Carrie Campbell Severino is President of the Judicial Crisis Network and a contributor to The Federalist and the Federalist Society. She served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and served as the Chief White House Strategist for President George W. Bush. She has been a legal analyst and activist, and is a frequent witness before Congress on constitutional law and judicial nominations.
00:00:00.000Hello, everybody. I'm Lou Dobbs, and this is the Great America Show. Welcome to the show, Truth, Justice, and the American Way, on display right here every day.
00:00:11.040And here we go. Today, all about the historic decisions handed down by five brave justices who secured the Constitution, supported the First and Second Amendments,
00:00:22.060and the right to life for the unborn, sending the issue of abortion back to the states as they reversed Roe v. Wade.
00:00:30.800They did all that while under threat from the Marxist left and the radical Dems.
00:00:35.840The Marxist left, who lead the Democrat Party, tried to intimidate these fearless five conservative justices
00:00:43.120who stood up for the Constitution and the Republic, for your rights and mine. God bless this Supreme Court.
00:00:50.980Five justices made all the difference and made history. Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
00:01:01.580Our guest today is one of the leading legal analysts and activists in the country.
00:01:06.560Our guest is Carrie Campbell Severino. She is president of the Judicial Crisis Network.
00:01:12.840She testifies frequently before Congress on constitutional law and briefing senators on judicial nominations.
00:01:19.500Carrie clerk for D.C. Court of Appeals Judge David Sintel and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
00:01:27.920Carrie earned her law degree from Harvard Law School, a B.A. in biology from Duke, and master's in linguistics from Michigan State.
00:01:36.840She's also a contributor to the Federalist and a member of the Federalist Society.
00:01:41.600Carrie, great to have you here. Welcome to the Great America Show.
00:01:44.820And let's start with the Supreme Court's decisions, overturning Roe v. Wade, ruling a football coach can't be fired for praying at the 50-yard line after a game,
00:01:55.640and overturning a New York state law restricting concealed carry of a firearm.
00:07:58.060And the opinion pointed this out like, gosh, we've tried to clarify this standard for you, Elias.
00:08:03.520Some of the lower courts seem to not want to get it.
00:08:06.200This is coming out of the Ninth Circuit, which is known for being one of the more activist and liberal courts.
00:08:10.780So I'm glad to see them get, you know, get corrected yet again.
00:08:15.500You know, liberal is an interesting word in 2022, isn't it?
00:08:20.200The Ninth Circuit is liberal in the most coercive way imaginable in denying the First Amendment, denying the Second Amendment, denying the Fourth Amendment.
00:08:34.240I'm a product of the 60s where liberal meant free expression, free spirits and an open mind.
00:08:43.240We have an authoritarian impulse running throughout the American left, the Marxist left that now controls the Democratic Party by, you know, it's just straightforwardly obvious and empirical.
00:08:58.360And to see this court stand against this historic wave within our society is, to me, an act of great courage, the likes of which I can't recall in the Supreme Court.
00:09:14.880This is a special group of people, these five justices with the courage, the intellect, and the philosophy of original interpretation of the court, textualists, if you will.
00:09:31.200Well, they are just a heaven-sent group of justices that are really making history.
00:09:39.200Yeah, having a majority, and in this case, we actually even had six justices join, because Chief Justice Roberts, religious freedom is an area that he has been pretty reliably going on, so that is great.
00:09:53.040And that we have these justices who are willing to do so, even at a time when there's so much, you know, protests and outrage and threats and intimidation against them, that they have the courage to stand up and say, yeah, but my job isn't to try to read opinion polls.
00:10:10.120It's not to try to even, you know, do what I think is maybe going to keep myself or my family physically safe.
00:10:15.400Because there's been, obviously not about this case, more about the abortion case, but there have been some real pressures on the court, and that we do nonetheless have a majority of justices willing to stand up and say, yeah, but I took an oath, I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and that's what I'm going to do.
