After the media spend four years warning of an incipient dictatorship, President Joe Biden decides to govern by executive fiat. Confusion still reigns on Biden s "CODI" policy, and 45 Senate Republicans vote essentially to dismiss impeachment. Ben Shapiro explains why Joe Biden can't just do things by executive order, and why the Constitution doesn't allow him to do them. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Don't let Big Tech track what you do, anonymize your web browsing, and don't let big tech track who you do it. Anonymize yourself, and you'll be on your way to becoming a better user of the internet. Use the promo code: PGPodcasts to receive 20% off your first month with discount code POWER10 at checkout. You don't have to be a subscriber to get 10% off the first month, but you can be a supporter of ExpressVPN if you sign up for a free trial, and get 15% off for the rest of the year. If you're not a member of the ExpressVPN, you can get 25% off by becoming a patron. That's free! You'll get 7 months free of the service, plus an additional 3 months free when you become a patron when you upgrade your membership, and they'll get you an ad-free version of the entire year for free. Allowing you access to all of their newest features and features, plus a 20% discount, plus they'll also gets you an extra $5,000 in the first year, plus you'll get an ad discount when you signup for a year, you get an additional $100,000 gets you get $50,000, they get $150, they decide what you choose, they also get a choice, they'll give you a freebie, they say they'll make you a maximum of $150.00 a month, they're going to give you that chance to upgrade their service. They'll also get you a FREEbie of the whole year, they tell you a year of the Daily Wire Pro? After the media spends four years of warning of incipient democracy, Ben Shapiro's show called "The Ben Shapiro Showing it all, and Ben Shapiro does it all of that, and he'll tell you what he does that in the show, and I'll tell me what he thinks of it in a review of The Ben Shapiro show, so you get it all.
00:00:23.000Anonymize your web browsing at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
00:00:26.000We're going to get to everything in the news in just one moment.
00:00:29.000First, you should be attempting to save money this year.
00:00:31.000I mean, you should every year, but now would be a really good time to save money considering the state of the economy.
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00:01:10.000Grab your mobile phone, dial pound 250, say Ben Shapiro.
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00:01:15.000Why would you be spending a lot more money for a cell phone coverage that is like exactly the same as the cell phone coverage you could get from Pure Talk USA for maybe half the cost?
00:01:46.000He constantly says things about the Constitution that are kind of true, and then he just proceeds to ignore them.
00:01:52.000So, I want to flash you back to the middle of the campaign, and Joe Biden is being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos, Democratic operative and ABC News anchor.
00:02:03.000And George Stephanopoulos is asking him why exactly he can't just do things.
00:02:26.000Here's Joe Biden circa just a couple of months ago talking about how presidents are not supposed to govern by executive fiat.
00:02:33.000The one thing, and I have this strange notion, we are a democracy.
00:02:38.000Some of my Republican friends and some of my Democratic friends even occasionally say, well, if you can't get the votes by executive order, you're going to do something.
00:02:46.000Things you can't do by executive order unless you're a dictator.
00:02:53.000And also, you can't just do things by executive order, is it?
00:02:56.000Also, that'd be a dictatorship if there was just one guy who could, you know, just use executive orders and put his whims into law that way.
00:03:04.000Wouldn't that be kind of dictatorial, it seems?
00:03:10.000Joe Biden is now the president of the United States.
00:03:13.000According to Hank Barron at Daily Wire, through Monday, January 25th, the sixth day of his tenure in office, Joe Biden had issued 28 executive orders, dwarfing the initial number of executive orders issued by former presidents in the initial days of their tenure.
00:03:24.000Former President Trump signed four executive orders in the first week of his tenure, with a total of 220 executive orders signed in his total time as president.
00:03:32.000Former President Barack Obama signed five in the first week, 276 overall.
00:03:36.000Former President George W. Bush signed zero in his first week.
00:03:40.000Former President Bill Clinton signed one in his first week.
00:03:43.000President Joe Biden has signed 28 in the first six days.
00:03:48.000Apparently, he signed a few more yesterday.
00:04:03.000Generally, in executive order, and I've been very much anti-executive orders since as long as I can remember, because this is not how the Constitution was supposed to operate.
00:04:12.000In fact, if you look in the Constitution, you'll notice there is no verbiage with regard to executive orders.
00:04:27.000Well, they've been used since the beginning of the Republic essentially to allow the executive branch to effectuate the will of the legislature.
00:04:33.000The idea was, the legislature tells the executive branch to do something, and now the executive branch has to do it.
00:04:38.000But the legislature has not been specific enough in how they want the executive branch to do it, and so now the executive branch has to effectuate that.
00:05:19.000Essentially what we have in this country is a Congress that sometimes passes giant omnibus packages that spend a lot of money and delegates tremendous authority to the executive branch, which is staffed by two million people.
00:05:31.000Hundreds of thousands under the auspices of various regulatory agencies.
00:05:35.000They turn out tens of thousands of pages of regulations that are highly specific and govern your everyday life.
00:05:40.000More of what happens in your everyday life is governed by the workings of the regulatory agencies inside the executive branch than is governed by Congress itself.
00:05:49.000Congress is just there to pass defense bills and sometimes cut your taxes or raise your taxes or to pass these omnibus spending packages.
00:05:59.000They're a vestigial organ of government.
00:06:02.000They exist almost the way that the Parliament used to exist in Great Britain with regard to the King.
00:06:06.000They were just there to basically fund whatever the King wanted to do.
00:06:09.000The King would go to Parliament, and if he didn't get what he wanted from Parliament, then he would dissolve Parliament, then he'd call a new Parliament, and then Parliament would give him the money that he wanted.
00:06:17.000The only difference is that we elect our dictator every four years.
