The New York Times calls Neil Gorsuch a "stolen" Supreme Court seat. Ben Shapiro explains why the Times is wrong, and why Donald Trump's pick of Neil Gorsuch is an excellent one. Plus, tips on how to make the most out of your time with Blue Apron's easy-to-prepare meals. Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative podcast "The Weekly Standard" and host of "The Ben Shapiro Show" on Fox News Radio. He's also a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard and has written for The Daily Wire and The Daily Caller, and is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone and The Huffington Post. His latest book, "The Dark Side of Politics," is out now, and it's available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. Click here to buy a copy of the book for just $19.99. Thanks for listening and share it with your friends! You can also join our FB group, and use the hashtag on that hashtag , and find Ben on Insta: if you re a fan of the show, . to help spread the word about it. . And don t forget to rate, review, and subscribe to Ben Shapiro's new show on Apple Podcasts! and leave us your thoughts on the show! And don't forget to tell us what you think of it! in the comments section below! Thank you for listening, Ben and Ben! ! Timestamps: 5 stars is a star! 6 stars is much appreciated! 7 stars! 9 stars is more than you could count! 10 stars is enough! 11 stars is not enough? 12 stars is too much? 13 stars is better than a star? 15 stars is good enough for me? 14 stars is really enough, right? 16 thanks, Ben? 17? 18 stars is great? 19 stars is even better than you can help me make it better than that? 21st wheeling it out there? 22 more than I can be good to go? 25 stars is pretty good to help me do it? 20 more stars are more than enough, thank me out there?? 21 more? 26 stars are better than I could count me out? 27 more like that than you re not enough, can I help me help me
00:00:00.000On Wednesday, the New York Times issued an editorial filled with impotent rage and unexplored angst over President Trump.
00:00:07.000Supreme Court nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.
00:00:10.000They called Gorsuch's seat a stolen seat since Republicans refused to grant Democrats an up-or-down vote on Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama's nominee to fill Antonin Scalia's seat.
00:00:19.000Instead of recognizing that the Constitution gives the Senate the ability to determine whether to vote on a given candidate or not, The Times suggested that Senate Republicans, quote, took an empty Supreme Court seat hostage.
00:00:30.000Inaccurate, since usually there's a ransom demand with a hostage, and Republicans didn't have one.
00:00:34.000Then, the Times characterized Gorsuch, a man unanimously approved for the Tenth Circuit by a Senate that included Barack Obama and Joe Biden, as extreme.
00:00:43.000Here's the New York Times, quote, President Obama had a great opportunity to repair some of that damage by nominating a moderate candidate for the vacancy, which was created when Justice Antonin Scalia died last February.
00:00:54.000Instead, he chose Neil Gorsuch, a very conservative judge from the Federal Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
00:00:59.000Whose jurisprudence and writing style are often compared to those of Scalia.
00:01:03.000You mean Republicans appointed someone like Scalia to fill his seat?
00:01:22.000The give and take, the grind and groan of politics, that's how the system is supposed to work.
00:01:25.000If Democrats don't like the outcome, tough!
00:01:28.000The Times is actually upset that the Supreme Court may no longer be a super legislature of leftists rewriting the Constitution to fit leftist ends.
00:02:55.000And when I make bets with cultural correspondent Michael Knowles about whether Donald Trump is actually going to appoint a conservative to the court, and then I lose, I fulfill my end of the bet.
00:03:05.000Now, all I ask is that if I end up being right when Trump does bad things, then other people recognize that's true.
00:03:15.000I said there was zero chance that Trump would nominate a textualist to the court because he didn't really care about the court, and also because Mitch McConnell was not going to invoke the nuclear option.
00:05:06.000Okay, so, the big news of the day, of course, is that Donald Trump fulfills his promise.
00:05:10.000And as I said, and I will repeat, I got it wrong.
00:05:13.000And I am very, very happy that I got it wrong.
00:05:15.000I said right after Trump was elected that I would be more than overjoyed if Trump would prove me wrong on things.
00:05:23.000And this is something he proved me wrong about.
00:05:24.000He went out, then he picked an actual textualist.
00:05:28.000And so, in honor of Michael Mulls defeating me in a bet, instead of firing him, which I actually do technically have the power to do, I decided to fulfill my end of the bet.
00:05:36.000Also, I know that he was celebrating a Donald Trump executive order that apparently came down last night.
00:05:53.000For those who are listening to this later, it's Donald Trump signing an executive order that says I'm going to pay Michael Knowles $800 or $400.
00:06:22.000And so, Hardiman has no record, there's no long-standing kind of judicial philosophy you can attribute to Hardiman, and Hardiman is recommended by Trump's sister.
00:06:31.000So, all of the signs therefore point to Hardiman.
00:06:39.000Politically, it's very smart because it shores up his base.
00:06:41.000You know, Trump's had a chaotic first 10 days, to say the least, and this shores up his base.
00:06:45.000I would not be surprised if in the next couple of weeks, Donald Trump starts to push something like a trillion dollar infrastructure package saying, look, I gave you your judge, now give me my infrastructure package.
00:06:54.000That would be the smart political move if he wants to triangulate.
00:06:58.000But you got to be overjoyed if you're a conservative about Judge Gorsuch.
00:07:04.000I want to get one other thing out of the way here, and that is everybody is already breaking out the chisels for Rushmore for Trump because of all of this.
00:07:09.000Listen, a great thing is a great thing.
