Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - October 16, 2020


Ep 314 ｜ The Monumental Importance of the Supreme Court ｜ Guest： Sen. Ted Cruz


Episode Stats

Length

24 minutes

Words per Minute

169.49644

Word Count

4,093

Sentence Count

268

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

5


Summary

Ted Cruz joins me to talk about the importance of the Supreme Court, the threat to our freedoms posed by a Democratic majority on the court, and why we should care more about the policies and decisions that affect our civil liberties than about the person on the ballot.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Today I have a very special guest, Senator Ted Cruz. We
00:00:16.180 are talking about the Supreme Court, the importance of the Supreme Court, the threat to our freedoms
00:00:22.680 that packing the Supreme Court, something that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going
00:00:26.880 to do if they win, something that Democrats have said that they're going to do if they
00:00:31.440 gain power, why that is such a threat to our liberty and to our civil rights. We are going
00:00:39.160 to talk about all of that today with him. This is one of those conversations that is
00:00:46.480 so important when we are thinking about who to vote for. I know I sound like a broken
00:00:50.800 record, but if there is anything that I can emphasize that I can get people to see is
00:00:57.200 that this election, all elections, but I would say in particular this election has such far
00:01:03.800 reaching implications. If we are talking about a party, the Democratic Party, who has said
00:01:09.260 that they want to pack the Supreme Court, that means expanding the Supreme Court to 13 seats,
00:01:14.440 filling in those extra seats with liberal justices. Liberal justices always go in the
00:01:20.680 way of democratic dogma no matter what the law says, no matter what the Constitution says.
00:01:25.460 So that means liberal activism at the expense of your civil liberties. If they do that, if
00:01:31.660 they abolish the Electoral College, if they decide that they're going to give statehood to Puerto
00:01:36.280 Rico and D.C., if they decide that they are going to be able to reconfigure the Senate, which
00:01:41.520 of course would be hard to do. But many people on the left do not believe that the Senate should
00:01:47.460 have the same number of representatives, the same number of senators per state, they believe,
00:01:54.420 like the House of Representatives, that it should be based on population. If that happens,
00:01:59.320 it will no longer be a democracy. We will no longer live in a representative democracy
00:02:05.180 in a republic. The middle of the country, the minority will not have a say at all. The way our
00:02:12.120 system is set up now, it makes sure that the 51% are not tyrannically ruling over the 49%. That is
00:02:20.700 how our country was set up intentionally and abolishing the Electoral College, reconfiguring
00:02:26.720 the Senate, makes sure that conservatives, especially conservatives in the middle of the country,
00:02:31.400 don't have a say anymore in our democratic processes. They are using the courts, especially
00:02:37.320 the Supreme Court, to pass ideas and policies that they know are not popular democratically and
00:02:43.520 that they can't get passed through legislative means. And so they weaponize the courts in order
00:02:49.000 to push things that the democratic elites want, but the rest of the country does not want. That's how it
00:02:54.740 works. And so voting for President Trump has these long-term implications because we are talking about
00:03:01.780 nominating and confirming a justice in Amy Coney Barrett that is going to have a lifelong appointment
00:03:08.360 and whose decisions are going to have lifelong generational implications. And so when we are
00:03:17.700 talking about the election and we're talking about the consequences of the election, it is so much more
00:03:23.380 important to think about things like this and think about the preservation of things like the First
00:03:28.260 and Second Amendment, those amendments that protect constitutional rights for all demographics,
00:03:33.540 rich, poor, black, white, immigrant, native-born, whoever you are. And it's so much more important
00:03:40.060 that we think about the preservation of those rights than a president's personality. And again, I know I've
00:03:46.100 said this so many times, but policies, decisions made by judges and by the Supreme Court are what is going
00:03:54.700 to shape your future and the future for your children and your children's children. Not Trump's
00:04:01.380 personality, not whether or not he interrupts at debates, not even his personal foibles and his
00:04:06.340 moral flaws, which I understand he has many. That doesn't mean that we can't criticize him. That doesn't
00:04:11.520 mean that we can't point out where he's wrong or where he's not Christ-like. We don't have to pretend
00:04:15.600 like he is our savior. But when we are voting, we are thinking about the policies and the decisions that
00:04:21.560 are going to affect our civil liberties, that are going to affect our constitutional rights and the
00:04:27.760 rights of our kids and our grandkids. And so take a step back from Trump's personality, from his personal
