The Megyn Kelly Show - BREAKING： Kamala Picks Radical Walz as VP, and Value of Free Speech, with Justice Neil Gorsuch, Rich Lowry, and Batya Ungar-Sargon ｜ Ep. 856

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00:00:31.000 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:00:42.480 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:45.920 Vice President Kamala Harris has selected her running mate for the 2024 race,

00:00:50.560 and it is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

00:00:53.420 Oh, Republicans, they're expressing a huge sigh of relief in response to this.

00:00:59.040 They definitely did not want Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania.

00:01:02.340 And as it turns out, neither did she.

00:01:06.160 He's just very Jewish. 0.93

00:01:08.260 Honestly, I think that's her reasoning.

00:01:10.000 She's saying otherwise, and we'll get into what she's saying.

00:01:11.880 But there's no question.

00:01:13.340 That party has gone so radical.

00:01:16.480 It's Ilhan Omar's party now.

00:01:17.980 How could they have a Jewish man as her running mate? 1.00

00:01:22.200 Bad enough she's married to a Jewish man. 0.51

00:01:23.900 This is how I'm sure they're thinking.

00:01:26.220 I mean, this is, Waltz, on the other hand, is from a state that just changed his flag to represent that of Somalia.

00:01:31.400 So it's a win.

00:01:32.260 Ms. Harris reportedly calling Governor Walz earlier today to inform him of her, I'm putting her in quotes, first big decision.

00:01:42.280 Who the hell knows who made this choice for her?

00:01:44.180 He's the favorite of Nancy Pelosi.

00:01:46.600 He was the favorite of Bernie Sanders.

00:01:48.740 Does that tell us anything?

00:01:49.520 It was a somewhat surprising move, as many did suspect, that she would do the practical thing and go for the swing state governor, which Minnesota is not, of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro.

00:02:01.140 He's a little bit more moderate.

00:02:02.620 I mean, anyone would be.

00:02:04.800 And he comes from a state she must win if she wants to get to 270.

00:02:08.820 But Mr. Shapiro may have become an issue due to the growing pro-Hamas faction of the Democratic Party.

00:02:15.180 The media and others on the left are already working to brand Governor Walz moderate and a representation of middle America.

00:02:21.880 That's not true.

00:02:23.660 He's not moderate.

00:02:25.200 Driver's licenses for illegals.

00:02:27.480 Check.

00:02:28.260 Free tuition for illegals. 0.89

00:02:31.020 Check.

00:02:31.820 Free health insurance.

00:02:33.160 Free.

00:02:33.500 Free, that is.

00:02:34.340 For illegals.

00:02:34.960 Check.

00:02:35.400 Who pays for that again? 0.99

00:02:36.640 Does Governor Walz just, like, draft an imaginary check from an imaginary pot of money?

00:02:42.120 Oh, wait, no, it's the taxpayers.

00:02:43.740 He's all for teenagers undergoing life-altering gender surgeries. 0.98

00:02:49.320 And by the way, he wants to take your child away from you if you won't okay them.

00:02:53.540 He supports putting tampons in the boys' bathrooms for kids as young as the fourth grade.

00:02:58.900 All right, I have a fourth grader, rising fifth.

00:03:01.680 And if there were ever a tampon dispenser machine in his bathroom, I would personally go and rip it down,

00:03:08.940 like we saw those kids do in Virginia last year.

00:03:11.780 And what will likely be a massive issue for Governor Walz, which is not being covered by the mainstream today,

00:03:18.600 he is being accused of misleading voters on his military service and dodging combat service in Iraq.

00:03:27.320 Joining me now, Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of National Review,

00:03:31.000 and Batya Anghar Sargan, opinion editor at Newsweek and author of Second Class.

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00:04:20.960 Thank you both so much for being here, Batya.

00:04:22.600 Let me start with you.

00:04:23.740 They're not going to say Shapiro's a Jew.

00:04:27.080 But you and I both know, and Rich knows too,

00:04:30.100 there is no way that wasn't an important factor in his rejection.

00:04:34.300 Honestly, Megan, some of them are coming out and saying it, right?

00:04:38.140 And the thing about Josh Shapiro is he's not just a Jew. 0.61

00:04:42.140 He's an observant Jew.

00:04:43.260 He keeps kosher, right?

