway from a New York Times article talking about the horrific relationship between Hunter and Joe Biden and a four-year-old girl in rural Arkansas.
00:44:11.000Quote, there's a four year old girl in rural Arkansas who's learning to ride a camouflage pattern four wheeler
00:44:16.000alongside her cousins. Some days she wears a bow in her hair.
00:44:19.000On other days, she threads her long blonde ponytail through the back of a baseball cap.
00:44:22.000When she's old enough, she'll learn to hunt like her mom did when she was young.
00:44:25.000The girl is aware that her father is Hunter Biden and that her paternal grandfather is the President of the United States.
00:44:30.000She speaks about both of them often, but she has not met them.
00:44:33.000Her maternal grandfather, Rob Roberts, described her as whip-smart and funny.
00:44:37.000I may not be the president, Mr. Roberts said in a text message using an acronym for the president, but he said he would do anything for his granddaughter.
00:44:43.000He said she needs for nothing and never will.
00:44:45.000The story surrounding the president's grandchild in Arkansas, who is not named in court papers, is a tale of two families, one of them powerful, one of them not.
00:44:51.000But at its story, but at its core, the story is about money, corrosive politics, and what it means to have the Biden birthright.
00:44:57.000Her parents ended a years-long court battle over child support on Thursday, agreeing that Biden, who has embarked on a second career as a painter, whose pieces have been offered for as much as half a million dollars each, would turn over a number of his paintings to his daughter in addition to providing a monthly support payment.
00:45:09.000The little girl will select the paintings from Mr. Biden according to court documents.
00:45:13.000Oh good, she gets absent daddy's finger paintings without the possibility of money laundering, so that's very exciting.
00:45:21.000We worked it out amongst ourselves, said London Roberts, the girl's mother.
00:45:24.000Hunter Biden did not respond to a request for comment in this article.
00:45:28.000Though a trial plan for mid-July has now been averted, people on both sides fear the political toxicity surrounding the case will remain.
00:45:34.000Both Hunter Biden, the privileged and troubled son of a president, and Ms.
00:45:37.000Roberts, the daughter of a rural gunmaker, have allies whose actions have made the situation more politicized.
00:45:41.000There's no evidence the White House is involved in those actions.
00:45:45.000President Biden's public image is centered around his devotion to his family, including to Hunter, his only surviving son.
00:45:51.000In strategy meetings in recent years, aides have been told the Bidens have six, not seven, grandchildren, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
00:45:58.000The White House did not respond to questions about the case, in keeping with how officials have answered questions about the Biden family before.
00:46:05.000So, just to point that out, that is the President of the United States literally disowning one of his own grandchildren because it is ugly for him and for his son.
00:46:17.000London Roberts, 32, comes from a clan as tight-knit as the Bidens.
00:46:20.000Her father is a red state gun manufacturer whose hunting buddies have included Donald Trump Jr.
00:46:24.000and who taught her at a young age how to hunt turkeys and alligators.
00:46:26.000She works for the family business, which sits on a winding country road dotted with pastures on the outskirts of Batesville.
00:46:32.000In pride of her family, the 5'8 Miss Roberts graduated with honors from Southside High School in Batesville and played basketball for Arkansas State University.
00:46:38.000After graduation, she moved to Washington to study forensic investigation at GWU.
00:46:44.000Along the way, she met the son of a future president who is sliding into addiction and visiting Washington strip clubs.
00:46:49.000In mid-2018, Roberts was working as a personal assistant to Biden, according to a person close to her and messages from a cache of Biden's files.
00:46:55.000Their daughter was born later that year.
00:46:56.000By then, Biden had stopped responding to Roberts' message, including one informing him of the child's birth date.
00:47:01.000Shortly after their daughter was born in November 2018, he removed Roberts and the child from his health insurance.
00:47:33.000She captioned a photo of them at the beach earlier this year.
00:47:35.000Seen through one prism, the photos are a powerful public testament of love from mother to daughter.
00:47:41.000Seen through another, they are exploitative, certainly from the perspective of Biden allies, who fear the images and the child are being weaponized against the Biden family.
00:47:47.000Oh, now four-year-old illegitimate children are being weaponized against their fathers, who have ignored them, tried to cut off their actual medical payments, tried to cut off child support and end up in court.
00:47:58.000Man, that terrible mom weaponizing the child that Hunter Biden sired.
00:48:31.000The strength of his political persona, which emphasizes decency, family, and duty, was enough to defeat Trump the first time around.
00:48:36.000He would need to keep it intact if Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024.
00:48:39.000On a proclamation issued on Father's Day, Biden said his father had taught me, above all, But of course, there is a grandchild that he will not speak of.
00:48:51.000Amazing, amazing solid stuff there from the New York Times.
00:48:53.000Still trying to make the case that Hunter and Joe are the real victims in all of this.
00:48:56.000whether he will publicly acknowledge her now that the child support case is settled.
00:48:59.000Amazing, amazing solid stuff there from the New York Times.
00:49:04.000Still trying to make the case that Hunter and Joe are the real victims in all of this.
00:49:18.000That is according to the Daily Caller.
00:49:19.000We are also finding out that Hunter Biden's former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, he could have been asked to testify before a grand jury and he never was.
00:49:28.000So obviously that looks like it's all on the up and up.
00:49:30.000Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.