Justice Anthony Kennedy steps down and the world goes insane. Ben Shapiro breaks down what this means and what it means for the future of the Supreme Court. He also talks about life insurance and why it s a good idea for us all to have life insurance.
00:00:21.000I'll give you all the updates on the news and we'll go through what this means.
00:00:24.000The Justice Anthony Kennedy, who, as I have said many times on this program, made up his mind on how to vote based on whether he had his Metamucil that morning.
00:00:39.000We'll be joined by special guest Jordan Peterson to celebrate Independence Day.
00:00:42.000God King Jeremy Boren will host a new edition of Daily Wire backstage with me, Andrew Klavan, and Michael Knowles to look back on our country's birth and look ahead to its future with the world's most prominent Canadian.
00:00:51.000Subscribers will even be able to write in live questions for us to answer on the air.
00:00:55.000Again, that is Monday, July 2nd, 7 p.m.
00:02:08.000Again, there's no reason for you not to have life insurance.
00:02:10.000The fact is that if something should happen to you and you leave your family without any sort of financial recourse, that is your own fault.
00:02:25.000So, yesterday, after we finished this podcast, Anthony Kennedy stepped down and blew up the world.
00:02:30.000So, I was not expecting Justice Anthony Kennedy to step down from his position on the Supreme Court.
00:02:36.000And the fact is that I think most people were hit by a truck over this.
00:02:40.000Most people in the Trump administration were very surprised by this.
00:02:43.000Maybe President Trump was not, because maybe he'd be having discussions with Justice Kennedy.
00:02:47.000But there are a lot of people who are very surprised by Justice Kennedy stepping down, specifically because most of his legacy is going to be the gay rights stuff, right?
00:02:54.000He was the lead writer in Obergefell, which was the case that suggested that same-sex marriage had to be the law of the land.
00:03:00.000He was socially liberal on issues like abortion.
00:03:03.000He stepped down while Trump was president and there was a Republican Congress.
00:03:07.000And that cut against a lot of the conventional wisdom.
00:03:09.000I, for example, thought that he was going to stick it out until there was a Democrat who was president so that his legacy would be maintained.
00:03:17.000The reason I think he decided to step down, besides the fact that he's 81 years old, is because I think that he looked at the spate of rulings that the Supreme Court has issued over the last three weeks.
00:03:27.000And what he saw was that there were four votes to overturn a lot of First Amendment protections.
00:03:31.000There have been three major cases in the last couple of weeks in which five to four, the Supreme Court had decided in favor of free speech.
00:03:38.000But if he were to be replaced by somebody from the left, then the left would immediately curtail the right to free speech.
00:03:43.000So, for example, there was a case that I discussed at length yesterday on the podcast, this case in which the Supreme Court decided that you could not be forced to pay into a union for which you did not vote.
00:03:52.000And Anthony Kennedy was on the majority side of that opinion.
00:03:56.000He said that that was a violation of the First Amendment.
00:03:57.000Well, there are four votes to say that the government can force you to pay money to an association like a union that you don't want to pay into.
00:04:04.000Anthony Kennedy probably looked at that and he said, I'm not sure that I want to leave when a Democrat's in office because then there will be five votes in favor of the proposition that the government can force you to pay money to an association that you don't like.
00:04:15.000And then there was a case that came down in the last couple of weeks, in which, for example, it said that it mastered the Masterpiece Cake Shop case, where it said that if you are a religious baker, you do not have to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, but only, this was decided on narrow grounds, only because the regulation in question was badly promulgated by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
00:04:33.000There were four votes in that case to basically suggest that any religious baker in the country can be forced, at point of government gun, to cater a same-sex wedding.
00:04:41.000And Anthony Kennedy, even though he's a gay rights advocate,
00:04:43.000So I think Anthony Kennedy looked at the radical left of the court and he said, I don't want my legacy to be the radical left of the court.
00:04:48.000I'd rather that my legacy be the gay rights legacy.
00:04:49.000My guess is that he went to Chief Justice Roberts and he got a guarantee from him
00:05:10.000That Roberts would become the new swing vote if same-sex marriage were to come back up for reconsideration and Roberts will work to tamp that down.
00:05:18.000The same-sex marriage stuff will stay enshrined in law and his legacy will be enshrined and he'll be fine and he will be able to step down from the court and be replaced by somebody who is more in line with his thinking on First Amendment issues.
00:05:29.000Now all of that is speculation but that is my strong inclination is that that's what happened here.