00:04:44.420 This is a person who has a deep connection to his Jewish heritage.

00:04:48.220 Of course, that was not the reason to pick him.

00:04:50.140 The reason to pick him was he could have delivered the one state.

00:04:54.100 Kamala Harris absolutely needs to win in order to win the presidency, right? 1.00

00:04:57.940 So on the one hand, you have the guy who could deliver the one state she actually needs in order to win, right?

00:05:04.940 And on the other hand, you have somebody who is a far-left progressive, as you said,

00:05:09.500 who, what's his big claim to fame?

00:05:11.160 He coined the term weird for J.D. Vance.

00:05:14.020 So obviously, she went with Tim Walls.

00:05:17.720 I mean, it's so amazing, Megan.

00:05:19.740 And there is simply so little effort being put by the far-left progressive wing of the party

00:05:25.900 to mask the fact that this was simply about Josh Shapiro having a strong, proud Jewish identity

00:05:34.760 and opposing anti-Semitism on college campus.

00:05:38.680 They have been explicit about this, and the Democratic Party has caved to the anti-Semites.

00:05:44.700 That is what we're seeing here.

00:05:45.920 We have here Karen Atiyah of the Washington Post, who has been one of the nastiest commentators on the Israel-Hamas war.

00:05:58.040 She was celebrating in the streets once Israel was attacked, long before they really began their retaliation campaign.

00:06:04.480 She was one of the people who liked, this is what decolonization looks like, like within a day or two of the attack.

00:06:12.580 Columnist for the Washington Post, she's thrilled about Governor Walz.

00:06:17.500 She tweeted out, looking forward to Walz donkey-stomping Vance in a VP debate, Walz is full of persona, charisma, experience, and authenticity.

00:06:26.280 Vance is a shape-shifting, woman-hating, weirdo sellout.

00:06:29.720 He's going to tap out in 46 seconds like that weepy Italian boxer. 1.00

00:06:34.300 I'm here for it, LFG.

00:06:37.100 Do you believe that?

00:06:38.740 So she's got it all in there.

00:06:40.680 Rich, this is classy.

00:06:42.440 Washington Post.

00:06:43.380 Just so thrilled they didn't go with that other guy who was somehow weirdly objectionable, you know, the governor of Pennsylvania.

00:06:51.320 This is just mind-boggling, because obviously Pennsylvania is the whole ballgame, right?

00:06:56.040 Trump's not winning without it.

00:06:57.360 She's not winning without it.

00:06:59.000 10,000 votes could matter.

00:07:00.580 I don't think picking Shapiro would have delivered Pennsylvania, but it potentially could have helped 10,000, 20,000, whatever, in a narrow race that could be decisive for the entire election.

00:07:10.360 So that she didn't pick him, he's popular there.

00:07:13.700 The Fox News poll had him at 61%.

00:07:15.620 He has executive experience.

00:07:17.420 He's obviously bright.

00:07:18.220 He's glib.

00:07:19.120 So it does make you go, hmm, and scratch your head.

00:07:21.700 You can't know exactly what the internal deliberations were.

00:07:24.260 But the entire public argument, there are a few other things thrown in.

00:07:27.980 But most of it was that he was a pro-Israel Jew.

00:07:31.180 And he was apologetic over it.

00:07:33.500 He was very defensive over this college op-ed he wrote 20 or 30 years ago saying the Palestinians are the problem and the reasons why we can't have peace.

00:07:40.260 Which is obviously true, but that's considered oppo now in the Democratic Party.

00:07:45.320 So instead she went with this guy who seems to me to be an MSNBC anchor's idea of what being folksy and having appeal to the middle of the country is.

00:07:58.540 I don't get it at all.

00:08:00.440 And another factor here with Shapiro may have been, he's quite good, and she may have felt there's a potential that he would outperform her, that people would comment on that he was, the fact that he's better at this.

00:08:11.560 And she felt threatened by him, also might have been an element of it here.

00:08:15.060 But clearly, you know, it's a left-wing choice.

00:08:17.300 This isn't a moderate choice whatsoever.

00:08:19.200 However, she's doubling down on the left. 0.92

00:08:22.260 There's some support for that second theory, Rich, coming from Fox News' Jackie Henrich, tweeting out,

00:08:27.300 Two sources confirm on background, the deciding factor in the VP choice was what Senator Fetterman of Pennsylvania said publicly.

