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00:01:20.000We are all still awaiting the Supreme Court's final ruling on overruling Roe v. Wade, but there was another really important decision that came down from the Supreme Court yesterday.
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00:01:33.000Well, we are all still awaiting the Supreme Court's final ruling on overruling Roe versus Wade.
00:01:38.000But there was another really important decision that came down from the Supreme Court yesterday.
00:01:42.000The case was called Carson v. Makin, and it was decided 6 to 3 with Justice Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts writing the opinion.
00:01:49.000He was joined by Thomas Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
00:01:52.000Of course, the liberals on the court, that would be Justice Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion.
00:01:58.000And then Sotomayor filed a separate dissenting opinion, which was even more extreme because she is the most extreme justice on the court by a long shot.
00:02:04.000Basically, what happened in this case, according to the Supreme Court, is that Maine had enacted a program of tuition assistance for parents who live in school districts that don't operate a secondary school Under that program, parents designate the secondary school they want their child to attend, either public or private, and then the school district transmits payments to that school to help defray the cost of tuition.
00:02:22.000Most private schools are eligible to receive the payments so long as they are quote-unquote non-sectarian.
00:02:27.000So then a bunch of religious schools sued and they said this violates the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
00:02:32.000The idea being this is discrimination against religion.
00:02:34.000And if you say that the only schools that are allowed to receive funding are non-religious schools, then you are effectively violating freedom of religion by discriminating against schools that are religious.
00:02:45.000This is a major issue because right now, across the country, we have seen voucher programs arise.
00:02:50.000In my home state of Florida, there are effectively voucher programs for a huge variety of students.
00:02:55.000And the question is whether a state is allowed to deny those vouchers to religious schools.
00:02:59.000Now, on the face of it, the answer would be obviously not.
00:03:02.000It's very silly to say that you should be allowed to use your voucher for some sort of secular school.
00:03:08.000The idea being that secular school is sort of the default, but not for a religious school of your choosing.
00:03:13.000Again, this is not the government directly funding religious schools.
00:03:15.000This is the government funding you and you deciding whether to put that money into a religious school.
00:03:20.000By the way, there'd be nothing wrong with the government directly funding religious schools so long as they're also funding not religious schools.
00:03:25.000If they're funding Jewish schools and Catholic schools, that is obviously not religious discrimination.
00:03:29.000But what we will see is that the left believes, and this is really, I think, the takeaway from this case.
00:03:34.000If the left had its way, all religion would be private and all secularism would be public.
00:03:39.000All that the right wants, and this is pretty clear here, is that religion and non-religion should be on equal footing when it comes to public funding, at least for private institutions.
00:03:49.000Nobody is saying they're going to teach Bible class in a public school.
00:03:54.000But we have now reached the point in American politics where it is considered absolutely de rigueur to fly a gay pride flag in a public school.
00:04:01.000But if you put up a display of the Ten Commandments, then this is a violation of church and state.
00:04:06.000Again, that phrase, the church and state boundary, that never appears in the Constitution of the United States.
00:04:11.000That's not what the Free Exercise and the Establishment Clause of the Constitution of the United States actually mean.
00:04:16.000The United States Constitution, when it says that the Congress shall not abridge free exercise of religion and shall establish no religion, The court has tended to read those as two separate clauses.
00:04:28.000The basic idea there is that you're not allowed to abridge the free exercise of somebody's religion by establishing a religion.
00:04:34.000It is not that you establish a religion by backing religion in any way.
00:04:39.000That was never the suggestion of the Founding Fathers.
00:04:42.000And that would have been out of step with 175 years of practice in the United States, basically up until the court rulings of the 1960s.
00:04:50.000So Justice Roberts in this case, he says the Maine's constitution provides that the state's legislature shall require the several towns to make suitable provision at their own expense for the support and maintenance of public schools.
00:04:59.000In accordance with that command, the legislature has required that every school-aged child in Maine shall be provided an opportunity to receive the benefits of a free public education and that the required schools be operated by the legislative and governing bodies of local school administrative units.
00:05:11.000But Maine is also the most rural state in the Union, though a lot of people live in the middle of nowhere.
00:05:14.000For many school districts, the realities of remote geography and low population density make those commands difficult to heed.
00:05:20.000Indeed, of Maine's 260 school administrative units, fewer than half operate a public secondary school of their own, meaning a high school.
00:05:27.000Maine has sought to deal with this problem in part by creating a program of tuition assistance for families that reside in these local areas, so they don't Want to spend the money to set up a public school in a town with five kids.