00:06:21.000Every four years, we get to decide who is going to issue the executive orders.
00:06:25.000And limitations on executive orders have been really falling apart for a hundred years, essentially.
00:06:32.000FDR issued tons and tons of executive orders that really outstripped the power of the office.
00:06:38.000The Supreme Court case that typically is used to discuss exactly what executive orders are allowed to do is a case that is called Youngstown.
00:06:47.000Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company versus Sawyer.
00:06:50.000This is a case that cropped up during the Truman administration.
00:06:53.000Basically, we're in the middle of the Korean War, and there is a labor union at a steel mill.
00:06:58.000And the labor union decided to strike at the steel mill.
00:07:00.000And Truman, because we're in the middle of a war and we needed steel, instead of trying to use the Taft-Hartley Act to break the union, instead of using the Taft-Hartley Act to enjoin the strike for 60 days, instead, Truman decided essentially to seize the steel mill.
00:07:16.000He said, I have the executive authority to just take away private property for war production.
00:07:21.000Well, the Supreme Court said, well, actually, you can't do that by executive order.
00:07:24.000That is not something you can do by executive fiat.
00:07:27.000There's a justice named Robert Jackson, and Justice Jackson then proceeded to write a concurrence, and he spelled out exactly what executive orders are for.
00:07:37.000He said, presidential powers are not fixed, but fluctuate depending upon their disjunction or conjunction with those of Congress.
00:07:43.000And then he created what he called an oversimplified grouping of practical situations in which a president may doubt or others may challenge his powers.
00:07:50.000So one, when the president acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress's authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all the Congress can delegate.
00:08:10.000And here is where presidents have begun to expand their power and they've never stopped expanding their power.
00:08:14.000Two, When the president acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, he can rely only upon his own independent powers.
00:08:22.000But there is a zone of twilight in which he and Congress may have concurrent authority or in which distribution is uncertain.
00:08:27.000Therefore, congressional inertia, indifference, or quiescence may sometimes, at least as a practical matter, enable, if not invite, measures on independent presidential responsibility.
00:08:36.000In this area, any actual test of power is likely to depend on the imperatives of events.
00:08:40.000So basically, what you have seen is presidents after presidents declare that Congress has not acted in this area, nor will they act.
00:09:41.000Okay, what diversity and sensitivity training generally mean in the context of corporate and federal oversight and training, generally what those mean, are these pathetic struggle sessions in which you are called before some sort of human resources quote-unquote expert and you are explained how if you say something completely inoffensive it is actually racist.
00:10:03.000You are told that white supremacy dictates the way that all of America's institutions work and if you don't acknowledge your own white supremacy then this is just because you are in fact a white supremacist.
00:10:13.000And this is how a lot of these diversity training regimens work.
00:10:16.000Now, Trump banned this in the last months of his administration.
00:10:19.000He wrote an executive order, and this governs inside the federal branch, right?
00:10:24.000So the president actually does have some power here because he gets to make the rules for the people who work for him.
00:10:29.000And Trump said, I'm not going to have federal employees taught a bunch of claptrap about how America's institutions are inherently white supremacist, and how if you believe in a colorblind meritocracy, this means you are a racist.
00:10:39.000But Joe Biden comes in, and the first thing he does is he says, you know what?
00:10:42.000We're going to go back to training people that America is inherently unfair and cruel, and the only way to fix America is radical change to its institutions.
00:10:49.000Here is Joe Biden saying this yesterday.
00:10:52.000In the weeks ahead, I'll be reaffirming the federal government's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and accessibility, building on the work we started in the Obama-Biden administration.
00:11:05.000That's why I'm rescinding the previous administration's harmful ban on diversity and sensitivity training and abolish the offensive counterfactual 1776 Commission.
00:11:17.000Unity and healing must begin with understanding and truth Not ignorance and lies.
00:11:24.000Okay, so him, first of all, calling the 1776 Commission ignorance and lies is insane.
00:11:29.000The 1776 Commission just teaches a traditional version of American history where America is generally the good guy.
00:11:34.000It does not whitewash America's history of racial discrimination.
00:11:37.000It does not whitewash the history of American slavery.
00:11:39.000It does not whitewash America's history of the treatment of Native Americans.
00:11:42.000Okay, that is not what it is designed to do.
00:11:44.000The basic notion here that Joe Biden is pushing is that we have to inculcate Throughout our federal workforce, and presumably throughout our educational system, the idea that America is inherently bad and requires systematic and fundamental change on every single level.
00:12:17.000He said George Floyd's death was a knee on the neck of justice.
00:12:20.000Now, the specifics of the George Floyd case are still in dispute.
00:12:24.000There is an ongoing judicial case about this.
00:12:26.000There is no evidence that has been presented thus far suggesting that it was a racialized killing.
00:12:32.000Really, I know that this has become the meme of the day, but the reality is no evidence has been presented that the killing of George Floyd was racially based.
00:12:43.000The best thing you can say about the case is that it was an act of police brutality.
00:12:48.000There is no evidence that Derek Chauvin, who is the officer in that case, murdered George Floyd because George Floyd is a black man.
00:12:54.000In fact, there's pretty good evidence to suggest that Derek Chauvin is going to have a fairly solid defense case.
00:12:59.000George Floyd was high as a kite on fentanyl.
00:13:02.000His autopsy showed that he had enough fentanyl in him to kill a horse.
00:13:05.000He was probably suffering from excited delirium.
00:13:07.000The full tape of the situation shows that George Floyd, again, the police were called by a shop owner to the situation because George Floyd had just passed a counterfeit bill.
00:13:34.000And the Minneapolis Police Department use of force Actually allows the kind of restraint that Derek Chauvin was using.