00:08:34.060 Concerns that Mr. Shapiro's own personal ambitions would cause him to upstage or override Harris.

00:08:40.300 The video produced by the Philly mayor team solidified this sentiment on Friday.

00:08:46.800 The implication being that Shapiro had something to do with that sort of pre-release, making it look like he was the choice.

00:08:53.340 But Shapiro's team saying they had no idea that the mayor's office was doing that or releasing that.

00:08:59.920 But the point is, you know, they're trying to say, OK, he was he was getting ahead of himself.

00:09:04.840 Bacha, I read that and I think that's her people trying to say it's not the fact that he is an observant Jew.

00:09:11.540 It's that he got too big for his britches.

00:09:14.060 Yeah, I totally agree with you. And I think, you know, that you pointed out that Pelosi and Obama were behind walls,

00:09:21.200 whereas actually President Biden was behind was backing Shapiro. Right.

00:09:25.860 So, again, we see this big, you know, power exchange happening, the center of gravity in the party.

00:09:32.800 And of course, that is the most important thing about Kamala Harris. Right.

00:09:36.200 She is sort of, you know, Democratic factory settings. Right. 0.99

00:09:40.420 She has no independent convictions of her own.

00:09:44.300 She reflects where she thinks the center of gravity of the party is.

00:09:49.020 And so looking ahead to this last week, I was saying I really hope she picks Shapiro because it will signal to Jewish American voters.

00:09:56.280 Look, of course, there is this anti-Semitic campaign against Shapiro, but the leadership is not listening to that.

00:10:03.000 The leadership would never fall for something this disgusting.

00:10:06.760 The leadership knows that in order to win the presidency, we need to win Pennsylvania.

00:10:11.360 And so we're going to go with the guy who has 61 percent approval in Pennsylvania.

00:10:14.660 And instead, what did Kamala Harris do? 1.00

00:10:17.080 She signaled to the country that the center of gravity of the Democratic Party right now is with the pro-Hamas protesters.

00:10:24.700 And anybody who said anti-Semitism will not be tolerated is going to get the boot.

00:10:29.440 And I think Jewish Americans are paying very close attention to that.

00:10:32.460 The signal that was given to them is you need to tell your children now that you cannot be the vice president of the of the United States if you are a Jew.

00:10:41.220 That cannot happen for you because the center of gravity of the party is on its knees begging to be recognized by anti-Semitic young people.

00:10:51.520 Apparently, that was the message of this choice.

00:10:54.160 Yeah, you can't if you're not if you want to run as a Democrat.

00:10:56.900 It's a it's a no.

00:10:58.020 I mean, even if you're the governor of Pennsylvania, the must wing win state in the entire contest in a nail bitingly close race.

00:11:06.660 It won't be enough, sweetheart.

00:11:08.620 You'll have to find something else to believe in.

00:11:11.220 If you want that role, it's just absolutely disgusting.

00:11:14.320 It's so on the nose.

00:11:15.840 These are the people who want to be our moral betters, who claim to be rich, who are constantly lecturing us about bigotry and inclusion.

00:11:23.540 It's a lie.

00:11:25.160 They're all for inclusion when it's men and women's sports like this Karen Attia laughing at the pain of that Italian boxer. 1.00

00:11:31.680 But when the inclusion looks like a man who happens to be Jewish, it's a. 0.73

00:11:35.980 Yeah, and this this is not like this wouldn't have been a history making choice.

00:11:41.640 Right. It's been done before, most recently with Joe Lieberman.

00:11:44.960 So we've actually seen backsliding among Democrats and on the left where this would be actually a big deal.

00:11:51.400 Having a Jewish running mate who's somewhat favorable to Israel, it's not like Shapiro's one of us.

00:11:57.120 Right. He's just relatively moderate compared to the rest of the party.

00:12:00.360 And the choice of waltz does show where the center of gravity of the party is.

00:12:05.680 And it's not where Joe Biden is. Right.

00:12:07.940 Joe Biden has, even though he's kowtowed to the left in all sorts of appalling ways, he is a preacher of another time and has certain instincts on being pro-Israel and favor of our allies, kind of patriotism that Kamala Harris does not have.