00:05:37.000So instead what they've said is, we're going to give you a voucher, you use that voucher however you want.
00:05:40.000Under that program, if an SAU neither operates its own public secondary school nor contracts with a particular public or private school for the education of its school-aged children, the SAU must pay the tuition at the public school or the approved private school of the parent's choice at which the student is accepted.
00:05:55.000Parents who want to take advantage of this benefit first select the school they wish their child to attend.
00:05:58.000If they select a private school that has been approved by the Maine Department of Education, then the parent's SAU pays the tuition at the chosen school up to a specified maximum rate.
00:06:07.000So if you want to receive these payments, you have to be approved under certain requirements under Maine compulsory education law.
00:06:13.000So you have to be accredited by a New England association of schools and colleges or approved for attendance purposes by the department.
00:06:20.000The school must meet specific curricular requirements like using English as the language of instruction and offering a course in Maine's history and maintaining a student teacher ratio of not more than 30 to one.
00:06:29.000And the program imposes no geographic limitation.
00:06:32.000Parents may direct tuition payments to schools inside or outside the state, or even in foreign countries.
00:06:36.000In schools that qualify for the program because they are accredited, teachers don't need to be certified by the state.
00:06:41.000Maine's curricular requirements do not apply.
00:06:47.000Prior to 1981, parents could direct the tuition assistance payments to religious schools.
00:06:51.000In the 1979-80 school year, according to Chief Justice Roberts, over 200 Maine students opted to attend such schools through the tuition assistance program.
00:06:58.000In 1981, Maine imposed a new requirement that any school receiving tuition assistance payments must be, quote, a non-sectarian school in accordance with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
00:07:07.000That provision was enacted in response to an opinion by the Maine Attorney General taking the position that if you publicly fund a private religious school, this violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
00:07:16.000We subsequently held that a benefit program under which private citizens direct government aid to religious schools wholly as a result of their genuine and independent private choice.
00:07:25.000That was a case called Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002.
00:07:29.000The main legislature considered a proposed bill to repeal the non-sectarian requirement, but then rejected it.
00:07:33.000And now the court holds that they had to reject it because the simple fact is that the free exercise clause requires non-discrimination between religion and a religion.
00:07:46.000According to the court, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment protects against indirect coercion or penalties on the free exercise of religion, not just outright prohibitions.
00:07:53.000In particular, we have repeatedly held that a state violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.
00:08:02.000The state may not withhold unemployment benefits, for instance, on the ground that an individual lost his job for refusing to abandon the dictates of his faith.
00:08:09.000We've recently applied these principles in the context of two state efforts to withhold otherwise available public benefits from religious organizations.
00:08:15.000In a 2017 case, Wright's Chief Justice Roberts reconsidered a Missouri program that offered grants to qualifying nonprofit organizations that installed cushioning playground surfaces made from recycled rubber tires.
00:08:26.000The Missouri Department of Natural Resources maintained an express policy of denying such grants to any applicant owned or controlled by a church, sect, or other religious entity.
00:08:34.000The Trinity Lutheran Church Child Learning Center applied for a grant to resurface its gravel playground.
00:08:38.000The department denied on the grounds that the center was operated by the church.
00:08:41.000And they said, no, no, no, this is discrimination on the basis of religion.
00:08:45.000And then they came to a similar conclusion in another case called Espinoza, a couple of years ago, in which they said that a Montana program that provided tax credits to donors who sponsored scholarships for private school tuition Also had to include religious schools.
00:08:59.000So now they're just saying that if you have a voucher program and it is broadly applicable, you cannot exclude religious schools because that would violate the free exercise clause.
00:09:08.000And as I'll talk about in just a second, this actually has some ramifications for the future of, I think, broader religious cases, religious freedom cases in the country.
00:09:16.000The left, however, thinks that states should be able to discriminate actively against religion.
00:09:21.000And really, they believe that the state should actively discriminate against religion.
00:09:25.000So Justice Breyer and Kagan and Sotomayor, they actually put forward a dissent in which they say that a state is allowed to further anti-establishment interests by withholding aid from religious institutions without violating the Constitution's protections for the free exercise of religion.
00:09:42.000So, meaning that it is not a violation of the Free Exercise Clause and it also is avoiding the Establishment Clause.
00:09:48.000Now, Justice Sotomayor, that sort of middle road here from Breyer and Kagan and Sotomayor sort of joins.
00:09:54.000Right at the very end of Breyer's dissent, he sort of explains.
00:09:58.000He says, main wish is to provide children within the state with a secular public education.