00:04:35.240 failures, and think about what policies and decisions you want implemented. I've tried to make the case over
00:04:41.940 the past several weeks that conservative policies are best for every demographic. That doesn't mean the
00:04:48.280 Democrats get everything wrong. That doesn't mean that everyone on the left is wrong about
00:04:52.640 everything. But the current brand of leftism, which is far leftism, that is increasing in popularity in
00:04:59.300 the Democratic Party, I believe only has the ability by nature, only has the ability to deconstruct
00:05:06.620 and divide. It does not have the ability to build up and to bring together. Leftism just doesn't.
00:05:12.340 If you look at the history of Marxism, how it's been implemented throughout the world, which is the brand of
00:05:17.040 leftism that we're seeing from the Black Lives Matter, Antifa, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Kamala Harris,
00:05:24.300 Bernie Sanders, wing of the party. It doesn't work. The implementation of Marxism of socialism
00:05:30.320 only divides, it only brings destruction and deconstruction and ultimately suffering and
00:05:36.300 starvation and resentment and tyranny. It never ends well. And for people to vote for Joe Biden based
00:05:42.860 on the fact that he seems like a nicer guy, which honestly, to me, he doesn't. Seems like maybe a
00:05:48.660 little bit of a better guy because he's a calmer in a debate and because he wears a mask when President
00:05:54.400 Trump doesn't and he doesn't tweet the same as President Trump. It's short-sighted. It's short-sighted.
00:05:59.200 So that's what this episode is about today. This episode is about the importance of long-term
00:06:04.580 thinking when we are thinking about our vote. And a great example of thinking long-term is the Supreme
00:06:12.700 Court and who is going to be making the decisions that will have an effect on which constitutional
00:06:19.460 rights are preserved and which ones are thrown out the window for left-wing activism.
00:06:23.620 Senator Cruz, thank you so much for joining me.
00:06:38.020 Thank you for having me. It's good to be with you.
00:06:40.000 Yes. So you've written this book, One Vote Away. It's about the Supreme Court,
00:06:43.800 why the Supreme Court is so important. Can you just briefly tell us what inspired you to write this book
00:06:49.520 right now? Well, I actually sat down and wrote it this spring and summer. So it was during the
00:06:56.100 lockdown and I was at home working from home and so pulled out my laptop and wrote it. And obviously
00:07:03.120 at the time I had no idea that we would have a Supreme Court vacancy in October. But I did know that
00:07:09.320 of course we had a presidential election in November. And I think judges and the Supreme Court in particular
00:07:15.820 are the single most important reason to vote for Donald Trump over Joe Biden. And so this book,
00:07:23.380 the way it's structured is each chapter talks about a different constitutional liberty.
00:07:28.840 So there's a chapter on free speech. There's a chapter on religious liberty. There's a chapter
00:07:33.360 on the Second Amendment. There's a chapter on democracy and elections. And it's not an academic
00:07:39.200 or theoretical book. Instead, it's practical and real. What it does is bring people inside,
00:07:45.700 bring people behind the curtain, inside the court to understand the Supreme Court, understand the
00:07:50.880 justices. You know, before I was in the Senate, I was a Supreme Court litigator. That's what I did for
00:07:55.900 a living was argue cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. And so every chapter tells war stories of the
00:08:02.820 big landmark cases, many of which I helped litigate to help people really understand what's going on
00:08:09.660 there. And, you know, it's striking on case after case after case. Many of them were five to four,
00:08:16.420 meaning we're just one vote away from losing our fundamental liberties.
00:08:21.400 There seems to be a lot of confusion, at least in more liberal circles online, the difference between
00:08:27.940 a constitutional right and a privilege. We see a lot that if you are against the Constitution or if
00:08:33.360 you disagree with the with a Supreme Court decision on a constitutional basis, it must mean that you
00:08:38.880 don't want women to have rights or LGBTQ people to have rights or whatever it is. Can you explain why
00:08:45.980 that is a fallacious argument and maybe the difference between an actual constitutional right and a
00:08:51.700 privilege? Well, there are all sorts of things that may or may not be good policy decisions,
00:08:59.200 but that are not under the Constitution given to judges to decree. You know, under our constitutional
00:09:06.040 system, public policy is meant to be debated in in the legislatures, in the elected bodies.
00:09:12.700 What happened and I trace this history in the book is is in the 1960s, the left decided that that
00:09:19.640 convincing their fellow Americans of their policy agenda was too hard. And so instead, they would
00:09:26.660 just go to the courts and it was much easier to get five unelected lawyers in robes to decree that