00:12:22.320 She is a woke progressive. She had all those positions in 19 and 20 that she's now disavowed that Joe Biden never would have adopted or only adopted them under extreme pressure.

00:12:33.140 She did it of her own free will because she thought that's where the party was going. 0.94

00:12:37.320 And now now she's trying to moderate. But this choice just does not make sense on that level unless she's trying to pick someone to her left to show, well, I'm moderate compared to that guy.

00:12:46.860 But how much sense does that make?

00:12:48.460 No, it's terrifying. I agree with you. Joe Biden wouldn't. I mean, God rest him.

00:12:52.320 No, just kidding. He's not actually dead. Forgive me. Forgive me. A little joke, a little humor for you.

00:12:58.680 But I do want to talk about Tim Walz because, my God, my very first story at Fox News, very young cub reporter, was Swift Boat Veterans for Truth coming after John Kerry and his misrepresentations about his military service.

00:13:14.320 Tim Walz has a Swift Boat problem of his own.

00:13:17.180 So if you look back at Alpha News, and this is a great news organization, we had them on when they did the documentary about the trial of Derek Chauvin and the smear job by so many against him.

00:13:26.780 I'm not defending, you know, the tape. I'm just saying if you actually watch this documentary, you'll be horrified at what was done to Chauvin by the officials in charge in Minnesota.

00:13:35.060 Anyway, Alpha News vetted Tim Walz hard back in 2018 when he was trying to elevate from congressman to governor, and he did it successfully.

00:13:44.400 And here's the headline. Former National Guardsman, Colin, Tim Walz is misleading the public about his time in service.

00:13:50.960 I'm going to read you some excerpts.

00:13:52.940 Walz often refers to his military service as he campaigns for governor.

00:13:55.960 However, former members of the Minnesota National Guard are raising concerns over the discrepancies in his story, saying he's misleading the public about it.

00:14:03.020 Tim Walz has embellished, this is a quote, and selectively omitted facts and circumstances of his military career for years, said Thomas Behrens, a retired command sergeant major for the Minnesota National Guard.

00:14:16.020 Walz, 54, this is back in 18, joined the Army National Guard when he was 17, completing 20 years of service.

00:14:23.880 And then in 2001, just days after 9-11, Walz reenlisted in the Minnesota Army National Guard.

00:14:29.880 He then retired four years later in 2005, ostensibly to run for Congress.

00:14:36.200 OK, so far, we're wondering what's wrong with any of this.

00:14:39.920 Behrens says Walz did serve a long and honorable career, but it is his story surrounding his service post 9-11 that raises red flags.

00:14:49.660 The discrepancies start with how long he reenlisted for.

00:14:53.380 They say, OK, in 2006, as Walz was amid his first campaign for Congress, questions were raised about the timing of his retirement.

00:15:01.860 You see, Walz's sudden retirement after learning that his unit would be deployed to Iraq is what is under scrutiny.

00:15:11.200 He allegedly reenlisted for another six years, which would have taken him well past the time of being his his.

00:15:20.820 They were trying to deploy him. He would have had to stay.

00:15:23.220 He would have had to go and be deployed. And suddenly he got out of it a couple of years early.

00:15:27.720 And what they say is that he quickly retired after learning that his unit, Southern Minnesota's 1-125 F.A. battalion would be sent to Iraq for Tim Walz to abandon his fellow soldiers and quit when they needed experience.

00:15:41.360 Leadership most is disheartening and it dishonors those brave American men and women who did answer the nation's call and continue to serve, fight and unfortunately die in harm's way.

00:15:51.720 Way. The governor or the then congressman came out and defended this report at the time, saying after completing my 20 years in 2001, I reenlisted to serve for an additional four.

00:16:04.240 Right. Which would have taken him to 2005. And I retired the year before my battalion was deployed in order to run for Congress.

00:16:11.280 Then alpha news goes on. However, official documents from the National Guard contradict that story.

00:16:17.480 According to his report of separation of military service, Walz reenlisted for six years, six years, not four, as he claimed.

00:16:26.800 And his service obligation was not complete until September 2007, which was after his unit was deployed and went.

00:16:35.760 The allegation is that he got out of military service. He did not want to go to Iraq.

00:16:40.900 And then he lied about the circumstances around it.