00:10:01.000This wish embodies in significant part the constitutional need to avoid spending public money to support what is essentially the teaching and practice of religion.
00:10:08.000That need is reinforced by the fact that we are today a nation of more than 330 million people who ascribe to over 100 different religions.
00:10:14.000In that context, state neutrality with respect to religion is particularly important.
00:10:17.000So, according to the left, neutrality with respect to religion means no religion.
00:10:21.000No publicly sponsored religion, even if it's not direct subsidy.
00:10:25.000Even if it's you picking where to put the money.
00:10:27.000Because what they wish, this is what the left wishes, is for secularism to be the public way of the republic, and religion is to be utterly private.
00:10:35.000And if you wish to send your kid to a religious school, you have to pay twice.
00:10:37.000You have to pay for a public school for someone else's kid, and then you also have to pay for a religious school for your own kid.
00:10:43.000Which seems to violate basic notions of fairness when it comes to the Free Exercise Clause and when it comes to, again, basic justice.
00:10:51.000I'm paying for many, many kids who are not my own in the United States, right?
00:10:54.000I'm paying for a lot of kids to go to crappy public schools, and then I'm also paying for my kids not to go to public school because I wish them to learn a value system that I actually care about.
00:11:02.000And somebody yesterday was joking, well, what are you going to do now?
00:11:04.000If you're saying that, according to the Supreme Court, you have to subsidize religion, what are you going to?
00:11:08.000If a parent wants to send their kid to the Church of Satan school around the corner, well, what are you going to do?
00:11:12.000And the answer is, first of all, that's called the local public school in many areas of the country.
00:11:16.000Well, we're talking about schooling your kid, but the reality is that it is summer break, and that means that you're spending more time than ever away from the home.
00:11:23.000Well, that means you also have to keep your house safe.
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00:11:59.000This summer, whether I'm across the country or across town, I know everything at home is protected and connected and that it will stay that way.
00:12:05.000With a Ring Protect Pro subscription, which is an amazing deal by the way, I get professional monitoring for the ultimate peace of mind.
00:12:10.000If anything happens, professional monitoring will call me and can request emergency services.
00:12:30.000Yeah, but Justice Sotomayor makes it perfectly clear what the left believes about religion.
00:12:35.000And this is, I think, the real conflict in the country over religious freedom.
00:12:39.000Justice Sotomayor says this court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers sought to build. This court should not have started down this path five years ago. Before Trinity Lutheran, it was well established that both the United States and state constitutions embody distinct views on the subject of religion in favor of free exercise but opposed to establishment that find no counterpart with respect to other constitutional rights.
00:13:00.000Because of this tension, the court recognized room for play in the joints between the religion clauses with some state actions permitted by the establishment clause, but not required by the free exercise clause.
00:13:10.000Moreover, the court for many decades understood the establishment clause to prohibit government from funding religious exercise.
00:13:15.000Over time, the court eroded these principles in certain respects.
00:13:19.000Trinity Lutheran veered sharply from certain understandings.
00:13:22.000After assuming away an establishment clause violation, the court revolutionized free exercise doctrine by equating a state's decision not to fund a religious organization with a presumptively unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of religious status.
00:13:37.000If I decide that I'm going to subsidize everybody except for the black people in my neighborhood, That seems to be the same thing as me discriminating against the black people in my neighborhood, would it not be?
00:13:47.000I'm confused as to why me giving benefits to every school except for these religious schools is not active discrimination against those schools.
00:13:55.000So Justice Sotomayor, she says, the consequences of the court's rapid transformation of the religion clauses must not be understated.
00:14:01.000From a doctrinal perspective, the court's failure to apply the play in the joints principle here.
00:14:05.000By the way, I have to say it is hysterical that we have a court that cites two things like the play in the joints principle.
00:14:12.000We're in the concept... The play in the joints principle?
00:14:15.000That's just an excuse to do whatever you want.
00:14:17.000If I say, listen, if I say to my kids, I have a set of rules at home.
00:14:20.000The rules are that you have to clear your plate at the end of the meal.
00:14:23.000And also then you have to go brush your teeth.
00:14:25.000But I also have a play in the joints principle, which means I can do whatever the hell I want.
00:14:29.000And I now invoke this play in the joints principle to also say that you have to do the dishes.
00:14:34.000Like, the play in the joints principle.
00:14:37.000The play in the joint principle is a contradiction in terms.
00:14:40.000A principle is a thing that is unchanging and eternal.
00:14:43.000Play in the joint is specifically ad hoc.
