00:20:48.040Okay, so the reason that this is, in my opinion, but it's more than an opinion, incontrovertible is that Biden's support was thin to begin with.
00:21:03.000He doesn't have, he doesn't have a core support.
00:28:48.580Make sure you see his whole podcast tonight at BillOReilly.com.
00:28:54.460Bill, as always, thank you for joining us.
00:28:55.940You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:29:01.760Direct to a relative of John Jacob Jingleheimer-Smith, as we found out on an episode earlier, Senator Eric Schmidt from Missouri is with us.
00:29:11.960Eric, what happened with SCOTUS last week?
00:29:15.140Well, they punted, essentially, on the Missouri v. Biden, which became the Murphy v. Missouri lawsuit that made it to the Supreme Court.
00:29:25.820And essentially, what the lower court had said was an Orwellian vast censorship enterprise made its way to the court.
00:29:33.020And what the court essentially did was they kicked it back to the lower court because they said the plaintiffs couldn't prove standing, meaning, and Justice Barrett wrote this part, that you would have to show that this was going to continue into the future.
00:29:49.180They certainly didn't say that this didn't happen, Glenn.
00:29:52.260And I think, like, if you're looking for what this case truly represents in a broader context, you've got to go back in time into May 2022 when we filed it, which was before Elon Musk bought Twitter.
00:30:07.760It's before we really started to learn the extent of all of the censorship.
00:30:12.120And when I filed it, we had some idea because you had, at the time, Jen Psaki standing at the podium gleefully saying, we're flagging this stuff.
00:30:20.860You know, so I think it's important to remember where we were at.
00:30:26.180I also think what it does, too, Glenn, is it probably shows us that there needs to be another kind of remedy for this sort of thing.
00:30:35.280Like, there needs to be, in addition to just saying, the court saying, you can't do this anymore, there need to actually be real damages here.
00:30:43.560And so that, I think, is a good segue into what we should do next in legislation that I have filed, which is twofold.
00:30:50.920So, one, on the social media companies themselves, if they're engaged in this kind of activity, because under Section 230, the legal protections they were giving them to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, essentially what Congress said is, okay, Internet people, platforms, you're going to be an open platform.
00:31:11.720Therefore, we're not going to hold you to the same standard, legal standard of, you know, sort of you can get sued for libel or, you know, you can get sued for any of the things that people might be able to sue CBS News or a traditional publisher for.
00:31:25.720So, they get this blanket protection because they're just supposed to be kind of an open source platform.
00:31:31.180That's not really what's happening right now, right?
00:31:33.220So, if they're found to be, if somebody sues, if Glenn Beck were to sue or something, and say, you know, this was, you know, you are censoring because it's a viewpoint discrimination or some sort of thing like that, that you lose your Section 230 protections.
00:31:49.800Do they want to be a publisher or do they want to be an open platform?
00:31:53.280The second piece, and I actually think it's maybe perhaps the most important piece for the things that you and I care about the most, which is the government's role in all of this, is that you provide a private right of action.
00:32:04.040So, you can sue an individual government actor for violating your First Amendment rights.
00:32:11.000I think that changes the incentive structure for these bureaucrats who right now think they can just sort of get away with this by labeling everything misinformation or disinformation.
00:32:19.920So, if they have something on the line themselves, it's a culture change, and that's what I'm going to be working on moving forward here.
00:32:27.620Do you think you have enough support or will in the next season of Congress and the Senate?
00:32:36.780Yeah, I think we have to take the majority, obviously.
00:32:40.100But I do think this stuff has been exposed.
00:32:42.240I was actually thinking about you last week, and so it's good that I'm on the show.
00:32:47.640I was thinking about when I think when it may have been the first time I met you, it was at an AG event, and you had that compass from Washington, right?
00:32:57.220And it had worn, I remember getting to hold it in my hand, and it sort of, you know, his thumb was on it as he's surveying property in Virginia and kind of knowing north from south.