00:09:33.860 result for the whole country than actually to try to convince Americans it was a good idea. And so
00:09:40.860 we've seen that pattern go on and on and on. Look, I'll give an example. So one of the chapters in the
00:09:46.480 book is about school choice. I am passionate about school choice. I think school choice is the civil
00:09:52.460 rights issue of the next century. That being said, I don't think it's the court's job to mandate school
00:10:00.080 choice. I think it would be wrong for the Supreme Court to say we have to have school choice everywhere
00:10:04.480 in America. The right place to make that argument and to win that fight is in the elected legislatures
00:10:10.500 in the state and in the U.S. Congress. And in the Senate, I lead the fight for school choice in the
00:10:14.960 Senate. But what I describe in the book is the case called Zellman versus Simmons-Harris,
00:10:20.820 where there was a challenge to Ohio school choice program. It went to the Supreme Court. By a vote of
00:10:27.040 5-4, the Supreme Court upheld the program. But four justices were ready to strike the program down
00:10:34.140 and strike down every other school choice program in America to rule that nobody could have school
00:10:40.000 choice. Now, that is blatantly contrary to the Constitution. But we're one justice away
00:10:45.100 from a five-justice left-wing majority shutting down every school choice program in the country.
00:10:52.020 Can you explain the difference between how a left-wing justice or judge decides a case versus
00:11:00.280 constitutionalist, originalist, textualist, judge or justice?
00:11:04.440 Sure. It's a great question. The job of a justice is to follow the law, not to implement whatever
00:11:13.340 policy they might agree with or they might not agree with, but to follow the law and follow the
00:11:17.700 Constitution. And so that means in the school choice context, allowing the elected legislatures
00:11:23.920 to decide whether you agree with or don't agree with what they like. Or another example is the
00:11:29.220 Second Amendment. So there's a chapter in the book talking about the case Heller versus District of
00:11:34.420 Columbia. It's the landmark Second Amendment case. What happened there is a fellow named Dick Anthony
00:11:41.700 Heller, who was a federal police officer in D.C. He carried a firearm at work, but D.C. law made it
00:11:49.140 illegal for him to have a functional firearm at home. And so he filed a lawsuit challenging that. It went
00:11:55.660 all the way to the Supreme Court. I represented 31 states before the Supreme Court defending the
00:12:02.960 individual right to keep and bear arms. And the Supreme Court, by a vote of five to four, struck down
00:12:09.080 the D.C. law, said it was inconsistent with the Second Amendment right. It was Justice Scalia wrote the
00:12:13.460 opinion. It is the finest opinion Justice Scalia ever wrote. Now, the position of the dissenters, and this is
00:12:20.720 important to understand, it wasn't that some gun control sometimes is a good idea or is acceptable.
00:12:27.460 That's something actually on which reasonable minds can differ. We can have an intelligent debate about
00:12:33.040 what the right standard is for whether gun control works or it doesn't. That was not what the dissenters
00:12:39.140 said. What the dissenters said was that the Second Amendment protects no individual right to keep and
00:12:45.580 bear arms whatsoever. None. That it protects only what they called a collective right of the militia,
00:12:52.400 which is essentially fancy lawyer talk for a non-existent right. What it would mean if they got
00:12:58.500 one more vote, if the four justices became five, it would mean that no American, you, I, nobody would have
00:13:06.500 any individual right at all under the Second Amendment. That if Congress or the state or your city
00:13:11.960 made it a crime for you to own a gun, that you would have zero legal remedies, and it functionally
00:13:19.460 is erasing the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights. It's deleting it. Now, in this instance,
00:13:24.080 the liberals don't like that people own guns. They support gun control. Well, it doesn't matter what
00:13:29.900 their policy preferences are. The Second Amendment is written into the Bill of Rights, and the job of a
00:13:34.660 justice is to enforce the terms of the Constitution. Right. Can you tell us what other civil liberties
00:13:42.000 are on the line? If Joe Biden does get his way, either if they pack the courts, which I'm going to
00:13:48.820 ask you about, or if he just gets his liberal judicial nominee confirmed? Sure. I'll give you another
00:13:57.560 example. One of the chapters in the book is on free speech, and I focus in particular on Citizens
00:14:05.540 United. Now, a lot of folks have heard of Citizens United. They don't really know what the case was
00:14:10.220 about, but they know that Democrats really hate it. It's worth focusing on what Citizens United was
00:14:16.600 about, because it was about whether you and I have the right to criticize politicians. In that case,
00:14:24.820 Citizens United, the group, is a small nonprofit organization based in D.C. They made a movie
00:14:31.420 that was critical of Hillary Clinton, and the Obama Justice Department wanted to go after them.