00:14:47.000But, says Justice Sotomayor, the court's increasingly expansive view of the free exercise clause risks swallowing the space between the religion clauses that once permitted religious exercise to exist without sponsorship and also without interference.
00:15:00.000The court's decision is especially perverse because the benefit at issue is the public educations which all of Maine's children are entitled under the state constitution.
00:15:07.000Right, but what she neglects to point out is that parents are the ones who get to make the call.
00:15:11.000What she really wants is the state of Maine to prevent parents from sending their kids to religious school by only subsidizing these parents to send their kids to non-sectarian schools.
00:15:22.000She says, in 2017, I feared the court was leading us to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment.
00:15:30.000Well, I mean, separation of church and state is not even in the Constitution.
00:15:35.000Today, the court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.
00:15:41.000No, it just says, the court is just saying that you can't discriminate actively against religion.
00:15:45.000Now, the reason that this makes a rather large difference is because we are about to see a spate of cases that come up with regard to quote-unquote non-sectarian interests running directly up against religious exercise.
00:15:58.000This is likely to happen because Neil Gorsuch and the Supreme Court have decided, for example, that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 magically now covers Transgender men or transgender women, for example.
00:16:09.000A Title IX, which was designed to protect biological women from the predations of biological men and to protect biological women from discrimination by biological men.
00:16:17.000Now it covers men who think they are women or women who think they are men.
00:16:21.000This runs directly in the face of a wide variety of religious practice in the United States.
00:16:28.000The simple fact is that, for example, men and women are treated differently in Christianity.
00:16:33.000Men and women are treated differently in Judaism.
00:16:35.000Men and women are treated differently in Islam.
00:16:37.000In every major religion in the United States, men and women are treated differently because the historic reality of the ages is that men and women are different.
00:16:44.000And this means they have different social roles.
00:16:46.000It doesn't mean that women can't do incredibly important things.
00:16:48.000More important things than men, in many cases.
00:16:50.000But the differences in religious roles between men and women are pretty baked in.
00:16:54.000Beyond that, you have the issue of Obergefell.
00:16:57.000And I've been suggesting, literally since Obergefell was brought down by the Supreme Court in 2013, in fact, before it, I said that if the state started subsidizing same-sex marriage, there would come a point where leftist states started cracking down on churches and saying that any institution that does not reflect our social policy with respect to same-sex marriage, if they don't believe that Justice Kennedy was magically the Pope and got to decide for everyone what morality was, That states would start discriminating against religious institutions.
00:17:28.000And so it seems the Supreme Court is now moving in the direction of what we call the Utah Rule.
00:17:32.000The Utah Rule exists, obviously, in the state of Utah.
00:17:35.000And basically, it has a very expansive, quote-unquote, non-discrimination law.
00:17:39.000It prevents discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and all the rest.
00:17:46.000It seems like this court is trying to signal that it is going to provide for broad religious carve-outs from secular non-discrimination law.
00:17:54.000Now the problem with that, of course, is that the rubber meets the road in what does religious practice look like?
00:18:00.000Because the reality is that religious people...
00:18:03.000Don't just practice their religion in religious institutions.
00:18:05.000Now what the left would like to do is pretend that religious institutions don't even exist.
00:18:08.000We've now seen a case in New York, for example, where Yeshiva University, the largest Orthodox Jewish institution in the United States at a higher education level, has now been mandated by the New York City Health Department, among other things.
00:18:19.000The New York City commissioners have decided, and a court has now held with them, that Yeshiva University has to subsidize gay pride groups at a modern Orthodox Jewish university By the way, Orthodox Judaism does not approve of homosexual activity.
00:18:32.000So now they have to subsidize and provide space for gay pride groups at an Orthodox school because they say, well, this isn't really a Jewish institution.
00:18:38.000It's a secular institution that does Jewish things.
00:18:42.000I would assume that that is going to be struck down by the Supreme Court.
00:18:44.000In that case, we'll end up in the Supreme Court.
00:18:46.000But what happens to all of the religious people in daily life who say, for example, that they do not wish to participate in a gay wedding?
00:18:54.000We've seen that the court has sort of elided this in the Masterpiece Cake Shop case, where the court decided that we were going to say that a person doesn't have to use their artistic endeavors.
00:19:02.000They can't be violated on First Amendment grounds.
00:19:04.000You don't have to use your artistic skill to do something.
00:19:06.000What if I'm not doing something artistic?
00:19:08.000What if I'm a plumber and I just don't feel like doing the plumbing at a gay bar?
00:19:13.000Because I object to gay bars in general.