00:05:35.000The Kennedy steps down and that of course opens up a slot on the Supreme Court and a swing vote on the Supreme Court because Kennedy has been the swing vote.
00:05:42.000Kennedy has been the guy who makes the decisions in these 5-4 cases.
00:05:45.000He's been the most powerful guy in the country for a long time and that is a testament to the fact that the Supreme Court has become far too powerful in American life.
00:05:52.000You saw an enormous amount of gnashing of teeth and wailing and rending of garments from the left and tremendous excitement from the right at the fact that this seat is now open on the Supreme Court and Trump is going to get to fill it.
00:06:01.000And the reason for that is that the Supreme Court has become entirely too powerful in the structure of American government.
00:06:07.000If you go back and you look at the Federalist Papers, and we go through them every week here on the Ben Shapiro Show, when you go back and you look through the Federalist Papers, what you see is that they thought that the judiciary was going to be a relatively powerless arm of the government, that its job was basically going to be to sit there and say, this is constitutional and this is not, but not on the grounds that they don't like a piece of legislation.
00:06:25.000In fact, the federal constitution didn't even apply to the states.
00:06:29.000And the Supreme Court in particular, we're supposed to be relatively toothless.
00:06:32.000Now the Supreme Court gets to decide whether everyone in the country is able to obtain an abortion, is able to kill babies.
00:06:39.000The Supreme Court gets to decide whether anyone in the country is able to get married to anybody else.
00:06:42.000The Supreme Court has entirely too much power.
00:06:45.000And that is reflected in all of the focus on the Supreme Court.
00:06:47.000That's because the left has taken the Supreme Court and used it as a tool in order to promulgate its agenda.
00:06:52.000The left sees the Supreme Court as its chief tool in pushing legislation it can't get passed through popular means.
00:06:58.000The reality is the left was pushing same-sex marriage, for example, for years and years, and they weren't getting any place with regard to federal legislation.
00:07:05.000So they went to the courts, and the courts gave them what they wanted, and the same thing was true on abortion.
00:07:09.000Well, because you rely on the courts, when the courts flip to the other side, there's now a lot of power in the hands of the right.
00:07:16.000I'll talk about what that means and what the courts should be doing in just one second.
00:07:20.000First, I want to point out that, you know,
00:07:23.000Some of us have been dreaming of being on the Supreme Court our entire lives.
00:07:26.000So, Mr. President, if you're listening to this, I would just remind you that when 12-year-old Ben Shapiro was playing at the Israeli Bonds Banquet in 1996, Larry King talked specifically about the dreams of that young man.
00:07:59.000Court will have to close at three o'clock on Friday.
00:08:02.000So I'm not saying that it's something that I would take.
00:08:06.000I'm not saying it's a job that if it were offered to me, I would take.
00:08:08.000I'm not saying that both Ann Coulter and David Limbaugh said in 2005, when I was still at Harvard Law School, I should be on the Supreme Court.
00:08:14.000I'm not saying that I'm 34 years old and I'd be on the Supreme Court for the next 60 years, Mr. President.
00:08:18.000But if you chose to make that pick, would I turn it down?
00:08:27.000But OK, in any case, in any case, Mitch McConnell says that the vote is going to come this fall, that this fall there will be a vote on President Trump's replacement justice.
00:08:37.000And you can you can just see the glee on Mitch, on cocaine Mitch's face.
00:08:40.000So Mitch McConnell snorted a full line and then he went into Capitol Hill.
00:08:44.000And this is what Mitch McConnell sounds like when he's very, very excited about something.
00:08:48.000The Senate stands ready to fulfill its constitutional role by offering advice and consent on President Trump's nominee to fill this vacancy.
00:09:00.000We will vote to confirm Justice Kennedy's successor this fall.
00:09:06.000OK, that is amped up Mitch McConnell right there.
00:09:08.000That is Mitch McConnell on an 11 on a skeleton.
00:09:12.000He's got that spinal tap volume turned all the way to the top.
00:09:15.000And look, Mitch McConnell deserves a lot of credit for this because it was Mitch McConnell who said, I am not going to move forward on the nomination of Merrick Garland.
00:09:22.000And he stood strong in the face of a lot of press attacks.
00:09:24.000And it's Mitch McConnell who is largely responsible for the fact that there will be two picks for the president of the United States.
00:09:30.000President Trump says he's going to pick from the current list, which makes a lot of sense.