00:16:44.460 Here is Tom Behrens, who I mentioned just a moment ago, speaking about this to alpha news.

00:16:51.720 He abandoned us. You know, I mean, what the hell kind of leader does that?

00:16:54.980 I mean, he just as soon as the shots were fired in Iraq, he turned and ran the other way and hung his hat up and quit.

00:17:01.700 For Pete's sake, this guy quit.

00:17:04.040 And if I say I'm not going to do it, I mean, what the hell kind of leadership is that?

00:17:07.160 If a company would say that we're going to deploy to Iraq or somewhere and you're going to be gone for whatever amount of time and then a foreman just says, no, I'm not going.

00:17:18.220 I mean, what does that say to the 500 people that are working that factory there?

00:17:21.480 You know, when he was a congressman, you know, he bragged that he was he was a command sergeant, retired command sergeant major.

00:17:27.200 I'm the highest ranking person ever in the in the house.

00:17:30.700 And, you know, all this lie that he was telling the state of Minnesota came out after 2018, after this was exposed.

00:17:37.340 And they said, well, he can say that he served as a command sergeant major, but he can't say he's a retired one because he's not.

00:17:44.860 And that's what he was saying.

00:17:45.620 And he was saying that. And there was lots of public, you know, lots of cards coming in the mail, you know, for him to be elected.

00:17:52.060 They said right on there he's a retired command sergeant major, just tooting his own horn,

00:17:55.960 just hanging on the coattails of people that actually are command sergeant majors that went through all the process and put all the time in.

00:18:03.880 It's stolen valor is really what it is.

00:18:06.220 I don't know of anybody else that's done what he's done, but we call it the truth about Tim Walz.

00:18:13.240 Rich, this is potentially bad, especially when you consider his he's going up in a debate and otherwise against a former Marine who did deploy.

00:18:25.300 He's not trying to dodge who did go to Iraq.

00:18:29.040 Yeah. So I have not looked at this personally myself yet.

00:18:33.480 It obviously needs to be litigated.

00:18:35.640 You would think if they're somewhat competent at the Harris campaign, they're aware of this and they've vetted it and they have an answer.

00:18:41.380 But this is the kind of thing that's potentially a torpedo to the bow of any major politician.

00:18:46.620 And it is the sort of thing people tend to shade.

00:18:49.920 Right.

00:18:50.580 It wouldn't be the first one.

00:18:53.040 But this will be a major focus.

00:18:55.900 I'm looking outside of this question.

00:18:57.260 I'm looking forward to the debate.

00:18:58.300 You know, Waltz is not an idiot and neither is J.D. Vance.

00:19:02.080 And J.D. Vance is the cliche he's had is, you know, a rocky start.

00:19:05.700 But he will be loaded for bear and a real professional when it comes to trying to demolish this guy and his records.

00:19:13.340 And I'm sure this clash will be scheduled at some point here.

00:19:17.480 And it'll be fascinating to watch.

00:19:18.840 The thing is, Bajia, you don't lie about your military service.

00:19:24.820 It's not that you can't get elected if you do.

00:19:27.300 Senator Richard Blumenthal and his statements about serving in Iraq, he got elected anyway. 0.96

00:19:34.180 John Kerry did not get elected president after the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth came forward about what he was saying.

00:19:40.280 But that was a Minnesota election when Tom Behrens and the others.

00:19:44.640 It's not just Tom.

00:19:45.700 There's Tony Wenzel, retired platoon sergeant for the Minnesota Army National Guard,

00:19:50.500 said he could never vote for Tim Walz as our governor when he abandoned his fellow soldiers like he did.

00:19:54.760 There are others who have come forward and will continue to come forward now.

00:19:58.620 Now it's a national election.

00:19:59.720 We're outside of Minnesota and there will be plenty of military families who will be determined to get to the bottom of whether Tim Walz might be in a position to send their sons to fight in combat

00:20:12.580 when he was allegedly to chicken to do it himself.

00:20:16.000 Yeah, you know, I reached out to a number of very close friends who are veterans when I was looking into this story because, you know, I'm bringing humility to this.

00:20:27.280 I haven't served and Tim Walz did serve 24 years quite honorably right in the National Guard.

00:20:34.700 And then he did seem to lie about it.