00:19:16.000Is that a violation of the First Amendment on religion grounds?
00:19:19.000Is that a violation of the First Amendment on free speech grounds?
00:19:25.000Or what if I just own a private corporation?
00:19:27.000And my private corporation does not wish to subsidize healthcare for same-sex partners, for example, because I don't believe that gay marriage is a moral thing.
00:19:36.000Presumably the court now forces me, the religious person, to run my business in a way that runs directly counter to my morality.
00:19:41.000This is the big problem with when you have forcible secularism as the state of play.
00:19:47.000There will be a conflict, and we'll have to see how broadly the Supreme Court is willing to carve religious exemptions to these so-called non-discrimination laws, which actively discriminate against people with religious viewpoints.
00:19:58.000But this case is definitely a step in the right direction.
00:20:00.000Naturally, you have legal experts like Jeffrey Toobin, who, when he's not masturbating on camera in front of his Zoom colleagues, is still the legal analyst at CNN.
00:20:08.000He is saying that this Supreme Court decision violates the Establishment Clause.
00:20:12.000Listening to Jeffrey Toobin disclaim on legal matters, let's just say it seems a little bit self-serving.
00:20:23.000Under the Free Exercise Clause, we have parochial schools in this country, and parents can educate their children under any sort of religion they like.
00:20:41.000However, there is also the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which said the Congress cannot establish a religion.
00:20:49.000And historically, the Court has said If there is government money going to religious institutions, including schools, that is a violation of the Establishment Clause.
00:21:02.000Okay, that is not, okay, him saying that this is a violation of the Establishment Clause if you choose to send your kids to a religious school with the voucher that has been provided to you is, of course, silly.
00:21:11.000But this, it does demonstrate, once again, that the real battle over religion in the United States is whether it will be forcibly disestablished by the government, which is the perspective of the left.
00:21:22.000This is going to be a case that also the Supreme Court is deciding this term, is if you are allowed after a football game to kneel in prayer The left would like to say no, or whether we are going to allow religious people to actually be religious.
00:21:35.000And this conflict has been a long time coming because the left has been pushing for forcible secularization of American society across every major institution in the society.
00:21:43.000So it's good to see the Supreme Court fight back against that yesterday.
00:21:48.000Chief Justice Roberts, rarely in a controversial case, actually making the right decision.
00:21:53.000The left has basically been saying for a very, very long time that you can be religious, you know, not in public.
00:22:02.000And that's why you should be getting the most out of your home.
00:22:03.000Financially speaking, your home is more than the place you live.
00:22:06.000It's actually an investment tool, especially these days.
00:22:08.000After all, home prices are still up almost 20%, which is a big deal because you're able to access that equity as cash at incredibly low interest rates, making it easier to pay off those high interest debts.
00:22:17.000Fund home renovation, add to your savings account, do whatever you need to do because it's actually your money.
00:22:21.000Now, if that sounds like something you might want to check out, you need to call my friends over at American at Financing.
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00:23:51.000Joe Biden has been pushing for something on gun control just so he can tell his constituents he did something on gun control.
00:23:56.000Here was Joe Biden reading his script yesterday.
00:23:58.000Have you received my briefing on the guns legislation that senators say that they've gotten to a legislative text point?
00:24:06.000Very brief briefing before I walked in the room to make sure I say, let them announce it and then I'll speak to it.
00:24:14.000I'll announce it and I'll speak to you.
00:24:20.000Well, they're now providing a service to that addled old fellow.
00:24:22.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the Senate began debate Tuesday on bipartisan legislation intended to curb gun violence in what would represent the first major federal change to gun laws in decades.
00:24:30.000Now, the reality is that the changes that are being proposed are not particularly major.
00:24:47.000The bill is apparently pretty vague and it's unclear exactly how the black letter law will then be interpreted by states, how grants will be given and all the rest.
00:24:56.000But it seems like this was just a do something moment.
00:24:58.000And this is what happens when you make policy on the back of emergency.
00:25:01.000Whenever there is something horrible that happens in this act as a spur toward legislation, legislation usually is crap.
00:25:06.000That tends to be the pattern in American life.
00:25:08.000The Patriot Act was wildly overbroad, and it was wildly overbroad because it was a reaction to 9-11.
00:25:13.000Whenever there is some sort of major national catastrophe, and then legislators jump into the fray to solve the problem, very often they do more harm than good.
00:25:22.000The proposed legislation released earlier on Tuesday evening is the result of weeks of negotiations that started, of course, after the mass shootings at a supermarket, largely black, in Buffalo, New York, and at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
00:25:34.000According to the Wall Street Journal, 10 Republicans signed on to the bill's framework released earlier this month.