00:09:35.000There are top five that I'm going to explain in just a few minutes here.
00:09:38.000I'm going to go through the people who are being looked at with the most scrutiny, according to Fred Barnes over at the Weekly Standard.
00:09:42.000We'll talk about how a justice should be selected.
00:09:45.000But here is President Trump saying that he's going to pick from the current list.
00:09:47.000Unfortunately, there are those of us who are not on the list, but President Trump says that he will pick from the list that he's got already.
00:09:56.000Well, we have, obviously, numerous people.
00:09:59.000We have a list of 25 people that I actually had during my election.
00:10:03.000I had to 20, and as you know, I added five a little while ago.
00:10:08.000And President Trump also said last night, he had a big rally last night, and he said that he was honored that Kennedy chose to step down on his watch.
00:10:15.000I'm very honored that he chose to do it during my term in office because he felt confident in me to make the right choice and carry on his great legacy.
00:11:36.000How should we determine which justices should be selected?
00:11:38.000Because the fact is, Republicans have blown opportunity after opportunity on the Supreme Court.
00:11:43.000I may be the only conservative in America who came out against the nomination of Judge Roberts for Chief Justice Roberts.
00:11:49.000Way back when, way back in 2005, when Bush nominated Roberts, I opposed Roberts because I said the man did not have a long track record of textualism and originalism, and he wasn't on record supporting strong textualist positions.
00:12:02.000When it came to controversial cases, and anybody who is not openly conservative, and I don't mean conservative in the sense that they're politically conservative, anybody who is not textualist or originalist, which I'll explain in just a second, those people tend to move to the center relatively quickly.
00:12:15.000And I'll explain why that matters in just a second.
00:12:17.000First, I want to talk a little bit about zip recruiters.
00:12:20.000So your business needs to get better, right?
00:12:22.000You need to recruit a new justice to the Supreme Court.
00:12:25.000Well, you could rely on your friends, you could rely on people that you know to recommend somebody for a job, or you could actually canvas the entire country for the best candidates.
00:13:34.000Open and obvious commitment to originalism and textualism.
00:13:38.000Originalism and textualism are the basic notion that when you read a text, when you read the Constitution of the United States, you're not reading poetry.
00:13:45.000It is not a living document where you get to reinterpret the provisions as you see fit that day.
00:13:50.000That's not what the Constitution was for.
00:13:52.000And you wouldn't interpret any other piece of legislation that way.
00:13:55.000You wouldn't take the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1907 and take that piece of legislation and then say, you know what?
00:14:01.000I think the Sherman Antitrust Act means that gay marriage is now legal, because the document evolves.
00:14:07.000The whole point of writing something down in a document, the whole point of legislation, is that it is a piece of law promulgated at a particular time, with a particular meaning, in a particular place.
00:14:16.000And if you want to change that meaning, then you can always pass another piece of legislation.
00:14:19.000You can have a constitutional amendment, for example.
00:14:22.000This is why the Constitution has so many amendments, because it needed to be changed in many ways.
00:14:28.000The fact is that the Constitution of the United States does not explicitly prohibit, for example, women from voting.
00:14:32.000But the Supreme Court didn't just go back and reinterpret the Constitution and say, the Constitution now means women can vote.
00:14:39.000There was a constitutional amendment that had to be passed in order so that women could vote because that's how legislation works.
00:14:44.000The way legislation works is that it is the legislature that should be doing the legislating.
00:14:48.000It is the job of judges to look at the text, see what it means, not what they wish it meant, not what they hope it meant, not what they would like it to mean, but what it actually meant at the time that it was written.
00:15:25.000I mean, the Obergefell decision that Kennedy decided is a great case of this, where Kennedy looked at the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was about preventing discrimination against black people, and said the 14th Amendment to the Constitution mandates that a man can marry a man all across the country.
00:15:39.000Now, maybe you believe that a man should be able to marry a man.
00:15:44.000But the idea that a judge is going to determine that from a document that was written in 1789
00:15:51.000And a Bill of Rights that was promulgated in 1791, and you're going to take that document and reinterpret it to mean whatever you think it ought to mean, that is a fundamental breach of judicial duty.
00:16:02.000And that's why when we look at the judges, what we should be looking at is who is going to implement the Constitution as written.
00:16:09.000Well, let's talk about some of the potential nominees that President Trump is considering.
00:16:29.000So all of these folks are relatively young.
00:16:32.000You figure that all of them will spend probably 30 years on the court barring serious health problems.