00:20:38.380 And my friend said, this is really unacceptable.

00:20:41.280 Both the lying about it, saying that he, you know, retired as a command sergeant major when he hadn't actually completed that service, but also abandoning his men.

00:20:51.140 And, you know, again, as somebody who didn't serve, who didn't go to Iraq, who didn't deploy, you know, I don't know that I would have had the courage to do it.

00:20:58.140 It's the lying about it.

00:20:59.680 It's the covering up the fact that he did withdraw in order to avoid that deployment while his men were sent overseas to fight that fight.

00:21:12.580 Misrepresenting that suggests that he does have a guilty conscience about it, that he does understand that there was something ignoble about that that voters don't want to see.

00:21:23.500 I like this is not going to go away.

00:21:25.620 He received a warning order to prepare to be mobilized, according to Alpha News, for active duty for a deployment to Iraq in early 2005.

00:21:35.740 And on May 16th, 2005, he retired, leaving his battalion and its soldiers without a key leader as they prepared to go to war.

00:21:46.840 He had no answers when he was served and asked about the papers confirming these allegations.

00:21:52.160 And that's not going to hold, not not in this election.

00:21:56.040 You know, it it's interesting to me, in part because, Rich, recently you had the Kamala Harris team attacking him as he won't be loyal to the country.

00:22:04.000 He'll only be loyal to Donald Trump.

00:22:06.080 And J.D. Vance heard that and took to the stump and attacked it immediately.

00:22:11.800 We have the soundbite. Watch.

00:22:13.220 I saw the other day, Kamala Harris questioned my loyalty to this country.

00:22:19.220 That's the word she used, loyalty.

00:22:22.180 And it's an interesting word, Semper Fi.

00:22:25.480 Loyalty.

00:22:26.560 Because there is no greater sign of this loyalty to this country than what Kamala Harris has done at our southern border.

00:22:33.980 And I'd like to ask the vice president, what has she done to question my loyalty to this country?

00:22:42.560 I served in the United States Marine Corps.

00:22:45.700 I went to Iraq for this country.

00:22:49.120 I built a business for this country.

00:23:02.960 And my running mate took a bullet for this country.

00:23:07.400 So my question to Kamala Harris is, what the hell have you done to question our loyalty to the United States of America?

00:23:19.120 It's stirring.

00:23:22.860 Yeah, that was good.

00:23:25.200 And he had an event.

00:23:26.200 He's having these so-called bracketing events, as the media calls them, with Harris and Waltz as they go around the country.

00:23:33.320 First stop in Philadelphia.

00:23:35.040 And these events that J.D. is holding, they're not rallies.

00:23:37.820 He'll have some ordinary people come up and talk, have a small group there.

00:23:41.900 And then he's just taking questions from reporters.

00:23:44.320 And he did this this afternoon.

00:23:46.160 Highly effective.

00:23:47.080 Especially effective when he's making the case that Kamala is hiding via an event where he's taking questions from all comers.

00:23:54.580 Now, it helps to have a sympathetic crowd there that likes everything he says and applauds, right?

00:23:58.680 Any political performer likes that.

00:24:00.700 But it does speak to a huge self-confidence, right?

00:24:03.780 That he's just, these reporters can ask whatever they want.

00:24:06.400 And he got challenging questions at this event.

00:24:08.740 So they really, even if they can't smoke Kamala out, you know, I think she's going to have to at least do one interview with Waltz, right?

00:24:14.940 On MSNBC or something.

00:24:17.060 If they can't smoke her out, at least if they can really punch through with the argument, what is she hiding?

00:24:23.000 Is she really up for this if she can't go off script?

00:24:27.080 I think that J.D. has a really, the campaign has come up with a really effective way to do that using J.D.

00:24:31.740 You know, Bhatia, I'm thinking about the imagery, right?

00:24:34.920 You've got, you know, a former Marine and he did deploy.

00:24:39.200 Young guy, you know, Semperfe, you heard the whole thing. 0.67

00:24:42.700 And on the other hand, you have Tim Waltz, who did serve for 20 years as a National Guardsman, but has this significant black mark at the end of it.

00:24:51.060 And who's, you know, effectively running to be stand-in for Commander-in-Chief.

00:24:55.260 And as we're seeing right now in real time, being in the VP role actually can foist you into that role, whether officially or unofficially, sooner than expected.