00:13:40.000So Chauvin is actually going to have a fairly solid defense case, even though the tape is extremely ugly.
00:13:45.000And even if you believe that the system has to be changed in sort of the way that force is used.
00:13:50.000Okay, but the point that Biden is making is far broader than that.
00:13:53.000He's not just arguing that this was an act of police brutality, which is possible and arguable.
00:13:58.000He's arguing not only that it is an act of racism, which again, no evidence has been provided to suggest that.
00:14:03.000He is arguing that it is indicative of all of American law enforcement, that all of American society rose up because of the George Floyd case, because it was indicative of how black Americans are treated in this country.
00:14:15.000It is evidence-free, and it is being crammed down from the top of the American government.
00:14:20.000If Joe Biden had campaigned on the notion that he was going to completely remake American government on the basis of critical race theory equity garbage, he would have had a harder time in that election cycle.
00:14:29.000He was considered the moderate on a lot of this stuff inside the Democratic Party.
00:14:34.000There's nothing about him that is moderate on these particular issues.
00:14:38.000And as we will see, this is going to have some very, very real ramifications.
00:14:43.000The basic idea that all of America's institutions are rife with racism because George Floyd died while under the knee of Derek Chauvin is not just a stretch, it is a stretch based on a stretch.
00:14:54.000But again, the goal here is more than anything transformational change.
00:14:58.000And whatever tool is available to leverage transformational change inside the American government, that is what Democrats and Joe Biden are about to use.
00:15:05.000And they're about to use all executive power in order to accomplish that.
00:15:10.000Here is Joe Biden talking about George Floyd.
00:15:14.000What many Americans didn't see or had simply refused to see couldn't be ignored any longer.
00:15:21.000Those eight minutes and 46 seconds that took George Floyd's life opened the eyes of millions of Americans and millions of people around all over the world.
00:15:32.000It was the knee on the neck of justice and it wouldn't be forgotten.
00:15:37.000It stirred the conscience and of tens of millions of Americans.
00:15:42.000And in my view, it marked a turning point in this country's attitude toward racial justice.
00:15:48.000There are 37 million black Americans living in the United States.
00:15:52.000As of 2020, this is according to the Washington Post database, they've calculated a grand total, they've documented a grand total of 15 black men shot in America by the police who are unarmed.
00:16:07.000So this idea that black people are being hunted down willy-nilly by the cops and that American society is viciously racist despite the fact that it is literally illegal to discriminate in both private and public industries.
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00:17:09.000And the fact of the matter is, you don't and shouldn't trust big tech to keep control of your information, not only Have they had hacks that have really harmed people's personal information in the past?
00:17:18.000Also, do you trust the big tech bros to actually control your information and not use it against you?
00:17:45.000Now, a couple days ago, I was talking about press secretaries, and I said that their job is very often to spin on behalf of their administrations.
00:17:51.000And this means that the ones who are asked to spin on behalf of people who lie routinely end up lying.
00:17:56.000That would be like a lot of members of the Obama administration.
00:17:59.000And I said that there are people who I think didn't lie in their job.
00:19:25.000Okay, but that is not what Democrats mean by justice or fairness.
00:19:27.000What Democrats mean by justice or fairness is you don't get what you deserve, you get the same thing as the guy next to you no matter what he deserves and no matter what you deserve.
00:19:34.000And not only that, it's not just that you personally get the same thing as the person next to you, it's that we ought to gauge by group outcome whether fairness has been achieved.
00:19:42.000So if black Americans have a lower net income than white Americans, or presumably if white Americans have a lower income than Asian Americans, they never say that part, because that part's awkward, then group equity has not been achieved.
00:19:55.000Now, that last example, the fact that Asian American households make more money than white American households, you're never gonna hear Democrats talk about that because, of course, they actually are not in favor, even, of equity in terms of fairness of outcome.
00:20:07.000They're not even, like, they don't even care about that.
00:20:10.000What they are really about is polarizing people by racial groups so that they can use them as a coalition of the quote-unquote oppressed against the supposed white majority that is oppressing them, despite the fact, by the way, that white voters split pretty heavily between Democrats and Republicans in ways that many other domestic Racial groups do not.
00:20:27.000In any case, here is Susan Rice saying that every agency of the federal government is going to be focused on equity, which again, means using the power of the federal government in order to cram down equal outcome, not protection of individual rights.
00:20:42.000On day one, the president signed an executive order Directing an unprecedented whole-of-government initiative to embed racial equity across federal policies, programs, and institutions.
00:20:55.000That starts with a review of policies and institutions to redress systemic racism where it exists and to advance equity where we aren't doing enough.
00:21:08.000Every agency will place equity at the core of their public engagement.
00:21:30.000If, however, you are going to place equity at the top of your list, this means you're going to give essential workers who are 20 and black the vaccine before you give people who are 65 that vaccine.
00:21:40.000Which not only makes no sense, it ends with more absolute numbers of dead black people because there are lots of black people who are over the age of 65 who will then not be privileged in the same way as people who are 20 and black.
00:22:04.000As we'll see in just a second, this is just part of the running theme of the Biden administration, or as Biden himself might call it, since he is now governing exclusively by executive fiat, the Biden dictatorship.
00:22:14.000Okay, so here is Susan Rice continuing along these lines.
00:22:17.000Susan Rice says federal agencies will be directed to take any steps to combat xenophobia.
00:22:24.000All of these terms sound like people are going to be empowered to fight the bad things.
00:22:29.000The question is, what are the bad things?
00:22:31.000We can probably agree on some of the bad things that ought to be fought by the federal government.
00:22:35.000And then there are some things that we probably cannot agree on.
00:22:37.000So here is Susan Rice using giant, catch-all, semantically overloaded terms to explain what the federal government is going to do under her auspices.