00:25:38.000Senate leaders from both parties have endorsed it, raising the likelihood of passage in the 50-50 chamber.
00:25:41.000Now, I think that the logic here Senator Mitch McConnell is take the gun control issue off the table for 2022.
00:25:49.000The idea is if we pass something, then we will be able to say when Joe Biden says, they wouldn't do anything.
00:25:55.000And they'll be able to say, well, actually, we signed on to a bipartisan piece of legislation with you on gun control.
00:26:08.000This is why McConnell is backing the bill.
00:26:10.000On the other hand, there's the argument to be made that handing Joe Biden any sort of legislative victory is a mistake.
00:26:15.000Because just from a political point of view, we'll get to the details of the bill in a second, from a political point of view, saying to Joe Biden, you can't get anything done.
00:26:22.000You have no ability to govern because you keep proposing things that people don't like.
00:26:29.000And taking the wind out of the sails of your base, many of whom are very exercised by the possibility of passage of these sorts of broad federal That is a bad idea as well.
00:26:41.000The bill would set up a $750 million funds, help states put in place and enforce extreme protection orders known as red flag laws that allow firearms to be removed if a person is deemed dangerous to themselves or others.
00:26:50.000And again, I've said before, and in principle, the idea of a red flag log, if you're talking about somebody who's exhibiting truly mentally dangerous behavior, like really dangerous, like going online and threatening people, or somebody who's murdering small animals.
00:27:10.000Because you've seen people on the left who have routinely said things like, if you disagree with me, I'm just gonna try to take your guns away.
00:27:15.000And that, I think, rightly scares the living hell out of people.
00:27:18.000Because one of the problems with an extreme protection order is that it is enforced without actually the ability to rebut right away.
00:27:25.000The police come and they take your guns before you actually have a chance to go in front of a judge and explain why the guns should not be taken.
00:27:32.000If passed, the bill would also close the so-called boyfriend loophole, which expands current law to prohibit dating partners or recent dating partners convicted of domestic violence from purchasing a firearm.
00:27:40.000Rights for those individuals will be restored after five years if they haven't been convicted of other violent crimes again.
00:27:45.000Senator Marco Rubio balked at the urgency.
00:27:47.000He tweeted, quote, We're being asked to vote tonight to begin debate on a gun proposal whose legislative text was made available less than an hour ago.
00:27:53.000The legislation also sets up a grant program for states to expand mental health services for schools and for schools to increase safety measures.
00:28:00.000It would appropriate a billion bucks for schools to expand mental health support, $300 million for school security and violence prevention programs.
00:28:06.000So again, that $300 million for school security and violence prevention, I'm fine with that.
00:28:11.000The red flag stuff seems like a bit of a red flag to me.
00:28:14.000The package also includes a crackdown on illegal sales of guns, would require an investigative period to review juvie and mental health records for 18 to 21-year-old gun purchasers.
00:28:23.000Now, I'm not sure if that law actually is sufficient because you actually have to now Open up juvie records?
00:28:31.000Or does it just provide an extra period in states that allow for that?
00:28:36.000The expanded background check for young buyers could involve a call to the local PD, take up to 10 days if there are areas of concern that authorities need to follow up on.
00:28:42.000The bill would also make it a federal crime to engage in straw purchases, the buying of a gun for someone else, or gun trafficking, which is the illegal trading of guns.
00:28:51.000Not sure how you would establish a straw purchase in the case, for example, where I buy a gun and then I give a gun to my 17-year-old son for his birthday.
00:29:03.000We want to go hunting together, so I give him a gun for his birthday.
00:29:05.000Is that now a straw purchase that is now going to make me a federal criminal?
00:29:09.000Well, John Cornyn is the top GOP negotiator and widely considered the heir apparent to Mitch McConnell.
00:29:13.000He says unless a person is convicted of a crime or is adjudicated mentally ill, their ability to purchase a firearm will not be impacted by this legislation.
00:29:22.000House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says that they are going to ram this thing through.
00:29:25.000The gun legislation is expected to cost several billion dollars.
00:29:28.000Lawmakers aren't insisting on waiting for a formal cost estimate to vote for it.
00:29:31.000Gun control advocates are backing the legislation.
00:29:34.000And they see this as the first step, obviously.
00:29:38.000They say it can be abused to restrict lawful gun purchases.
00:29:40.000But one thing That people on the right are saying, and I think is well-founded, is this is, as always, just the first, this is just a foot in the door.