00:25:05.780 Meanwhile, and the reason I think it's interesting in addition is because I mentioned in the intro, Tim Waltz changed the Minnesota flag to look almost exactly like the Somali flag.

00:25:16.260 I mean, it's a dead ringer for the flag of Somalia.

00:25:19.600 It's got the highest population of Somalis than any other state in America.

00:25:24.300 And you look at Kamala Harris's website.

00:25:27.720 We noticed this the other day.

00:25:29.080 Good luck finding an American flag on there.

00:25:31.460 Good luck finding one policy.

00:25:35.820 One.

00:25:37.140 Nothing.

00:25:37.940 You know what it is?

00:25:39.200 It's LGBTQ pride merch.

00:25:43.080 That's what's on her website.

00:25:44.660 You go to the Trump website.

00:25:46.060 It's covered in American flags.

00:25:49.140 His motto is make America great again.

00:25:51.960 It's his campaign slogan.

00:25:53.060 He's got his former Marine out there.

00:25:55.320 They talk about America and their love of country at every turn.

00:25:59.200 And so I do see this dividing pretty quickly into the pair that loves America and what it stands for and the pair that doesn't.

00:26:08.440 Yeah, on the policy front, it really is amazing.

00:26:12.660 Of course, which policies should she put on her website?

00:26:15.440 The ones that she held a year ago or five years ago or 20 years ago or five minutes ago, right?

00:26:19.900 She's such a flip flopper that it would be very hard to pin her down. 1.00

00:26:23.140 The split screen is very, very significant here.

00:26:26.760 You have Kamala Harris reportedly choosing the less charismatic, less challenging of the potential mates, whereas Donald Trump went for a man who is clearly going to be the standard bearer for the future of the MAGA movement.

00:26:42.660 You have the Harris agenda, which amounts to basically a yossification campaign, right? 0.92

00:26:49.380 A yoss queening, right, to the top with no actual policy. 0.98

00:26:53.360 And then you have Donald Trump's record on the economic front that really made working class Americans feel like they had a shot at the American dream again.

00:27:03.220 You have the Democrats caving to the elites in their party.

00:27:07.660 You know, President Obama, George Clooney, Nancy Pelosi effectively choosing the next president on their ticket as opposed to the voters.

00:27:16.400 And then you have Donald Trump again and again sidelining the elites in his party, whether it's Project 2025 or whether it's the donor class who picked Nikki Haley, right?

00:27:27.300 There are really two visions for the future of America at stake here.

00:27:32.080 One of them says, I'm going to be a perfect reflection of my voter base.

00:27:37.040 I'm going to represent the multi-ethnic, multi-racial working class.

00:27:40.820 And they're shot at the American dream.

00:27:42.980 And the other side says, no, I'm going to reflect no policy.

00:27:46.820 I'm simply going to be a reflection of, you know, elite energy, right?

00:27:52.600 Elite discourse, right?

00:27:55.020 Exactly.

00:27:55.620 Elite vibes, the vibes that the elites want to see out there and hope to trick the American people into going along with it.

00:28:03.960 But, you know, this selection, Rich, in a way, telegraphs exactly which Kamala Harris we're dealing with.

00:28:09.600 Is she the 19 one who proposed getting rid of private health insurance and who wanted to ban fracking and all the things over the border?

00:28:17.160 All of it.

00:28:17.700 Is that her or is she this new moderate as the campaign written statements have suggested that she's reversed herself on all of that?

00:28:25.100 We have yet to hear from her at all.

00:28:27.680 This selection tells us everything we need to know.

00:28:29.800 This guy, Waltz, we just went through the list.

00:28:32.460 OK. First of all, Minnesota schools have dropped from seventh in the nation to 19th under his gubernatorial reign.

00:28:41.740 He wants driver's licenses for all illegals. 0.93

00:28:45.100 He wants free tuition for all illegals. 0.92

00:28:47.240 He wants free health care, has provided not just wants, has provided free health care for all illegals.

00:28:52.240 And as I said in the intro, free is not free.

00:28:54.560 He wants to make Minnesota a sanctuary state.

00:28:56.620 It's not yet.

00:28:57.460 But he's on record saying, yes, I would like that.

00:28:59.500 That makes sense to me.