00:14:37.420 They wanted to be able to fine them and punish them for daring to make a movie critical of Hillary
00:14:43.040 Clinton. Case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and there was one really, really chilling
00:14:49.080 exchange at the oral argument. Justice Sam Alito asked the Obama Justice Department, he said,
00:14:55.680 under your theory of the case, would the government have the authority to ban books? Could the federal
00:15:03.260 government ban books if they criticize politicians? And the Obama Justice Department said, yes,
00:15:09.720 we have the authority to ban books, never mind what the First Amendment says, we can ban any book we
00:15:14.440 don't like if it criticizes a politician. Citizens United was five to four, so the majority struck
00:15:21.320 down that attempt at government power and said, no, the First Amendment gives us a right to speak and to
00:15:29.240 criticize politicians, but there were four justices willing to hold the federal government can prohibit
00:15:35.040 movies and books if they criticize anyone in politics. That is a radical, extreme position, and I'll tell you
00:15:43.900 even more scary, both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have explicitly pledged to nominate justices who
00:15:50.780 will vote to overturn Citizens United, so to take away our free speech rights, and they've also pledged
00:15:56.740 to nominate justices who will vote to overturn Heller, so to take away our Second Amendment rights. These
00:16:02.280 rights are at the edge of the precipice one vote away.
00:16:17.120 You hear a lot from the left that people like Amy Coney Barrett, Republicans want to take away their
00:16:23.340 rights, and yet the examples that they give, they don't really, they don't hold a lot of water. There's not a
00:16:31.120 lot of evidence behind it. Can you tell me kind of what's behind those accusations of conservative
00:16:36.900 justices taking away what leftists see as rights? Well, you know, it's interesting. They say that,
00:16:45.980 but you know who didn't say it? Was Kamala Harris last night in the debate. You know who didn't say it
00:16:50.920 a week earlier? Was Joe Biden in the debate with Donald Trump. And actually, the left knows that their
00:16:57.640 positions are not popular. The left knows that taking away free speech is a very unpopular
00:17:03.100 position. The left knows that erasing the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights is very unpopular.
00:17:08.180 The left knows that their assault on religious liberty, there's a whole chapter on religious
00:17:13.360 liberty. One of the things it talks about is the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic convent of
00:17:18.380 nuns who the Obama administration persecuted to try to force the nuns to pay for abortion-inducing
00:17:26.380 drugs and others. And by the way, Joe Biden has pledged if he's elected, he'll resume persecuting
00:17:33.280 the Little Sisters of the Poor. That's not a popular position. And it really, I think it's worth
00:17:39.600 conservatives, Republicans ought to note that in the debates, Kamala and Joe don't defend those
00:17:46.160 positions. They run away. They pretend, you know, it was really revealing last night when Kamala was
00:17:51.420 asked, I think, four separate times, are you and Joe going to try to pack the Supreme Court if you
00:17:57.300 win? And she wouldn't answer. She wouldn't answer. She wouldn't answer. She wouldn't answer. And the
00:18:01.440 answer is yes. Their radical base wants them to do that. But they know the American people don't want
00:18:07.980 to see the court politicized, turned into essentially a democratic super legislature that overturns the will of the
00:18:16.980 people. If you want to change policies in our country, the right way to do it is the political process.
00:18:23.240 Convince your fellow citizens. But democracy is messy. And the far left, they don't believe in it anymore. They believe in
00:18:31.680 dictatorship and power and orthodoxy and censorship. And if you dissent from anything they say, they will
00:18:38.080 cancel you. They will silence you. They will shut you down. And that's an incredibly unpopular position.
00:18:44.400 But I think it's incumbent on us to point out that's what they're arguing for.
00:18:48.600 And the funny thing is, their buzz phrase right now is save our democracy, preserve our democracy by electing
00:18:54.180 Joe Biden. They've talked about packing the Supreme Court and abolishing the Electoral College.
00:18:58.400 I mean, I don't understand how that is the preservation of democracy. Could you talk about
00:19:03.580 specifically what are the implications and really what's the meaning of, first of all,
00:19:08.260 packing the court and even doing other things like possibly abolishing the Electoral College?
00:19:14.320 Yeah, well, you know, there's an entire chapter in the book on democracy and elections. And what it
00:19:19.640 talks about principally is the case Bush versus Gore. So I was part of the legal team that represented
00:19:25.920 George W. Bush and Bush versus Gore. I was a young lawyer at the time. I was working actually on the George
00:19:32.760 W. Bush presidential campaign. So I was living in Austin, Texas, met my wife, Heidi. We met on the campaign.