00:16:36.000This is why the idea that Trump gets to shape the court for a full generation here is exactly right.
00:16:58.000All of that assumes, of course, that Chief Justice Roberts isn't going to become a Kennedy-like swing vote, which I think is a dubious assumption, but it's possible that you may actually have a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for the first time in legitimately generations.
00:17:10.000So here is what we know about the people who are being discussed.
00:17:14.000Brett Kavanaugh is apparently the frontrunner.
00:17:15.000He is also the person who is the most icy.
00:17:17.000Okay, so I do not think the president should select Brett Kavanaugh of the D.C.
00:17:22.000He's a former clerk for Justice Kennedy.
00:17:24.000He was elevated to the federal bench in 2006 after a three-year delay.
00:17:27.000The reason his nomination was delayed was because Democrats were upset over the fact that Kavanaugh used to work for Ken Starr in the office of the Solicitor General, and he had the temerity to say that the Clinton administration targeted Ken Starr.
00:17:37.000So Kavanaugh has been on the court for quite a while.
00:17:42.000He recently dissented when the circuit decided that a 17-year-old illegal immigrant detainee had a right to an abortion.
00:17:47.000He said that the decision was, quote, based on a constitutional principle as novel as it is wrong.
00:17:51.000He held in 2011 that the Washington, D.C.
00:17:54.000ban on semi-automatic rifles and its gun registration requirement were unconstitutional under the Supreme Court Teller decision, which recognized that the Second Amendment to the Constitution was an individual right.
00:18:05.000He also held that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau structure was unconstitutional, which of course is true as well, and holds administrative decision-making to a minimum.
00:18:15.000Here's where it starts to get a little bit dicey.
00:18:17.000Kavanaugh, like Chief Justice Roberts, is known for working across the aisle.
00:18:21.000He is, on the downside apparently, a general believer in Chevron deference.
00:18:24.000Chevron deference is the idea that you have these administrative courts, these administrative law courts, that get to decide your fate, and you can't appeal that directly to the judiciary.
00:18:32.000So, administrative law courts exist in the executive branch.
00:18:34.000There's a whole branch of thought that says Chevron deference is stupid.
00:18:37.000That if something is decided by, for example, the EPA, that is reviewable by a judge because the EPA is not a judicial system, the EPA is a regulatory system.
00:18:45.000Kavanaugh reportedly does not use textualist methods nearly as much as conservatives might wish, and worse,
00:18:50.000He upheld Obamacare in Sissel v. Department of Health and Human Services, as well as 7th Sky v. Holder, in which he may have actually crafted the rationale that Chief Justice Roberts eventually used in calling the Obamacare penalties a tax.
00:19:02.000Remember that Chief Justice Roberts rewrote Obamacare to make it constitutional, suggesting that it was a tax rather than a penalty, and it appears that Kavanaugh may have actually created that rationale.
00:19:15.000I'm not saying that Kavanaugh would certainly be another Chief Justice Roberts, but I think it's more likely he would be another Roberts than another Gorsuch.
00:19:21.000Hey, now, Amul Thapar, he's relatively new to the appellate courts.
00:19:25.000He voted to uphold Ohio's method of legal injection, lethal injection, and in Michigan, government's meetings opening with a Christian prayer.
00:19:33.000He's ruled that monetary donations are a form of protected speech under the First Amendment.
00:19:36.000Now, because Thapar's record is relatively thin on the Court of Appeals, he's only appointed in the last year and a half, there's not much to go on with regard to issues like abortion and religious freedom.
00:19:44.000With that said, Professor Brian Fitzpatrick of Vanderbilt Law School described Thapar as very Scalia-like and very Thomas-like.
00:19:50.000And Thapar has criticized Richard Posner's pragmatism.
00:19:52.000Posner is on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and is a terrible judge.
00:19:56.000He criticized Posner's pragmatism in judicial theory because using pragmatism rather than text would, quote, elevate judges to the position of co-legislator.
00:20:18.000is on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
00:20:20.000She was a cause celeb, you recall, when Democrats began suggesting that her Catholicism was a bar to her ability to be an objective judge.
00:20:26.000And she was supposedly so Catholic that she was going to use her Catholicism to rule in particular cases.
00:20:31.000She says that life begins at conception.
00:20:33.000She signed a letter from the Beckett Fund criticizing Obamacare's requirement that employers provide contraceptive coverage, calling it a, quote, grave violation of religious freedom.