00:22:46.000The president will sign a memorandum directing all federal agencies to take steps to combat xenophobia and acts of violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who have been targeted by political leaders in our nation's response to COVID-19.
00:23:04.000Again, these are continuation of our initial steps to advance racial justice and equity through early executive action.
00:23:14.000Okay, so nobody wants Asian Americans treated with violence because nobody in America should be treated with violence.
00:23:19.000This is one of the hallmarks of being an American and having your individual rights protected.
00:23:24.000Also, when she says, been treated by our political leaders with xenophobia, what she means by that is that Donald Trump said Chinese virus.
00:24:02.000So the founders truly believed that legislatures were going to protect their own prerogatives.
00:24:06.000The legislatures were not going to allow the executive branch to infringe on what the legislative branch does.
00:24:11.000The people would be zealous of their own powers.
00:24:14.000What the founders didn't contemplate is the idea that the legislature would actually delegate all of its powers to the executive, and then they would just become basically a bunch of charity cases who are living off the tax paradigm to occasionally pass giant budget-busting omnibus packages.
00:24:31.000Originally, that was not a possibility because Congress couldn't do any of that.
00:24:34.000It's also true that the Congress people, the Senators particularly, were a lot more wedded to their state.
00:24:39.000It used to be that Senators were appointed by their state legislatures, they were answerable to their state legislatures.
00:24:49.000It means that if you're a Senator, your chief goal in life is to avoid responsibility.
00:24:53.000The easiest way to avoid responsibility is just saying that the executive should do it.
00:24:57.000So here's Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, saying that Joe Biden should just use executive powers to do whatever he wants.
00:25:05.000In fact, he should use executive power to declare climate change an emergency.
00:25:10.000And then he will be able to he will be able to access a bunch of emergency powers at his disposal.
00:25:17.000Now, you'll recall that some of us warned about this when President Trump declared the situation on our national border an emergency, a national emergency, and started using executive power in order to do things about it.
00:25:27.000You might want to go to the legislature for that.
00:25:29.000Because once you start declaring things national emergencies, you've now opened the door to Democrats doing exactly this.
00:25:34.000Because once you say that it's a national emergency, then presumably the executive The President of the United States can now declare that he wants cap and trade, or that he wants to shut down fracking, or that he wants to do a bunch of things that he actually doesn't have the power to do because now it's a national emergency.
00:25:48.000Here is the Senate Majority Leader, again, the leader of the majority in the Senate, saying the legislature should be completely left behind.
00:25:55.000Biden should just go ahead and do what he wants and declare climate change a national emergency.
00:25:58.000By the way, climate change is not a national emergency.
00:26:01.000It is not close to a national emergency.
00:26:03.000Climate change is not even a global emergency.
00:26:05.000Climate change is a thing that is happening.
00:26:08.000It is going to have some deleterious effects over the course of the next century, and people are going to adapt, as they always have throughout human history, to a changing climate over time.
00:26:17.000The notion that if we do nothing right now, that tomorrow tsunamis are going to wipe out half of America.
00:26:41.000Bad things happening eventually over the course of time is not a national emergency.
00:26:44.000But the goal here, again, the point here is that the executive in our country has essentially become an elected dictatorship that we can shift every four years.
00:26:51.000Joe Biden used to acknowledge this until he got the powers.
00:27:07.000Because it relates to what you're saying.
00:27:10.000Then he can do many, many things under the emergency powers of the president that wouldn't have to go through, that he could do without legislation.
00:27:18.000Now, Trump used this emergency for a stupid wall, which wasn't an emergency.
00:27:23.000But if there ever was an emergency, climate is one.
00:27:25.000So I would suggest that they explore looking at climate as an emergency, which would give them more flexibility.
00:27:36.000The notion that climate change, which is a gradual change in the climate over the course of literally a century, is more of an emergency than vast numbers of people crossing our southern border illegally in the now?
00:27:48.000I didn't even think that was a national emergency that should be declared a national emergency.
00:28:02.000But again, the goal here is so that Joe Biden can then use powers delegated specifically for emergencies in order to simply override his actual executive powers.
00:28:11.000So for example, he could use the National Emergencies Act.
00:28:13.000He can tap into a suite of more than 100 additional powers according to grist.com.
00:28:19.000Usually it's used for a natural disaster or something.
00:28:24.000But there are some that are theoretically kind of large.
00:28:26.000So, for example, you could just redirect a bunch of money from the Pentagon toward building solar panels.
00:28:53.000And by the way, one of the ways he is governing from the top, he has now announced that he's going to pause oil and gas sales on public lands.
00:29:00.000According to the Associated Press, he has said to announce a wide-ranging moratorium on new oil and gas leasing on U.S.
00:29:04.000lands and waters, as his administration moves quickly to reverse Trump administration policies on energy and the environment and address climate change.
00:29:12.000The drilling moratorium is among several climate-related actions Biden is outlining on Wednesday, according to two people with knowledge of his plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
00:29:19.000Biden is also likely to direct officials to conserve 30% of the country's lands and ocean waters in the next 10 years, initiate a series of regulatory actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and elevate climate change to a national security priority.
00:29:33.000Again, how the executive ended up with this much power, it's frankly on the legislature, which has completely abdicated its duty.
00:29:40.000Remember Captain, I'm not gonna ban fracking?
00:29:42.000He's only gonna ban fracking where he can, is the basic idea here.
00:29:45.000And, you know, he's just going to get rid of Keystone XL.
00:29:48.000And by the way, we're not even doing the fracking.
00:29:50.000And we're not even doing the drilling on Keystone XL.
00:29:54.000But trying to move against fracking on public lands is, of course, a way for him to, number one, undermine... This isn't even connected to climate change.