00:10:29.300So when Justice Kavanaugh was threatened, a man trying to kill him, when there's an argument in the Congress, and Justice Roberts, his mom, on the issue of security for the justices, and the attacks on them, the intimidation, even as there is a federal law against demonstrating and trying to intimidate judges, what do you make of his silence?
00:10:56.960You know, I'm not, the Chief Justice doesn't make a lot of statements, and I actually do think he has been strong enough in terms of rejecting things, you know, like the actual assassination attempt of one of his colleagues.
00:11:11.720What concerns me more, you know, in terms of people not speaking, is the President himself, who not only has not rejected the idea of people protesting in front of the justices' homes.
00:11:21.120Like, we all recognize, you can protest in front of the court, obviously keep it peaceful, and thankfully some of the threats that there's going to be a night of rage did not pan out, so that's good.
00:11:30.040But the President has really just kind of encouraged these people who are going to the private homes of these judges, including those who have children still living at home.
00:11:42.100In terms of Chief Justice Roberts, the thing that makes me most frustrated, the thing that he has the most power to address is finding the leaker.
00:11:51.240However, this leak of the draft opinion of Dobbs is just an outrageous violation of the institution of the court.
00:12:01.840It's a violation of their privacy and their confidentiality to someone at the court, presumably a clerk for one of the liberal justices, but we still don't know.
00:12:09.880You know, over two, about two months ago now, has leaked this opinion.
00:12:14.940We've never had that happen in American history before, and the chief, I mean, we had reports that he's doing investigations, but how hard can it be?
00:12:23.780You've got really a few dozen people who all work in the court building.
00:12:28.740I just don't understand how hard it could be to figure out which one of these people leaked it, because if you don't, this term, we were horrified and shocked,
00:12:38.900and we saw all sorts of negative consequences from this one leak of one decision.
00:12:42.380What's going to happen next term, five decisions, ten decisions?
00:12:45.580Because as long as it's perceived as, hey, they'll never catch us anyway.
00:13:02.600They're going to go off and start working for a big law firm and pull in what's now up to a $400,000 bonus.
00:13:09.180And so one of these clerks is going to be getting nearly half a million dollar bonus for, you know, building his or her resume on an institution that they're helping to destroy.
00:13:22.280I just, it doesn't make any sense to me.
00:13:24.640I don't understand it because I, when I clerked there, the chief justice was very concerned about confidentiality and maintaining your obligations to the court in that way.
00:13:33.880So I don't understand why he has not taken stronger action on that, but I think it's going to have some very serious consequences undermining the court itself.
00:13:43.180His words, I don't even recall his words, Carrie.
00:13:46.100You mentioned you weren't so concerned about his statements that you felt were strong enough.
00:13:51.500I honestly can't remember a single word this man said about the security for the justices or enforcing the law against intimidation of Supreme Court justices.
00:14:06.700You know, I guess it's that I'm not as concerned about that because I don't maybe expect him as much as a, the judges don't normally make comments.
00:14:15.900But I think you're, you're, you're probably right.
00:14:18.840Now, maybe he has made a statement on it that I don't know of, but I, I, I just view that as not as much his job as finding the leaker, him or herself.
00:14:29.780And, and the fact that the White House has basically endorsed these protests just really makes my blood boil.
00:14:36.760So, but yeah, I, I, I, so I'm not, I'm not even sure what the chief justice has said on that.
00:14:42.360But I, again, I think that his, what he, what he clearly has the authority to do to help stop this kind of thing from happening again, he has not done.
00:14:52.820I think that we're ending up here in agreement.
00:14:55.100But, and I, I would say that there is such a thing, I'm inventing this expression right now, but there is such a thing as the critical judgment of low expectations.
00:15:04.980And it seems, it seems to me that you and I have different expectations of the chief justice.
00:15:10.840And perhaps you know him better than me, perhaps not.
00:15:13.840But I, I swear to you, the man has, has found so many ways to disappoint that I no longer have much of a expectation, either of him.