00:20:41.000Barrett has written in depth on Justice Scalia's originalism.
00:20:44.000She's evidence support for textualism as well.
00:20:51.000And it would drive Democrats up a wall because she's Catholic as well.
00:20:54.000So I think Amy Barrett is my number one choice.
00:20:57.000Now, in just a second, I want to get to the last two possibilities for the Supreme Court, according to Fred Barnes.
00:21:02.000These are the top five that we are going through right here.
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00:22:56.000Gorsuch has turned out to be a tremendous justice.
00:22:58.000I'm very skeptical of Thomas Hardiman.
00:22:59.000Leonard Leo, who's one of Trump's chief advisors, has described Hardiman as very much in the mold of Justice Scalia, well-schooled on the doctrines of originalism and textualism.
00:23:07.000But Hardiman has never spoken openly about originalism and textualism, never heard his judicial philosophy.
00:23:13.000So I need to hear his judicial philosophy.
00:23:16.000He stood against a New Jersey law that required showing a justifiable need to allow carrying a handgun publicly.
00:23:20.000He said that violated the Second Amendment.
00:23:23.000In another Second Amendment case, he specifically stated that the threshold question in a Second Amendment challenge is one of scope, adding that the inquiry, quote, reflects an inquiry into text and history.
00:23:32.000So that sounds originalist, but it's still a little bit thin.
00:23:36.000He also ruled that a plaintiff could sue for sex discrimination on the grounds that he was a male treated badly for being effeminate, thus broadening the class of claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
00:23:45.000So Title VII of the Civil Rights Act says you can't discriminate against someone on the basis of sex.
00:23:49.000He broadened that to include you can't discriminate against someone on the basis of their perceived effeminacy, which is not the same thing at all.
00:23:58.000The whole point of Title VII is that men can't discriminate against women in employment.
00:24:29.000If you look at disparity, and you immediately jump to, it must be discrimination, then I've got a problem with your legal reasoning.
00:24:35.000He also ruled in favor of an illegal immigrant seeking asylum on the grounds that he was targeted by MS-13.
00:24:39.000There was an illegal immigrant who said that he wanted asylum in the United States, and he was refused asylum.
00:24:43.000He said he was being targeted by MS-13 in Honduras, and he was refused asylum because they said, well, the government's supposed to protect you down there.
00:24:51.000Anybody targeted by MS-13 doesn't just get to claim asylum in the United States.
00:25:19.000Unlike Kavanaugh, he's actually expressed his judicial philosophy.
00:25:22.000So in his original confirmation testimony, he said, He also said before the Federalist Society, the quote,
00:25:39.000Okay, that's sort of definitional originalism.
00:25:40.000We don't have a lot in terms of his, in terms of his particular decision-making.
00:25:42.000We do know that in 2016, Keflage slammed the IRS for failing to turn over materials necessary for determining whether they discriminated against conservative groups.
00:26:07.000Keflige was the Judiciary Committee counsel for Spencer Abraham when he was a senator, when Abraham was pushing for a federal abortion ban.
00:26:28.000Since Justice, since Judge Bork was nominated in the 1980s and and Ted Kennedy, the worst of all Kennedys, came forward and started bashing the hell out of Judge Bork and coined the term Borking him.
00:26:40.000He just went after him and destroyed him on the public stage.
00:26:44.000Since then, there's been a tendency by Republican presidents to nominate people who are stealth candidates, to nominate people who do not have a long, historic record of originalism and textualism.
00:26:54.000And you're not even allowed to ask people tough questions.
00:26:55.000You're not allowed to ask them whether you think that Roe was wrongly decided.
00:26:58.000You see this in judicial hearings all the time, in Supreme Court judicial hearings.
00:27:01.000Somebody will say, well, was Roe wrongly decided?
00:27:03.000And the left uses it as a litmus test.
00:27:05.000If you say Roe was wrongly decided, they won't vote for you.
00:27:07.000Well, the right should have a litmus test, too.
00:27:09.000Of course, Roe versus Wade was wrongly decided.
00:27:13.000It is one of the worst recent cases in the history of the United States and it inculcates a moral standard that is simply not based in the Constitution.
00:27:20.000There's nothing in the Constitution that grants a right to kill your baby in the womb.
00:27:23.000The founders would have been appalled at such a notion.
00:27:27.000They said there's an emanation from a penumbra that ends up... What does that even mean?