00:08:08.000So Donald Trump does, leading up to this,
00:08:11.000A lot of people think he is going to do, which is he brings in Hardeman and then he brings in Gorsuch, and then they think there's going to be an actual rose ceremony.
00:08:18.000And so the media is all abuzz with this.
00:08:20.000And then it turns out that Trump actually does something great, not just picking Gorsuch, doing it in a dignified way.
00:08:25.000So he has the ceremony last night where he hands the rose to Gorsuch, basically.
00:08:32.000Here's Donald Trump introducing Judge Gorsuch.
00:08:35.000When Justice Scalia passed away suddenly last February, I made a promise to the American people.
00:08:42.000If I were elected President, I would find the very best judge in the country for the Supreme Court.
00:08:51.000I promised to select someone who respects our laws and is representative of our Constitution, and who loves our Constitution, and someone who will interpret them as written.
00:09:06.000Okay, I don't know who's writing this stuff for him, but it's great.
00:09:08.000Okay, this is all terrific, and again, do I think that Trump deeply cares about this stuff?
00:09:12.000No, but I don't care whether he cares about this stuff, since all I care about is the result, right?
00:09:15.000I don't care about what his thinking process is.
00:09:17.000The result is great, and the result is Judge Gorsuch.
00:09:20.000So Gorsuch then comes to the stage, and here's what Gorsuch has to say about the Constitution.
00:09:26.000Standing here, in a house of history, and acutely aware of my own imperfections,
00:09:32.000I pledge that if I am confirmed, I will do all my powers permit to be a faithful servant of the Constitution and laws of this great country.
00:09:41.000Okay, and then he continues along those lines by saying that he talks about Justice Scalia, who he was friends with.
00:09:45.000He said that he cried when Scalia died.
00:09:47.000Here's what he said about Justice Scalia.
00:09:49.000The towering judges that have served in this particular seat of the Supreme Court, including Antonin Scalia and Robert Jackson, are much in my mind at this moment.
00:10:21.000I think Gorsuch is going to be very much like Alito.
00:10:23.000He'll actually be to the right of Alito.
00:10:25.000And the reason I say this is because, from what we can tell, from what we can tell based on the best available evidence, this is a guy who actually has a coherent judicial philosophy.
00:10:33.000And his judicial philosophy is that you ought to read the Constitution as it was meant, when it was written.
00:10:39.000That's his philosophy, which is Scalia's philosophy as well.
00:10:54.000All of us face the problem of complicity.
00:10:56.000All of us must answer for ourselves whether and to what degree we are willing to be involved in the wrongdoing of others.
00:11:01.000For some, religion provides an essential source of guidance both about what constitutes wrongful conduct and the degree to which those who assist others in committing wrongful conduct themselves bear moral culpability.
00:11:11.000This statute violates their faith, representing a degree of complicity their religion disallows.
00:11:16.000And here's what he wrote in 2005 at National Review.
00:11:31.000American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders in the ballot box as the primary means of affecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private school education.
00:11:45.000This overweening addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary.
00:12:15.000That's a pretty hard slap in that lecture at Justice Roberts, who rewrote the law in Obamacare in order to achieve a result that he thought was best.
00:12:36.000In one area, actually, Gorsuch is better than Scalia.
00:12:38.000He's not as good a writer as Scalia, because Scalia is one of the great judicial writers of all time, but in one area he's better, and that's what they call Chevron deference.
00:12:44.000So Chevron deference, there's a case from 1984, I believe, it's called Chevron, and the basic case was that there was an environmental regulation that was interpreted by the EPA in a certain way, and people sued, and they said the EPA is interpreting this law wrong, and the EPA judged that those people were wrong, so these people went to court and they sued the EPA.
00:13:03.000And the EPA said, listen, we're the ones tasked with interpreting the law.
00:13:16.000He says, no, that allows for impermissible abdication of duty by Congress.
00:13:20.000Because if Congress were to send a law to the EPA saying, we want you to interpret all environmental policy, that doesn't now mean that the EPA gets to be its own legislature.
00:13:28.000It's Congress's job to pass laws, it's the executive's branch to implement them, if the executive branch implements them in ways that are not
00:13:36.000According to what a reasonable definition of the statute would be, then the judiciary can overrule them.
00:13:43.000If they don't pick the most reasonable interpretation, the judiciary can overrule them.
00:13:47.000In 2016, he said, quote, that the Chevron rule, excuse me,
00:14:27.000This is a home run pick for Donald Trump.
00:14:29.000I'm not sure that he could have done any better.
00:14:32.000And again, he comes to conclusions, Gorsuch does, based on the law, not based on what he would want the law to be.
00:14:37.000Which sometimes means that conservatives aren't going to like the outcome.
00:14:40.000But that's not what the Supreme Court is for.
00:14:41.000The Supreme Court is not just to get a conservative outcome, it's to get a constitutional outcome.
00:14:46.000He voted the right way on Hobby Lobby.
00:14:49.000Most important, for Trump's purposes, he was easily confirmed in 2006, he was confirmed unanimously, they didn't even take a roll call vote, they took a voice vote on Gorsuch, which means Obama voted for him, Biden voted for him, they all voted for him.
00:15:02.000Okay, we have to pause and say thank you to another one of our advertisers.
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00:16:46.000He has a decade of proven experience on the Court of Appeals, being faithful to the Constitution, following the law, protecting the Bill of Rights and our fundamental liberties.
00:16:58.000will yield a swift confirmation in the United States Senate.
00:17:02.000And we'll find out about the swift confirmation, but to talk about what the Democrats are going to do about this, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com right now and subscribe.
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