00:30:02.000Fracking is one of the single greatest reducers of carbon emissions in the United States because fracking has largely replaced coal emissions as well as normal oil exploration.
00:30:12.000Fracking and natural gas, significantly less carbon emissions than those other forms of power.
00:30:18.000All this is designed to do is cater to his environmental left.
00:30:21.000Also, by the way, he has his plan to pause all deportations.
00:30:26.000So, the acting Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, David Pekoske, last Wednesday wrote, a memorandum directing DHS components to conduct a review of policies and practices concerning immigration enforcement.
00:30:37.000It sets interim policies during the course of that review, including a 100-day pause on certain removals to enable focusing the department's resources where they are most needed.
00:30:46.000That attempt to place a moratorium on deportations has now been held up by a Texas judge.
00:30:51.000We'll see whether that eventually holds up in court.
00:30:55.000So the powers that are being centralized in the executive branch are exorbitant.
00:31:11.000It means that Congress needs to fight back and grab back its own prerogatives.
00:31:15.000But unlikely to happen given the fact that we are now an executive agency with a vestigial legislature.
00:31:20.000Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to COVID policy because the supposed, remember when Biden was campaigning on how he was going to get control of this thing, get his arms around it?
00:31:30.000And by the way, if Trump had been as much of a mess about COVID policy in the last week of his administration as Biden were about COVID policy in the first week of his administration, you think the coverage would be this glowing?
00:31:39.000It's all glowing coverage for Biden, of course.
00:31:42.000Yeah, we'll get to that in just one second.
00:31:43.000First, let's talk about the fact you don't want to go to an auto parts store.
00:31:47.000There's not a great reason to go right now.
00:31:48.000There's really not a great reason to go ever.
00:31:49.000You're going to go there, you're going to wait in line, you're going to get to the front of the line, they're not going to have the part, they're going to order it online, then they're going to upcharge you.
00:31:54.000How about instead of that, you just skip the auto parts store entirely and you go to rockauto.com.
00:31:59.000It's a lot easier than walking into the auto parts store, answering a bunch of questions you don't know the answer to, and then having them order the part online anyway.
00:32:05.000Instead, you just go to rockauto.com and use the power of the interwebs at your desk, in your pocket.
00:32:10.000RockAuto.com will always offer the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear like airlines do.
00:32:16.000Why would you spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
00:32:18.000RockAuto.com is a family business that serves auto parts customers online for 20 years.
00:32:22.000Go to RockAuto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
00:32:26.000Best of all, prices at RockAuto.com are always reliably low and the same for professionals and do-it-yourselfers.
00:32:31.000Why spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
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00:32:37.000Quickly see all the parts available for your vehicle and choose the brands, specifications, and prices you prefer.
00:32:42.000They've got amazing selection, reliably low prices, all the parts your car will ever need.
00:33:53.000you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:33:57.000Now the wonderful thing about executive run government is that our executives are great If we know one thing, it is that when you centralize power in one area of the government, usually they're amazing at it.
00:34:12.000And if they fail, it's because they don't have enough power.
00:34:14.000See, this is always the logic of the media.
00:34:16.000The president has enormous power in our system.
00:34:19.000If he is given not enough power, however, then things fail.
00:34:22.000But then if he fails, that's because he didn't have enough power.
00:34:25.000It's a completely unfalsifiable proposition.
00:34:27.000So Joe Biden has been complaining for Little under a year, about how the executive branch really needs to take more control of the COVID response because we need more, more power at the executive level.
00:34:48.000We complain constantly about the government sucking at everything, and then we're like, yes, but if they had more power, perhaps that would fix the problem.
00:34:53.000Okay, that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
00:34:57.000That's like me saying, my kids make a bunch of bad decisions every night.
00:34:59.000Like, they want to eat candy all night and then run around in the nude.
00:35:02.000This is what my small, small children do.
00:35:05.000Probably if I give them more power, it'll be better.
00:35:07.000The problem is I'm not giving them enough control.
00:35:44.000If we go back to a system where elected representatives are elected more than once every four years, and there's a pretty high level of churn, and they're checked and balanced by other forms of government, they leave you alone.
00:35:58.000And then you wouldn't care so much who's the president of the, oh, we're not gonna do, okay, fine, so we're not gonna do that, fine.
00:36:02.000All right, so here is how COVID policy looks when it is centralized.
00:36:05.000So within the last week, Joe Biden has now reversed himself 1,273 times.
00:36:10.000Don't worry, he's the greatest truth teller who ever lived and also Captain Normalcy who loves chocolate chip ice cream, but he's reversed himself 1,732,000 times in the last week on COVID policy.
00:36:20.000So for example, yesterday, literally yesterday, Joe Biden, the most honest and wondrous of all COVID leaders, he said that Americans should all be able to get the vaccine this spring if they need it. Or roughly when do you think anyone who wants one would be able to get it? Summer?
00:36:34.000Is it fall? No, I think it'll be this spring.
00:36:37.000I think we'll be able to do that this spring.
00:36:41.000But it's going to be a logistical challenge that exceeds anything we've ever tried in this country.
00:39:12.000Here is Jen Psaki, who literally gets paid to just spin away all of Joe Biden's problems.
00:39:16.000So good luck to her, because that dude is barely sentient.
00:39:19.000What the president's goal is, is ensuring that there's greater availability in the spring.
00:39:25.000He will push his team. He pushes his team on COVID and updates on it, even when it's a meeting about other issues. This is his focus every single day. But the fact is, every American is not going to be eligible this spring. We're going to continue to increase supply, that's part of it.
00:39:41.000And he has said many, many times it's going to take months and months for a broad swath of the population to be vaccinated.