00:33:08.740I think what's happened in the last week, if you tie it into this debate that happened last week, I think that in the largest context, when people look back, let's say 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, I think what's happened in the last year or two, and COVID was the sort of harbinger of all this.
00:33:27.600All of the lies have been exposed now, right?
00:33:32.440Like, these are the same people who are now shocked, you know, oh, Biden needs to be replaced.
00:33:37.720These are the same people who have lied to you about, these aren't political prosecutions, the same people that lied to you about COVID, the same people who've lied time and time again, who tell you the economy is just fine, and that look at the numbers, they're great, and you shouldn't believe you're lying on what's happening in your own life.
00:33:57.020They're the same people who lied about the Hunter Biden laptop theory.
00:34:00.760So this kind of, call it, you know, administrative state, deep state, whatever you want to call it, there's people so invested, Glenn, in Biden remaining so they can keep doing what they want to do without any accountability.
00:34:32.320So tell me about a couple of other things.
00:34:34.200The Supreme Court has downgraded the insurrection now to trespassing.
00:34:40.380Can you go into that ruling, which is Fisher versus the U.S.?
00:34:46.300Yeah, I mean, look, I think the takeaway here is that the government was overzealous with all of this, right?
00:34:53.840And when you're dealing with criminal prosecutions, you're supposed to have, you know, the government isn't supposed to get the benefit of the doubt on a lot of this stuff.
00:35:02.820Which is why, again, I went up to Manhattan and saw that trial, the Alvin Bragg Soviet-style show trial, which is why that case, I think, is so riddled with reversible error.
00:35:15.740The judge actually – and the Supreme Court ruled on something else a couple weeks earlier saying, no, you actually have to have a universal agreement among the jury of what the actual crime is.
00:35:26.440Like, this seems like a very basic civil protection for people if you're going to have your liberty taken away from you, right?
00:35:33.980Like, the jury actually has to agree what the crime is.
00:35:37.500And Judge Bershon said you don't have to do that.
00:35:41.440And so that, in addition to not allowing testimony from somebody who was going to say from the FEC that this is not even a – you know, the underlying crime, I guess, that you're alleging isn't even really a crime.
00:35:52.360So I think that that was sort of an important protection.
00:35:55.200Of course, I'll never forget coming on your show talking about the Chevron case, and you came in with some, like, very white, sexy music talking about Chevron when we were –
00:36:08.420Well, I was going to get to that here in a second.
00:36:33.620So we talk about turning the corner and what this can all mean, right, moving forward.
00:36:38.040So for a very long time, what courts have been able to do through Chevron deference is that if they claim something is ambiguous, if there's something ambiguous in some agency –
00:37:07.120The vast majority of these calls then when they were being – you know, if anybody was being challenged, the government won, the agency won, the bureaucrat that you never heard of won.
00:37:15.360And so even though the Congress never actually said this is what we want to have happen, so it's a very important piece of returning power back to the Article I branch, you know, where people are elected, and saying we're not going to give this sort of deference to these agencies anymore.
00:37:34.880So essentially, not to get too nerdy on this stuff, it's probably something like what's referred to as Skidmore, which is they can have an opinion about it, but ultimately the court isn't going to bend over backwards.
00:37:45.360And agree with the agency just because they're the, quote, unquote, experts.
00:37:50.980But this also does – and I had an op-ed last week right when this came out because we were hoping that this would happen.
00:37:56.620It does put the onus, I think, on Congress now to actually do something.
00:38:01.680And there's three things I think we should do.
00:38:04.360The first is I think we should codify saying still with these rules, if you're going to propose a new rule, pull back three first.
00:38:11.200I think that would be an important first step, or maybe five or ten or two, whatever your number is, but just sort of change the culture.
00:38:18.100The second piece is we ought to have a de novo standard of review.
00:38:35.300They still have a role, but then opining over things that they created and then deciding that that's what's going to be moving forward, that has to end entirely.