00:19:39.100 We were in cubicles about 20, 30 feet apart from each other. And if you remember what happened in the year 2000,
00:19:46.440 on Election Day, George W. Bush won. They counted the votes and he won. But in Florida, it was very close.
00:19:52.940 And so Al Gore sent in teams of lawyers to challenge the election outcome. And, you know, what you do if
00:20:00.440 you've lost when you're doing an election challenge is you try to throw out the votes of the winner and
00:20:04.660 you try to get more votes for yourself. And so that's what Gore was doing. He was trying to throw
00:20:08.300 out votes for George W. Bush. And he was trying to find new Al Gore votes after the votes had been
00:20:13.200 cast. I was in Tallahassee, was part of the legal team from the from the beginning and was down there
00:20:20.080 the entire time. You know, one of the things I describe in the book is, is it was utter chaos.
00:20:26.200 You know, in the war room, we had a whiteboard on the wall that had a chart. There were seven
00:20:32.520 different lawsuits, all pending simultaneously, any one of which could cost the presidency of the
00:20:38.200 United States. And and twice the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. So the first time it went to
00:20:44.780 the Supreme Court, we won unanimously. We won nine to nothing. The Supreme Court concluded the Florida
00:20:50.400 Supreme Court, which was a partisan Democratic Court, had gotten it wrong. So they vacated that
00:20:55.300 decision. They sent it back. The second time it went to the Supreme Court on the question of remedy,
00:21:00.900 the final outcome, the court divided five to four by a vote of five to four. The court said enough is
00:21:08.240 enough. The ballots now have been counted four times. George W. Bush has won all four times.
00:21:14.240 You can't keep challenging and challenging and challenging and dragging, dragging the election
00:21:18.860 out. It's over. Now, the course of that recount was 36 days, 36 days where the entire country and
00:21:26.400 the entire world didn't know who the next president would be. It was chaos. It was uncertainty. And what
00:21:31.540 the Democrats wanted to do is they wanted the courts to decide instead of the voters. They didn't like that
00:21:37.940 the voters had chosen George W. Bush. And so they were trying to get judges to set that decision aside.
00:21:43.580 It's the same thing. I think there's a very good chance we will face that same kind of electoral
00:21:49.040 litigation after this election. And the Democrats want the courts to rule for them, never mind what
00:21:55.980 the law says, to say Joe Biden wins. And if you want to understand the issues that are really at stake
00:22:03.300 there, the book, One Vote Away, How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History. The book is really,
00:22:12.080 I think, a very helpful tool to understand the Supreme Court. A lot of people know it's important,
00:22:17.520 but you don't necessarily understand what's going on. This book is designed, you don't have to be a
00:22:21.240 lawyer to enjoy it. It's designed to be understandable, readable, interesting, and bring you inside.
00:22:28.080 But it also gives you the insight what the election is about in November and what the epic fight over
00:22:35.280 Judge Barrett that we're in the middle of right now. When you're talking to your friends, when you're
00:22:39.600 talking to your family, you want to understand these issues. And this book, I got to say, it's
00:22:45.140 been really encouraging. It's shot to number one, the top bestseller in the country on Amazon.
00:22:50.440 That is awesome. And I think it's because people are finding it helpful and interesting and fun and
00:22:55.440 readable. So I would encourage folks, go to Amazon, go to Barnes and Noble, go anywhere you get your
00:23:00.600 books, and I think you'll find it both interesting and helpful. Yes, it's extremely, extremely readable
00:23:06.620 and easy to understand. Thank you so much for writing it. Just very quickly, what are the chances of
00:23:12.540 Amy Coney Barrett being confirmed before the election? I think they are very, very good. I believe
00:23:18.480 the Senate will confirm Judge Barrett. We're going to start the hearings next week. The Democrats are
00:23:23.500 going to do everything they can to turn it into a political circus like they did with Justice
00:23:27.260 Kavanaugh. But I believe we have the votes. I don't think the Democrats can stop it. They're going to
00:23:32.640 yell and scream and stomp their feet. But at the end of the day, I believe Judge Barrett will be
00:23:38.040 confirmed by the end of the month before Election Day. And I think that is a major victory. By nominating
00:23:45.120 her, President Trump was delivering on his promises to the voters. And by confirming her,
00:23:50.260 the Republican majority in the Senate will be delivering on our promises to the voters.
00:23:54.080 Yes. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for your fight and what you stand for. Thank you for writing
00:23:58.040 this book. I do encourage everyone to go and check it out. Purchase it on Amazon, wherever you
00:24:03.080 get your books. Thank you so much, Senator Cruz.
00:24:05.580 Thank you. Really appreciate it. God bless. You too.