00:29:51.000The minute you start passing gun legislation on the basis of terrible things happening, well, next time a terrible thing happens, they'll push more gun legislation and you will just pass that gun legislation as well.
00:30:01.000Apparently, Republicans wanted to include language banning the use of any federal spending in the bill for abortion.
00:30:06.000One person familiar with the talk said that had been resolved, no funding would be used for abortion.
00:30:11.000And again, final hurdles in the text, according to the Wall Street Journal, had centered on red flag laws known formally as extreme protection orders.
00:30:18.000Lawmakers had needed to work through differences on expanding federal law preventing people convicted of domestic violence from obtaining a firearm.
00:30:24.000Current law bans those who are married, who lived with, or have a child with the victim.
00:30:28.000So the boyfriend loophole is you don't have any of those things, but you have a girlfriend and you're beating her up.
00:30:33.000Which, again, don't really have a problem with that.
00:30:34.000Not sure why it's a federal issue as opposed to a state issue, but...
00:30:37.000All right, now, is any of this really going to solve the broader problem of mass shootings in schools?
00:30:43.000Probably not, because as it turns out, the problem of mass shootings in schools very often tends to be derelict action by people who ought to know better, which is why, for example, we are now finding out that the Uvalde classroom door that supposedly the police refused to breach because it was locked wasn't locked at all.
00:31:02.000Here's the director of Texas Department of Public Safety, Stephen McGraw, explaining.
00:31:07.000There's compelling evidence that the law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we've learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre.
00:31:21.000The on-seat commander waited for a radio and rifles.
00:31:37.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Macross said that police officers armed with rifles and protected by body armor were on the scene within three minutes.
00:31:46.000Even had the door been secured, which it was not, they had the tools to break it open.
00:31:49.000They waited an hour and 14 minutes to go into the classroom despite hearing ongoing gunshots, knowing kids had been shot inside, knowing at least one teacher shot was still alive.
00:32:15.000According to McCraw, Arradondo arrived in the school 11-36.
00:32:18.000That's three minutes after the shooter began massacring the kids in the classroom.
00:32:23.000His timeline indicates that Arradondo repeatedly instructed other officers not to go into the classroom as he sought classroom keys and police protective equipment.
00:32:30.000McCraw said a teacher had previously reported the strike plate on the door jamb was broken and that the door was unable to lock correctly.
00:32:35.000He said he doesn't believe officers at the scene even tried the handle.
00:32:39.000Arradondo did not bring his police radio to the scene.
00:32:42.000It wouldn't matter because the police radios apparently don't work inside the building.
00:32:46.000He said testing after the shooting showed only that border patrol radios were functional, which shows that the local law enforcement didn't even have the ability to talk to people who are inside or outside.
00:33:00.000Seven minutes after all of this, school district police officer Ruben Ruiz came into the school telling other officers that his wife, teacher Eva Morales, had called him and told him she was shot, Apparently they then took his gun away to prevent him from going in.
00:33:15.000Just horrific failure of action by this police department.
00:33:20.000And no amount of additional funding to red flag laws is going to fix that.
00:33:26.000And this looks more like a political stunt by both Republicans and Democrats.
00:33:29.000Democrats say they got something done, Republicans to say that they helped out.
00:33:32.000And then it does like an effective solution to any of this sort of stuff.
00:33:36.000Apparently Senator Cornyn also pledged on Tuesday that he was going to negotiate some sort of deal on immigration.
00:33:44.000According to Igor Bobich, who is a reporter for Huffington Post, according to Bobich, he said, the vibe in the Senate is so positive right now, Schumer gave Susan Collins a fist bump.
00:33:57.000A smiling Cornyn tells Alex Padilla, the senator from California, first guns, now immigration.
00:34:00.000And Sinema said, that's right, we're going to do it.
00:34:04.000I mean, that is, I don't know what you guys do for a living.
00:34:07.000You don't have any agreements with Democrats on immigration.
00:36:33.000Use code Ben for 25% off your new membership.
00:36:36.000You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:36:40.000Meanwhile, if the Republicans are trying to save Joe Biden through gun control legislation and or amnesty legislation, the economy is not going to save Joe Biden.
00:37:22.000So here is Karine Jean-Pierre, a rather untalented White House press secretary, trying to explain that we are not in recession.
00:37:30.000We see that the economic strength that we have seen from this past year, from the action that the President has taken with the American Rescue Plan, with what we have seen with the historical gains, that is going to help us deal with the recession.