00:15:26.720Let's turn to where really he failed, I think again, and that was on the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
00:15:38.460This 5-4 decision is miraculous, it is wonderful, it is historic, it is powerful, and it is giving an entire nation an opportunity to bow their heads and seek forgiveness and to do far better.
00:15:58.100Whether you are religious or not, this is a historic opportunity for the nation, and it sets right the Constitution.
00:16:06.540Your thoughts on the case, the Dobbs case, and their rulings, and the overturning of both Casey and Roe?
00:16:21.160Yeah, I mean, as I was saying before, the amount of courage it took to decide this case well can't be overstated.
00:16:29.540Overstated, because, and we've seen so many times just, justices walk up to doing so and, and blink.
00:16:39.020So we've been 30 years waiting, or 1992 I guess the case has decided, 30 years we've been still operating under this regime because the court was ready to overturn it back then.
00:16:49.600And even though their opinion basically still couldn't make sense of how the right to abortion is actually in the Constitution, they just said, well, we don't want to, we don't want to rock the apple cart here.
00:17:01.560We don't want to, we don't want to upset things.
00:17:03.280This court has said, you know what, sometimes a decision is so egregiously wrong that you have to overturn prior precedent.
00:17:10.140And that, they talked, which I think was a great analogy about Brown versus Board of Education, where for more than this 50 years, the precedent was set that separate but equal is fine.
00:17:21.160And we had, the South had a whole, you know, legal system based upon that notion.
00:17:26.220Oh yeah, sure, you can have segregation, you can have separate but equal.
00:17:29.740And then finally the court found the courage to say, actually, no, that was wrong.
00:17:36.860And we need to go back and start over.
00:17:38.100And it was not easy, and I don't think it's going to be necessarily easy in this case either, although in many cases I think it will be more so, because this case, it's not overriding any state laws.
00:17:47.400It's really just letting the states do what they either were doing before or what they've decided to do since.
00:17:53.620So in many states, it's not going to even affect what their abortion laws are.
00:17:59.720And now, it really gives the American people the opportunity to discuss and decide how to address this issue.
00:18:08.120But to have something read into the Constitution, like happened in Roe versus Wade, a right that had never existed in America, suddenly declared out of the blue to be not just a right, but like a primordial right.
00:18:25.020It was like, this is one of the highest rights in the Constitution.
00:18:29.640That is kind of the definition of judicial activism.
00:18:33.000So I think taking that out of our legal jurisprudence is a huge step forward in recognizing that our Constitution says what it means, means what it says, and the judges aren't the ones who get to make things up to invent constitutional law out of full cloth.
00:18:51.660These five justices that I mentioned, obviously, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, these are, and John Roberts, necessarily, as the chief justice.
00:19:29.320He is supposed to be a constitutionalist, is he not?
00:19:32.620And how does he get so far off tacking as he tries to wind his way through the law and the Constitution?
00:19:40.660Well, you know, yeah, I love that you referenced his ability to find his way north, because I saw a great quote by Justice Thomas, who was funny, earlier this year, someone inadvertently called him Chief Justice Thomas at one of the arguments.
00:19:55.020And I think a lot of people thought, I'll go with that.
00:19:57.720I would love to have a Chief Justice Thomas.
00:19:59.620Let's just, because for all of his attempts to kind of do what he maybe thinks is helping the institution of the court, Chief Justice Roberts has not been a leader on that court.
00:20:13.500He is one that seems to be vacillating.
00:20:15.320He's one that seems to be following the trends rather than standing up and saying, this is what's right.
00:20:20.360Whereas Chief Justice Thomas, or not Chief Justice, Justice Thomas has really filled that role.
00:20:25.640And there was a great video clip that I just saw on Twitter today, I hadn't seen it before, where he was saying, you know what, the challenge is if you're in a hurricane, north is still north.
00:20:38.840If you can't see which way you're going, north is still north.
00:20:41.300If you're being tossed around in the seas, north is still north.
00:20:44.720And you have to be able to set your compass and just follow that, regardless of the crazy stuff going on around you.
00:21:07.900It was him and Justice Scalia, basically.