00:38:44.760Thirdly, the RAINS Act I think is perhaps the most structural reform we could put into place, which is to say if you think it's such a good idea, this rule that you're proposing Congress has to vote on.
00:38:57.040So if you want to ban gas stoves because you think it falls under some statute that nobody ever intended for that to mean, then Congress should vote on it.
00:39:06.460We should have to vote on it, and then you can judge us by our votes.
00:39:09.760I think that would be a transformative kind of reform.
00:39:13.380I do think there's growing momentum for it.
00:39:15.240I think that this decision now, because it puts it more squarely, we have to be more prescriptive in how we write statutes, which is a good thing.
00:39:23.760There's going to be a lot more discussion now, so I'm sort of helping lead a working group in the Senate.
00:39:30.580Those other show favorites, I'm sure, Mike Lee, others will be involved in this and kind of figuring out what we should do moving forward to reign in the administrative state, because this has given us an opening now, for sure.
00:39:50.860The only one we've had is probably the most boring one, which is the corner post decision, which is about a statute of limitations on challenging agency action.
00:39:59.020It's actually another good thing for fighting in the administrative state, but it is not the sexy decision.
00:40:04.000We still have the net choice decision, which is about the social media networks, and then, of course, the Trump immunity still coming.
00:40:10.700And, Eric, what is the social media network one about?
00:40:14.340That's about they can't take you off, right?
00:40:51.140But so far, there's not been anything that's reeled them in, right?
00:40:54.980They kind of just get to do this stuff and rely on the terms and conditions of their site.
00:40:59.240But actually, what was also interesting about the Missouri versus Biden lawsuit, Murphy versus Missouri, is what it ends up being, is the government was pressuring them to change their terms of service, right?
00:41:22.960But I do think that getting at the most important thing we can do is get at the government's role in influencing what these social media companies can do.
00:41:57.820So, Eric, can you tell us, and this is kind of unfair because I don't know how much you're up on the immunity case that's in front of the Supreme Court.
00:42:05.940We're expecting word on that at any time.
00:42:08.280Can you tell me what we're looking for there and what it means?
00:42:13.860And, again, I'm not dug into this case as probably as closely as I should be, but I did listen to some of the oral arguments.
00:42:19.980Actually, my former solicitor, General of Missouri, John Sauer, argued this case, and John's a brilliant guy, clerk for Scalia.
00:42:27.680So I think there's a reason why this is the last case or one of the last cases they're going to decide because it's a very difficult case for the court
00:42:35.060and one that they would probably prefer not to have to engage on, but because of Jack Smith's focus on all of this stuff, they're going to have to.
00:42:42.940And it centers around there's never been a case.
00:42:45.980They've never actually had to decide this issue about whether or not a president is immune from criminal prosecution, from actions taken while he's in office.
00:42:57.580And so that's really what this centers on, is Jack Smith's trying to sort of bootstrap anything President Trump did during January 6th into some sort of criminal prosecution.
00:43:07.560And I think what the court is, I don't know what they're going to do.
00:43:11.980My guess is they're going to have some sort of an opinion that sets some sort of framework for presidential immunity.
00:43:20.440It may not be entire, every act is immune, but I think they ought to err on that side of it,
00:43:29.260because what the founders were really worried about when they were talking about this issue,
00:43:34.580if you read the Federalist Papers or those documents surrounding the Constitution,
00:43:40.020they actually were worried about the weaponization of local prosecutors against the president
00:43:47.980to sort of tie up the president in engaging in his official duties.
00:43:51.880So, you know, if that's their worldview, Glenn, I think they're going to be very deferential to the idea
00:44:02.400that presidents, to be president, have to make really difficult decisions,
00:44:06.880or, by the way, can't engage in political speech, which is ultimately what this case is really all about.
00:44:12.140There's a bunch of reasons why Jack Smith's case is flawed,
00:44:14.940but I do think the court's going to settle on some idea that, of course, presidents are immune from criminal prosecution.
00:44:21.880based on the actions of when they're in office.