00:27:31.000Basically what that means is there are a bunch of justices on the Supreme Court who decided they felt like legalizing abortion that day so they went ahead and they legalized abortion that day.
00:27:39.000It seems to me that you should be able to ask judicial nominees who are going to be sitting on the court for the next 30 years what they think of critical cases, that they should be able to give honest answers to those critical cases.
00:27:49.000But because Democrats have made it such a cause celeb to destroy people over their positions on controversial cases, the easiest way of getting on the court is to be a stealth candidate who's never said anything controversial, and then we never have to ask you about the things you've said that are controversial.
00:28:04.000There are 51 United States senators who are Republicans.
00:28:07.000That means that President, and thanks to Harry Reid, which I'll explain in a moment, President Trump does not need 60 votes to get anyone through the Senate.
00:28:15.000So let's ask every question we've got to ask.
00:28:17.000Let's vet these candidates all the way down to the ground.
00:28:31.000A historically blown opportunity that will not come around again because there's this sort of ghoulish death watch that happens on the Supreme Court where we sit around waiting for somebody of the other party to die.
00:28:39.000But the Supreme Court needs to be hemmed back into its constitutional role.
00:28:44.000And it's constitutional role is not to implement stuff that I like or stuff that you like.
00:28:48.000It's constitutional role is to read the Constitution and apply the words of the Constitution clearly.
00:28:53.000This is why, for example, if I were going to go off the board here, but still on President Trump's list, I would be going for Senator Mike Lee.
00:28:59.000I think Senator Mike Lee would be the best pick of anybody that's been brought up.
00:29:03.000We know where he stands constitutionally.
00:29:05.000I know where he stands constitutionally because I've discussed the Constitution with Senator Lee.
00:29:08.000Senator Lee is a deep textualist, a deep originalist, and you know that he would vote to constrain the federal government's powers when it violates the Constitution of the United States.
00:29:17.000And he would also not use his own political preferences as the guidepost for determining what the law allows.
00:29:23.000So I like the idea of Senator Mike Lee.
00:29:25.000I know people are saying, well, then you won't have that vote in the Senate.
00:29:33.000So if you want to guarantee that this is a pick that goes through and a pick that votes the way that justices should all be voting, then it should be Mike Lee.
00:32:27.000And Mitch McConnell, cocaine Mitch, right, cocaine Mitch, he said at the time, looking exactly the same, he said at the time, you're going to regret this a lot sooner than you think.
00:32:37.000He looks a little more peaked now because he's done a lot more coke.
00:32:39.000But here is Mitch McConnell saying, Harry Reid, you are going to regret this.
00:32:43.000And Orrin Hatch sitting in the background looking just as alive then as he is now.
00:34:39.000President Obama at the time said, we need to eliminate the routine use of the filibuster for judicial nominees, because come on guys, we have to stop this.
00:34:46.000We need, we, it can't, it can't go on.
00:34:48.000Probably the one thing that we could change without a constitutional amendment that would make a difference here would be the elimination of the routine use of the filibuster in the Senate.
00:35:03.000Excuse me for saying a little bit of schadenfreude here, but yes, you all deserve this.
00:35:08.000But the richest schadenfreude came courtesy of people wailing yesterday.
00:35:12.000Now listen, I understand why people are upset.
00:35:14.000The fact is that when you believe that an institution is dedicated to the promulgation of your political ideology, and then that institution might be hemmed back into its constitutional boundaries, where it won't just declare that gay marriage is the law of the land based on nothing, or it won't just declare that abortion is the law of the land based on nothing.
00:35:31.000When all of that happens, then I understand why you'd be upset, but that's because you were stupid about what you think the Supreme Court should have been doing to begin with.
00:35:38.000This was not the job of the Supreme Court.
00:35:40.000But DNC members, who thought that they were, like, basically, Anthony Kennedy was the last bastion of hope.
00:35:45.000So, this audio broke yesterday of DNC members legitimately wailing after Kennedy announced his retirement, and it is just delicious.
00:36:49.000And then the best tweet yesterday was definitely from some rando named Matty K, who tweeted out, literally in tears, haven't felt this hopeless in a long time.
00:36:57.000With Justice Kennedy leaving, we now have two options as Americans.
00:36:59.000Get fitted for your Nazi uniform or report directly to your death camp.
00:37:03.000How do you fight the darkness without light?
00:37:08.000Yeah, yeah, that's probably, that's probably what's gonna happen here, is that the constitutional boundaries will be restored, and then we'll make you into a Nazi and put you in a death camp.