00:39:51.000By the way, I love when she's like, he's pushing his team, he's pushing his team.
00:39:54.000Dude couldn't push over one of those inflatable punching bags.
00:40:02.000By the way, Team Biden is also lying about what is happening here in the state that I occupy, Florida.
00:40:11.000So, on Tuesday, Joe Biden's press secretary, Jen Psaki, who again, says things that are untrue on a fairly regular basis, suggested that Florida was lagging behind in vaccine distribution.
00:40:21.000Saki should have noted that Florida is holding a lot of vaccines to give second doses to elderly residents who have already received the first dose.
00:40:27.000DeSantis put out a statement, he said, the insinuation that Florida is underutilizing vaccines is totally disingenuous.
00:40:32.000Florida is number one in the country among the top 10 most populous states for vaccine doses per capita.
00:40:36.000Additionally, Florida is averaging more than 300,000 first doses per week, but we are not going to divert second doses away from our seniors.
00:40:43.000If the implication is that we should be giving those second doses away to other people, that is not the way the FDA has prescribed the series.
00:40:48.000We're also number one in the nation by far in vaccination of seniors.
00:40:51.000Florida has vaccinated more than 1 million seniors 65 and older to date.
00:40:55.000If we're given additional first doses, we're ready to double our output.
00:40:58.000Okay, that was the response after Jen Psaki on Monday suggested that DeSantis was blowing it in Florida.
00:41:03.000Again, DeSantis has become sort of the whipping post for the Democrats, which is insane.
00:41:07.000Because again, Florida currently ranks 26th in the nation in deaths per million, despite having a population the same as New York and significantly older, meaning significantly more vulnerable to COVID.
00:41:18.000Saki on Monday had suggested that they've only distributed 50% of the vaccines that they've been given in Florida.
00:41:24.000Okay, literally the federal government has told them they are not supposed to distribute the second shots of vaccine.
00:41:28.000There's some people like me who say, you know what?
00:41:29.000We shouldn't be holding those into vans.
00:41:31.000We should literally just be giving out everything that is there.
00:41:33.000But as long as the federal government is dictating that you cannot do that, or you should not do that, they don't get to complain about that.
00:41:41.000Hey, speaking of which, the greatest of all federal responses being led by the greatest of all possible doctors, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
00:41:46.000Now again, I will note once more, I have not been anti-Fauci this whole time.
00:41:49.000Now I just find the guy to be unbelievably annoying and self-serving.
00:41:53.000I think that he has puffed himself up beyond all accomplishment during this pandemic.
00:41:57.000I think he has accomplished very little during this pandemic.
00:41:59.000I think many of the things that he has stated along the way are untrue.
00:42:02.000I think he has taken every possible position that it is possible to take.
00:42:04.000He has been both pro-masking and anti-masking.
00:42:06.000He has been both pro-herd immunity and anti-herd immunity.
00:42:09.000He has been both pro-opening the schools and pro-closing the schools.
00:42:13.000Okay, so here was Anthony Fauci saying, we need to rejoin the World Health Organization because the pandemic came from China, which makes no sense.
00:42:20.000Literally, the World Health Organization acted as a PR agency for the Chinese while they lied to the rest of the planet.
00:42:25.000Here's Fauci saying we should rejoin them anyway.
00:42:27.000Certainly the WHO needs to have some reforms.
00:43:11.000Here's Anthony Fauci explaining two masks will be great.
00:43:15.000This is a physical covering to prevent droplets and virus to get in.
00:43:21.000So if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective.
00:43:29.000And that's the reason why you see people either double masking or doing a version of an N95.
00:43:45.000So there was a graphic that MSNBC put up about this, right?
00:43:48.000And the graphic showed the efficacy rate for two masks, and it was 75%.
00:43:53.000And then the efficacy rate for three masks, which was 90%.
00:43:57.000As one of our producers noted, it would be fun if they showed the efficacy rate for one mask, which actually is not all that high, especially if it is a cloth mask, because that might give the lie to the idea that masks are going to be the sole solution to this entire problem.
00:44:11.000I mean, honestly, as long as we are just saying that you should just be strapping on the masks, like, I don't understand why four isn't better.
00:45:15.000Speaking of which, when it comes to COVID policy, as we noted yesterday on this program, the teachers unions are in control, and these are the greatest and wisest people.
00:45:23.000These are the people who teach our children, which God help our kids.
00:45:29.000So the Chicago Teachers' Union has suggested that they are not going to go back to work.
00:45:33.000In fact, they are currently engaged in what most legal interpreters believe is an illegal strike, backed by the American Federation of Teachers, backed by the Biden administration, presumably.
00:45:45.000The Chicago Teachers' Union has said, we are not going to reopen until it's perfectly safe.
00:45:53.000They believe that they need more diversity hires, and I have no idea why that has to do with COVID.
00:45:57.000They also are saying that they wanna make sure not just that kids are wearing masks, but that every kid is tested and is negative, or every kid is vaccinated.
00:46:17.000I mean that over the past 24 hours, the Chicago Teachers Union, Put out a little film of teachers' union's dance teachers dancing for school closings.
00:46:27.000I've never seen a better case for defunding the Chicago teachers than this.
00:46:32.000Number one, that these people have jobs.
00:46:34.000And number two, that these people feel that this is important work, what they are doing right here.
00:46:38.000So, here are six Chicago teachers' union dance teachers dancing for school closings.
00:50:03.000This is a story back from July 2019 by Ben Terrace.
00:50:07.000The lead of the story was this incredibly awkward and weird story in which Kamala Harris was talking about how campaign was like a prisoner.
00:50:15.000A campaign made her feel like a prisoner.
00:50:17.000Kamala Harris described to her sister in this story how preparations for a Democratic primary debate in Miami had allowed her to break from the grueling primary campaign schedule.