00:21:09.620And now to finally beat the point where you have a majority of the justices who adhere to those type of principles of, you know what, we have to go north, you know, come hell or high water, this is the direction we're supposed to go.
00:22:06.720The idea that the court right now has five solid constitutionalists on it, the issues that we're looking at, speaking of past sins, this is also the same court that did not take up two opportunities to intervene in the election of 2020,
00:22:25.960despite, I think, despite, I think, very clear cause, particularly with the lawsuit from the states seeking redress, which is the Supreme Court's responsibility.
00:22:39.780It was a ruling of convenience, in my opinion.
00:22:43.180Going forward here, we're going to have, it appears, another round of great, unsettled, and disturbing events in our election of 2020.
00:22:58.160Because the Republicans have done nothing to shore up the integrity of the election.
00:23:03.120We're hearing reports with your co-author, Molly Hibbingway, reporting about the Biden administration's, at least the fear that the Biden administration is federalizing in some ways this election,
00:23:18.420and making moves that are completely unavailable to the prying eyes of the national media or to the American people.
00:23:30.840It looks like this administration is preparing something for the election.
00:23:35.820Even FOIA requests, according to Molly's reporting, are not being honored, and we know that they're up to something.
00:23:46.260Give us a sense, if you will, your sense of what is going on with this White House and the election of 2022.
00:23:53.700Well, you know, we've seen that just like they were trying to do in 2020, they're trying to change the legal system to open the door to just easy ways to boost Democrat voting group
00:24:16.200and to undermine the ability to ensure election integrity, and that's what's so discouraging.
00:24:21.700I think it's been good to see some places, you know, like Georgia with their Jim Eagle or whatever Biden was calling it, Jim Crow 2.0 law.
00:24:31.620I mean, just standing up for common sense things.
00:24:34.960And what's so funny is, you know, this is another issue that came up when I was clerking.
00:24:40.700Now, 15 years ago, there was a question, is requiring voter ID constitutional?
00:24:45.460And the answer was yes, absolutely constitutional.
00:24:48.660And yet you still have people all these years later saying, oh, we can't do that.
00:24:52.700That would be, you know, they have all sorts of arguments.
00:24:55.420And it's like, no, no, no, this has already been decided.
00:24:59.700And it's something that most Americans, including Democrats, recognize.
00:25:04.600We actually want to have people to have confidence in our elections.
00:25:08.460And it's really just the Democrat legislators we've seen are more interested in figuring out how to gain the system than in actually maintaining that election integrity.
00:25:20.480So I think, like so many of the issues, they're overreaching on this in a way that's beyond even where their base is.
00:25:29.140The radicals just want, you know, all sorts of crazy stuff.
00:25:31.200But I think the most of the base recognizes the importance of election integrity in both parties, amazingly.
00:25:37.300What is the principle that you think, again, so everyone is clear, the principle that you think the left and the right agree on in terms of election integrity?
00:25:48.840Because we just didn't see a sign of it in 2020.
00:25:51.780No, no, no, I'm not saying that the Democrat leaders and the loud voices in the Democrat Party are standing for these principles.
00:26:00.480But I'm saying when you look at surveys of actual Americans, even across the board, the Democrats are recognizing that, you know, you ask, they say that this is somehow racist.
00:26:10.460But you survey and black Americans recognize that they want to have voter ID, too.
00:26:14.280So this is something that I think that is one of these many issues that because they're listening to the loudest, most radical voices, the deep pockets, really, because I think that's what's driving a lot of the left wants to go where where the money is.
00:26:28.640And those people are pushing some of the most radical policies that I think is not just to the left of common sense, but it's the left of most America, including many Democrat voters who are like, guys, you know, this is this is beyond just just like we were talking about.
00:26:44.020You know what it means to be a good old fashioned liberal where you can have a debate about different ideas and hash that out.
00:26:53.680That used to be a liberal idea. Now it's somehow a conservative idea because the left has moved so far left that the center has shifted.
00:27:00.520Just the idea of, you know, they're taking things so far to the left that I think they're leaving a lot of a lot of Americans behind.