00:37:17.000That's not an exaggeration at all, guys.
00:37:19.000Now listen, there are some of us who've been prone to exaggeration about Supreme Court decisions in the past.
00:37:23.000I think my reaction to the Obamacare decision, well, I think I was right about the general reaction, was probably overstated on Twitter, but at least I wasn't saying that we were living in a Nazi death camp, so there's that.
00:37:33.000In any case, the level of leftist ire is insane, and the proposed solutions to stopping this are just as wonderfully delicious.
00:37:41.000So let's get into how the left has decided that they are going to hold up the nomination of Kennedy's replacement.
00:37:46.000So Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, he says that he's begging Republicans now that they should follow their rule.
00:37:52.000What exactly does he think was their rule?
00:37:53.000He thinks that Mitch McConnell said that we shouldn't vote on a judicial nominee in an election year.
00:39:15.000Here's Kamala Harris saying that somehow, using votes they don't have, in a filibuster process they themselves nuked, they're gonna try to work to stop this.
00:39:22.000Are you guys going to play hardball this time and say, we're not going to let you pass this?
00:39:25.000You're not going to rush this through us in a few months before election day?
00:39:28.000Based on every conversation I've had with my colleagues so far this afternoon, everybody's prepared to play hardball.
00:39:42.000She was sending up some serious smoke signals that she was upset about this entire thing.
00:39:48.000In fact, it sounds like she really wants to refight the battle of Little Bighorn here.
00:39:53.000Elizabeth Warren, our Native American senator from Massachusetts, who's not Native American in any way, makes a mockery of Native American background with her claims that she is.
00:40:00.000Here she is explaining that Donald Trump is about to destroy the country wholesale.
00:40:04.000This woman taught at Harvard Law School when I was there.
00:40:06.000She was obnoxious then, she's obnoxious now.
00:40:08.000Donald Trump has the opportunity to remake the Supreme Court for a generation.
00:40:13.000A woman's right to decisions over her own body are at risk.
00:40:17.000Equal rights, equal marriage is also at risk.
00:40:39.000So listen, eventually this will all be turned around and there will be a time when Democrats are in power again and we'll suffer the same way the Democrats are now.
00:40:45.000The difference is that Republicans aren't interested in the Supreme Court becoming a tool of their political agenda.
00:40:50.000Republicans just want the Supreme Court to go back to the original text of the Constitution and read the Constitution like any other law would ever be read, like the Bankruptcy Code would be read.
00:41:52.000Alternatively, you could stop relying on nine leftists on the Supreme Court to pass your legislative agenda, and you could actually go and have that legislative agenda passed by a bunch of Democrats.
00:42:01.000Or you could whine about it, really loud, and cry and whine.
00:42:04.000You could have Chris Matthews go out there and say, it's time for Democrats to play hardball.
00:42:08.000Yeah, go, Chris Matthews, get up, come out of the show, come in here all angry.
00:42:21.000It's time for me to stop coming out of the show, and I will finally go and buy a comb, because that's how serious I am about this situation.
00:42:27.000The reality is the Supreme Court never should have been this important.
00:42:30.000It is Democrats who made it this important.
00:42:31.000It is leftists who made it this important.
00:42:32.000And now they are reaping what they sow and it is well, well deserved.
00:42:36.000OK, time for some things I like and then time for some things that I hate.
00:42:40.000So the thing that I like today is a book called The Hollow Hope by Gerald Rosenberg.
00:42:43.000OK, there are a lot of people who believe that the Supreme Court is the great
00:42:47.000Hope for their agenda, that the Supreme Court is going to save them.
00:42:51.000The Supreme Court is going to make the country a better place, that they're going to do justice.
00:42:55.000There's a very famous story about Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, that he was deciding a particular case, and he was at a dinner party, and he goes out from his dinner party, and he hops in his carriage, and he's about to ride away, and some guy starts running after him, and the guy starts screaming at him, do justice, Mr. Holmes, do justice!
00:43:13.000And Holmes looks back at him and he says, it's not my job to do justice, it's my job to enforce the law.
00:43:19.000Historically speaking, for all the talk about how the Supreme Court has radically changed things, people radically overestimate how much the Supreme Court has changed things.
00:43:25.000It is my belief that even if same-sex marriage had not been passed on the federal level by the Supreme Court of the United States, that is the direction that the country was moving anyway.