00:50:24.000Quote, it's a treat that a prisoner gets when they ask for a morsel of food, please.
00:50:29.000Kamala said, shoving her hands forward as if clutching a metal plate, her voice now trembling like an old British man locked in a Dickensian jail cell, and water.
00:51:28.000So you wouldn't want people to have that awkward feeling of recognizing that Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate and is, in fact, not a wonderful human being.
00:51:51.000Here's how they described it in a tweet, quote, Kamala Harris is the first vice president who is black, South Asian, female, and the direct descendants of immigrants.
00:52:56.000They're only going to fact-check the stuff that's accurate.
00:52:59.000They're just going to skip the part that's inaccurate.
00:53:00.000So we're probably not going to do tons of fact-checking on all of his vaccine failures thus far, like all of his untruths thus far.
00:53:06.000We're not going to fact-check that sort of stuff, are we?
00:53:08.000Meanwhile, over at Newsweek, So, Tom Cotton, there was a piece at Newsweek claiming that Tom Cotton had engaged in stolen valor because he served in the 101st Airborne.
00:53:46.000Because they had one piece saying that Tom Cotton had stolen valor by calling himself an Army Ranger after graduating from Ranger School.
00:53:51.000Then they had another piece from 2015 where they themselves acknowledged that people who graduated from Ranger School were in fact known as Rangers.
00:54:02.000According to National Review, Cotton's office contacted Newsweek this weekend to point out that Newsweek had identified female ranger school graduates as Army Rangers in 2015.
00:54:11.000Newsweek responded, by editing its 2015 story to conform to Salon's new smear of cotton.
00:54:17.000The 2015 Newsweek story no longer says the two women will, quote, become rangers.
00:54:21.000The edited version says they will, quote, be allowed to wear the coveted ranger tab on their uniforms.
00:54:27.000So they're going back in now and re-editing old stories, not just the Washington Post, Newsweek too.
00:54:31.000They're re-editing old stories and they are just rewriting history.
00:54:35.000I mean, this is like, when people say Orwellian, this is actually like straight from Orwell, where the guy who's the main character in 1984 literally sits there and rewrites historical stories to conform to modern day ideas.
00:54:44.000So they're now going and rewriting old stories to conform to the narrative that Tom Cotton has engaged in stolen valor and the narrative that Kamala Harris is a wonderful person who never says awkward things.
00:54:57.000I mean, the dictionary did this with the term preference after Maisie Hirono, idiot senator, decided that it was a wonderful, wonderful idea to suggest that Amy Coney Barrett was somehow a homophobe for using the term sexual preference.
00:55:09.000The extent to which the media are just going to be a government outlet at this point, it's pretty hard to overstate that.
00:55:23.000And Ducey asked a pretty solid question, which is, Biden had had a phone call with Vladimir Putin, and Ducey said, so what did you talk about with Putin?
00:55:33.000And Biden immediately responds by kind of ripping on Ducey, because this is the way it's gonna be.
00:55:38.000In the White House press room, essentially, there's going to be the one reporter who is the gadfly who all the rest of the press hate because he's killing the vibe.
00:55:46.000The vibe in that room is supposed to be the vibe on a porn, on a porn shoot.
00:55:50.000And here is Peter Doocy over there ringing a cowbell and saying, you know, guys, when you want to leave off the lubing, you might at some point want to ask a difficult question.
00:55:58.000And Joe Biden's gonna be like, that guy, see that guy?
00:56:52.000So yesterday, Rand Paul sponsored a bill.
00:56:55.000It was designed to go, it was essentially a resolution that suggested that impeachment was illegal because Donald Trump is no longer impeachable because he's no longer president of the United States.
00:57:04.000Now, I think the legal case on that is somewhat sketchy.
00:57:07.000I think there's a fairly solid constitutional argument That you can, in fact, be convicted by the Senate after you are impeached, after you are in office, in order to bar you from running again.
00:57:17.000Nonetheless, 45 Republican senators voted against the impeachment, which means nobody's going to vote in favor of the impeachment, right?
00:57:22.000It's going to be the five that we already know about who are likely to vote in favor of the impeachment.
00:57:27.000That would probably be Mitt Romney, It's going to be Murkowski.
00:57:51.000The sham of a trial is unconstitutional.
00:57:53.000That is more than will be needed to acquit and to eventually end this partisan impeachment process.
00:57:56.000The trial is dead on arrival in the Senate.
00:57:57.000Now, The statements that are put out by a variety of Republicans are worth talking about.
00:58:03.000So Tim Scott, Senator from South Carolina, who is quite critical of Trump, he put out a statement.
00:58:08.000He said, I'm unconvinced the Senate has the authority to hold a trial against a private citizen if President Trump was such an existential threat.
00:58:14.000Why did Speaker Pelosi rush the impeachment only to wait 12 days to send the article to the Senate?
00:58:18.000If the purpose of this trial is to remove a president that was already done on January 20th, when Trump left the White House.
00:58:22.000But now, once again, the Senate is faced with the time-consuming task of determining the merits of yet another article of impeachment on now-former President Trump.
00:58:29.000We need to get back to the people's work.
00:58:30.000We need to get vaccines distributed, save small businesses, etc.
00:58:35.000And by the way, I think that that last statement is going to reflect American opinion quite faster.
00:58:38.000If this continues to drag on and people still can't get the vaccines and the economy continues to be in the doldrums, people are going to be like, why are you spending time on this again?
00:58:49.000Okay, but here is the broader argument against impeachment.
00:58:51.000The broader argument against impeachment is, once again, there is no objective standard by which Trump's conduct is quote-unquote impeachable.