00:38:08.000And meanwhile, Joe Biden, his idea is to mock oil companies.
00:38:11.000So this idiot has undermined the ability to refine or produce oil in the United States, and he's mocking the oil companies while you're paying six bucks a gallon.
00:38:27.000and at times vilified it, and that the administration would need to take a change in approach in order to make progress on reducing energy prices and to increase supply.
00:41:21.000If they had thought five minutes down the road, they would have realized inflation was going to blow out.
00:41:25.000Not just that, if they've been thinking ahead, remember, this is the crew that was like sending out masks in January of this year, thinking ahead.
00:41:41.000And by the way, he has another solution that is definitely going to help so many Americans.
00:41:45.000Joe Biden now wants to plan, he plans to cut nicotine in cigarettes.
00:41:49.000Basically destroying the cigarette industry and it won't destroy the cigarette industry.
00:41:53.000It'll just turn everybody into a criminal who is now distributing Lucy's on the sidewalk.
00:41:57.000Unfortunately, in the United States, a disproportionate number of minorities smoke.
00:42:00.000The smoking rates differ fairly widely based on racial and ethnic background.
00:42:05.000So Joe Biden just targeted people who are the socioeconomic Lower class.
00:42:12.000I mean, you're talking about people who earn the least because there is a large income striation among people who smoke in the United States.
00:42:18.000So the people who are the poorest in the United States are now going to be targeted by the Biden administration.
00:42:22.000The Washington Post now reporting the Biden administration said Tuesday it plans to develop a rule requiring tobacco companies to reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes sold in the United States to minimally or non addictive levels.
00:42:32.000An effort that if successful could have an unprecedented effect in slashing smoking related deaths and threaten a politically powerful industry.
00:42:40.000The initiative was included in the administration's Unified Agenda, a compilation of planned federal regulatory actions released twice a year.
00:42:46.000The Spring Agenda was released on Tuesday.
00:42:51.000I also recognize that what you are actually going to do by doing this is create an entire industry of illegal distribution of nicotine-riddled cigarettes.
00:43:01.000And then you're going to be shocked when there are additional confrontations with the cops or with the feds.
00:43:08.000They don't think through their policy beyond like the next five minutes.
00:43:12.000But don't worry, the experts are in charge.
00:43:13.000Janet Yellen informs us that the Fed is going to do fine.
00:43:16.000Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, straight from the Proudfoot family of the Shire, said she thought that the Federal Reserve's efforts to combat inflation could be effective, according to the Wall Street Journal, without significantly increasing the unemployment rate.
00:43:27.000The tight labor market that formed over the past two years as the economy recovered rapidly from a brief pandemic recession could aid the Fed in combating inflation, Yellen said while speaking at a press conference during a visit to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
00:43:39.000Rising wages across the economy could draw people back into the labor force, which remains smaller than it was before the pandemic.
00:43:44.000That larger pool of labor could ease upward pressure on worker wages, a factor that feeds into broader inflation.
00:43:51.000The pandemic-inflated economy I think needs to be taken into account.
00:43:53.000To my mind, makes it more possible for us to achieve lower inflation, she said.
00:43:56.000Well, I mean, you've done a crappy job so far, so I'll trust you now.
00:44:00.000She says, staying in the neighborhood of tight labor markets, what people would dub full employment, I think is possible.
00:44:29.000If all of this seems mutually contradictory, that's because it is.
00:44:33.000There's no through lines this administration, other than they do what they want to do and damn the consequences, it does not matter.
00:44:39.000That is the message of this administration.
00:44:41.000Now, it doesn't mean the Republicans can't save him.
00:44:43.000You can always count on Republicans to be too stupid for the room and start making overtures to a president who's in the midst of dramatic failure.
00:44:50.000You can see the political failures that the Republicans seem to be pursuing right now.
00:44:57.000Republicans can make that mistake in the future.
00:44:58.000You know, the Republicans tend to get fat and happy on the one end, where they're like, oh, well, you know what?
00:45:05.000And it's a bad concession that undermines support of the base.
00:45:08.000Or they can make an error on the other end by nominating bad candidates in the belief that the Democrats are so bad there's no way that the Republican can lose.
00:45:36.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Bradford Carrington, Executive Producer Jeremy Boren, Supervising Producer Mathis Glover, Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky, Associate Producer Savannah Dominguez-Morris, Editor Adam Sajevitz, Audio Mixer Mike Karamina, Hair and Makeup Artist in Wardrobe Fabiola Christina, Production Coordinator Jessica Kranz.
00:46:00.000The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.