00:43:32.000It is my belief that even without Brown v. Board of Education, the country would have moved away from segregation.
00:43:37.000In fact, Brown v. Board of Education happens in 1955.
00:43:39.000It takes until 1964 and the Civil Rights Act to forcibly desegregate the South.
00:43:45.000That's the argument that Gerald Rosenberg makes.
00:43:47.000Gerald Rosenberg is not a conservative.
00:43:48.000He's a professor, I believe, at the University of Chicago Law School.
00:43:50.000And he writes a book called The Hollow Hope, Can Courts Bring About Social Change?
00:43:55.000The courts cannot bring about social change.
00:43:57.000The best that they can do is sort of lag behind and then rubber stamp the direction they think the country is going anyway.
00:44:02.000So the left that wants to use the courts as their tool of social change, the answer is if you want social change, go out and make social change.
00:44:08.000Don't rely on a bunch of non-elected oligarchs who sit there for life to make your agenda happen.
00:44:14.000That's not the job of the Supreme Court.
00:44:15.000It is the job of the Supreme Court to enforce the greatest document ever conceived of by human beings.
00:44:20.000And that, of course, would be the Constitution of the United States.
00:44:23.000OK, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:44:29.000So Jeffrey Toobin just made an ass of himself on CNN.
00:46:02.000The left doesn't actually like democracy.
00:46:04.000When the left talks about how much they love democracy and how this is going to impose on our democracy some sort of burden, the reality is they can't get people to vote for their policies, so they want judges to do it for them.
00:46:14.000And when Jeffrey Toobin whines about this,
00:46:16.000I don't see why Jeffrey Toobin's value set should govern what people in Texas think.
00:46:19.000I don't see why my value set should necessarily govern what people in Massachusetts think.
00:46:23.000I think on the issue of abortion, it's a little bit different because if you consider abortion to be a form of murder, then you actually do require federal legislation on these issues because it is the job of the government to protect life, liberty, and property.
00:46:33.000And under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, there's equal protection of the laws, which in my view should be applied to the unborn as well.
00:46:39.000But with all of that said, there's this weird antipathy toward people voting for issues that Democrats don't want them to vote for.
00:46:47.000So they're all pro-choice when it comes to abortion, but they're anti-pro-choice when it comes to everything else.
00:46:50.000They're anti-choice when it comes to religious bakers.
00:46:52.000They're anti-choice when it comes to whether you should have to join a union or pay a union.
00:46:56.000They're anti-choice when it comes to whether you should be able to vote on issues like abortion in general.
00:47:01.000So they are utterly inconsistent on these issues.
00:47:03.000So, you know, it's it's it's just it's ridiculous.
00:47:06.000But this sort of crisis mentality on the left has been exacerbated.
00:47:10.000I mean, we had we had Maxine Waters talking about violent uprisings, essentially mob justice happening a week ago.
00:47:16.000Imagine how bad things are going to get now.
00:47:17.000I mean, I said to somebody in the White House, I hope your Secret Service protection is great, because I do not trust that there aren't going to be an increased number of nuts who are looking to kill somebody based on the level of and tenor of politics in the modern American state.
00:47:29.000I'm not going to blame that on the media.
00:47:30.000I'll blame the raised temperature on the media, but I'm not going to blame, you know, assassination attempts on the media, but the temperature is just too high for something not to blow.
00:47:38.000That's the direction in which this is moving.
00:47:40.000And now with all of that said, President Trump gave a rally last night, and President Trump's rallies are always basically hour-long comedy routines.
00:47:47.000I don't think that President Trump is really cooling down the rhetoric at all.
00:47:50.000And this is what his fans love about him.
00:47:52.000His biggest fans love the fact that President Trump likes to engage in the same sort of fisticuffs that the left engages in.
00:47:59.000And I understand the tendency of the id to resonate to this stuff.
00:48:02.000So I think this is helping the country move forward in any positive way.
00:48:06.000Here is Donald Trump going after Joe Crowley, who was just defeated in a primary by Alexandria Sanchez, Asya Sanchez, I can't remember her name, the socialist 28-year-old who's the new face of the Democratic Party.
00:49:27.000So while I enjoy President Trump's comedic timing, I am going to remind people that the President of the United States did say things about punching people with whom you disagree.
00:49:43.000So before we before we say that all of this is on the Democrats, I think a lot of it is on the Democrats, but I don't think that it is bringing down the temperature in any real way for the president of the United States to use that kind of language.