00:58:58.000The reason I say quote-unquote there is because you can impeach for literally anything.
00:59:05.000But the question is, what standard are you using to impeach Trump?
00:59:08.000If the standard being used to impeach Trump is that Trump engaged in prevarication about the outcome of an election, it's going to be real hard to do that and set a neutral standard given the fact that for four years Democrats kept claiming over and over and over that Donald Trump was not in fact the rightful president of the United States and that he had worked with the Russians in order to game the system.
00:59:25.000If the standard is that Donald Trump used inflammatory language In order to incite violence.
00:59:31.000Then you run into another problem, which is you're either going to have to impeach pretty much everybody who engaged in inflammatory language, or you don't have a neutral standard.
00:59:39.000If the standard is that Donald Trump challenged an election that was legally held and legally certified, and that anybody who challenges an election that is legally held and legally certified needs to be thrown out of Congress, well then you end up at the Mazie Hirono position, the dumbest person in the United States Senate.
00:59:52.000Here's the senator from Hawaii saying that it's not just that Trump should be impeached, it's that Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley should be thrown out of the Senate.
01:00:00.000You know, these two senators, they did more than just simply have a disagreement over the election results.
01:00:05.000They were very busy just putting out the lie that this election was stolen.
01:00:13.000And we're not, for these two senators, basically leading the charge in the Senate to sign on to these objections, even though a hundred House Republicans objected.
01:00:24.000Those objections would have gotten nowhere, so they needed senators to sign on to the objections, and Senators Hawley and Cruz provided that leadership on the Senate side to contest a fair and free election result.
01:00:37.000Okay, so the goal for a lot of Democrats, again, is not just to lump in Trump with the rioters, but also to lump in Cruz and Hawley with the rioters, and then to lump in presumably everybody who wanted to challenge election results, even though I think that is wrong.
01:00:49.000They want to lump them in with the actual people who did physical violence, and then they want to lump in every conservative with those people.
01:01:03.000Again, I'm less enthused by the constitutional idea that you can't impeach somebody who's already out of office.
01:01:09.000I'm more motivated by Rand Paul's argument here.
01:01:13.000He says, you know, you guys are using a pretty interesting standard of incitement, considering that you literally will not say a damn word about people in your own party using inflammatory language, and then people using that inflammatory language as an excuse to do violence.
01:01:26.000But now you want to impeach Trump over it.
01:01:29.000No Democrat will honestly ask whether Bernie Sanders incited the shooter that nearly killed Steve Scalise and Volunteer Coach.
01:01:39.000The shooter nearly pulled off a massacre.
01:01:41.000I was there because he fervently believed the false and inflammatory rhetoric spewed by Bernie and other Democrats, such as, the Republican health care plan for the uninsured is that you die.
01:01:56.000As this avowed Bernie supporter shot Steve Scalise, nearly killing him, and shot one of our coaches and two or three of our staff, he screamed, this is for healthcare.
01:02:07.000Ask me or anyone if that's incitement.
01:02:10.000Okay, Rand Paul happens to be correct about this.
01:02:13.000And people who are vague in their standards should not be surprised when those standards come around to bite them directly on the tuchus.
01:02:19.000If your standard for incitement is you use inflammatory language in politics, Pretty much everybody is toast.
01:02:24.000But again, the goal here for Democrats is really threefold.
01:02:27.000One is the moral castigation of every single Republican.
01:02:30.000The only Republicans who are good Republicans are the ones who do our work in this moment, according to the left.
01:02:35.000Mitt Romney is their friend right now.
01:02:36.000Wait until Mitt Romney does something they don't like, he'll become an enemy again very, very quickly.
01:02:41.000So goal number one, all Republicans are bad, regardless of what you think about the election, and no matter whether you condemn the Capitol riots, you are bad.
01:02:51.000Also, this creates a political conundrum for Republicans.
01:02:53.000If Republicans vote against the impeachment, then the idea is that the Republican Party has backed Trump and Trump will be the guy going forward.
01:03:00.000And if the Republican Party does back impeachment and gets rid of Trump, then Trump is motivated to run revenge campaigns against Republicans.
01:03:06.000So that is what Democrats are setting up right here.
01:03:09.000And when they're on their moral high horse about it, like, I'm not gonna listen to Joy Behar and her moral high horse here.
01:03:15.000I'm sorry, she has no leg to stand on.
01:03:17.000She's like, anybody who voted not to convict, they have blood on their hands?
01:03:23.000Just gonna point out, I know that we're not supposed to make this comparison.
01:03:25.000Because it happens to be a perfectly apples-to-apples comparison, but the entire Democratic Party infrastructure essentially backed the case behind Black Lives Matter, said that it was wonderful, worth pursuing.
01:03:34.000Black Lives Matter ended with $2 billion in damages across the United States and at least a dozen deaths on its hands.
01:03:42.000I don't hear any of these people who are using extraordinarily inflammatory language talking about the blood on their own hands, of course.
01:03:47.000They're never going to talk about that.
01:04:12.000And we will remember those names of that Senate, Senators, and the House people who decided not to convict this guy because the blood is on their hands then.
01:04:21.000Okay, I'm sure that all those Republican senators are gravely fearful of the wrath of Joy Behar.
01:04:27.000Because, you know, if they had voted to convict, probably Joy Behar would probably vote for them.
01:04:32.000There's a basic rule that now applies in American politics.
01:04:34.000If the only people ripping you, and this is unfortunate because the principle no longer applies, if the only people ripping you are the people on the other side, you're basically fine.
01:04:44.000Because anybody who thinks that Joy Behar or Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi are repositories of principle on this thing, yeah, I really, really don't think so.
01:04:53.000All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
01:04:55.000In the meantime, go check out Matt Walsh's show.