00:27:08.000I think they're doing that on voter ID and a lot of these voting measures as well.
00:27:12.160I think that the challenge is you've got such lockstep amongst the Democrat politicians that they're they're full steam ahead regardless.
00:27:58.900That was an attempt to not only intimidate a president, but to overthrow a president and to do so with every weaponized element available to the Marxist Dems.
00:28:11.880That is the Democratic Party, the legal system, the court system, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the national media.
00:28:21.040There was no no element that was not weaponized in federal government against the president, against the Republicans and against the American voter in order to achieve what they gained in 2020,
00:28:37.360which was the election of a man who the attorney general of the United States understood had lied in front of the American people.
00:28:46.320And through that lie in the second and final debate of 2020, won the election using Russian disinformation as a shield.
00:28:54.060And the sword was already the Zuckerberg half trillion ballot trafficking and unwatched drop boxes across the country.
00:29:07.500We always give our guests the last word.
00:29:11.040And, Carrie, that is your opportunity.
00:29:15.200Your concluding thoughts on all of this.
00:29:17.180Yeah, you know, I think this term is just really an illustration of how important keeping an eye on the the main issues and just continuing to work despite setbacks.
00:29:32.660It has been this this court is not something that happened overnight.
00:29:36.140It's not even said that it just happened in the last presidency, although that certainly, you know, was the was the crowning achievement of it.
00:29:44.480We got these last three justices who really put us over the edge.
00:29:47.220But this has been something that has been in the works since the 80s, you know, since Robert Bork was attacked.
00:29:54.640And then Republicans, you know, it took them a few generations to kind of learn to fight back.
00:29:58.980I feel like we're always a little generation behind or so on catching up with the techniques.
00:30:02.860But we have we have learned we have built a court and built really a movement of lawyers who understand how to how to interpret the Constitution, how to be faithful to that.
00:30:15.540And I think we have the American people now recognize this, how important that is.
00:30:18.680And we're bearing that's bearing fruit and we're starting to see the Constitution enforced as it's written, not erasing rights that are in there, like the Second Amendment, not inventing rights that aren't in there, like like the right to abortion.
00:30:28.680And I think that that's something to really celebrate.
00:30:31.380But it's something that could be gone in a heartbeat if the left got the opportunity.
00:30:36.000So we have to definitely continue to make sure we hold our our our politicians to high standards and appoint to the kind of judges who are going to keep our Constitution faithfully.
00:30:49.300Let me ask you just one last question based on your concluding comments.
00:30:54.840Does this all lead you to believe that if there are irregularities, if there is widespread anomalies and questions about the election in 2022, which seems to me right now to be all but assured,
00:31:10.020do you believe the courts will now take up the issue of current fraud, suspicions of fraud or irregularities or improprieties with also the presence of some illegality?
00:31:29.900Do you think they will actually have the courage this time to take it up?
00:31:32.920I wish I knew the answer to that question.
00:31:40.500I think I'm hopeful that, you know, there there hasn't been nothing that's been done in the meantime.
00:31:46.060But I think we need to make sure that our laws are the laws that are on the books, stay on the books and don't get kind of changed at the last minute.
00:31:54.540Like what's happening, I was disappointed the court didn't didn't take up some of those last minute shenanigans and changes to the state laws.
00:32:00.500But I'm optimistic that at this point, they kind of have seen what happens when you just let things go and have learned the lesson of, you know what, sometimes you just need to give them, give people an answer and step up and do the hard, hard thing.
00:32:14.460So I'm optimistic that we'll be able to have a process this this election.
00:32:21.280Look, there's always going to be issues, but I think we're moving in the right direction.
00:32:25.520Gary, we thank you very much for being with us.
00:32:28.260We appreciate your judgment and your insight and your knowledge.
00:32:38.540Gary Campbell Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network.
00:32:43.680Tomorrow here on The Great America Show will be our friend and great patriot, Mark Simone, on all that's happening as we enter the Independence Day weekend.