00:29:00.240 He has supported the Biden-Harris economic agenda.

00:29:05.680 And here's the capper.

00:29:08.260 He's as radical as we can get on the trans and children issue.

00:29:13.300 He is Gavin Newsom with white hair.

00:29:16.800 That's who Tim Waltz is.

00:29:17.780 He signed an executive order that says the state can take your child away from you, away from you if you don't, quote, affirm their gender identity, meaning they say they're a girl when they're really a boy.

00:29:33.920 And make sure they can get access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, chopping off their healthy body parts. 0.94

00:29:43.140 If your 13 or 14-year-old comes home and says, I want to be castrated, and you say no, Tim Waltz wants the state to take your kid away from you.

00:29:53.740 So that's as radical as we have anywhere in the world on this issue, Rich.

00:29:59.320 Yeah, just shocking.

00:30:02.080 And to the 2019 point, Tim Waltz would have been totally comfortable in that primary, right?

00:30:07.680 He wouldn't have had to change any of the positions he has now, right?

00:30:10.380 Kamala became more left, and now she's telling she isn't anymore. 0.99

00:30:14.280 Waltz is still with all those 2019 positions.

00:30:17.720 And ultimately, you know, it's Kamala's positions that matter more, but the case you can make against her is that this reflects her values, this reflects where she really is.

00:30:26.680 And the idea that the state is going to be weaponized against parents who want their disturbed or ill children who have gender dysphoria to be treated in a rational way where you try to wait it out and hope it's a phase that passes rather than introducing these radical measures that, you know, Western Europe, UK are now rejecting because there's no science behind them whatsoever.

00:30:51.420 And we still have it in America and in the heartland.

00:30:54.920 That's stunning.

00:30:55.940 It'll be part of the case against him.

00:30:58.380 And J.D. Vance was already making it this afternoon.

00:31:01.100 But look, Batya, at how the media is already rolling out the red carpet for this guy.

00:31:06.740 Get used to this because we're going to have three more months just like it.

00:31:11.560 Take a look at SOT 9.

00:31:13.720 Waltz appears to fit the all-American definition of a man from middle America.

00:31:18.200 High school teacher, football coach, member of the Army National Guard before becoming a member of Congress and now governor.

00:31:25.640 Exactly.

00:31:26.240 He really has that perfect back story.

00:31:28.220 He's the one, George, remember, who labeled J.D. Vance and his Republican allies as, quote, weird, which gained a lot of steam with the Harris campaign.

00:31:35.960 He has this folksy, personal, informal vibe that has really appealed to a lot of Democrats.

00:31:41.240 And they believe that his rural back story, the fact that he was a former member of the NRA, as you say, he is this high school, former high school teacher.

00:31:48.100 He was a football coach.

00:31:49.200 That this can help appeal to those independent swing state voters.

00:31:55.160 Independent swing state voters, Batya.

00:31:57.620 They're going to love him because he's folksy and was once a member of the NRA.

00:32:02.620 The media thinks that because they don't care about policy, because they are rich and elites and don't have to worry about pocketbook issues or issues like, you know, what's going on with their kids in public schools because their kids are on private school.

00:32:22.000 Right. Therefore, the only thing that matters is, does somebody give off a folksy vibe?

00:32:29.900 Right. What is their back story?

00:32:31.780 Same thing with Kamala Harris. 1.00

00:32:33.260 They don't care what she represents.

00:32:35.180 They only care what she looks like. 1.00

00:32:37.660 Right. They only care about the story because they are not facing the kinds of struggles that average Americans are struggling with every single day.

00:32:47.060 Now, Walls did do some things that are pretty good for working class Americans. 0.99

00:32:52.680 You know, he established a standard for nursing homes.

00:32:54.940 Very important.

00:32:56.240 He banned non-compete clauses.

00:32:58.380 Very important for working class Americans.

00:33:00.020 And he also required a certain level of transparency in warehousing, which is really important for Amazon workers.

00:33:07.120 This is all stuff that really matters and stuff that, you know, Republicans really need to be paying attention to because that is the only threat that he actually represents.

00:33:15.300 And honestly, it's clear that that is not what they are putting.

00:33:19.400 That is not the basket they're putting their eggs in.

00:33:21.600 Right. He's not being trotted out as somebody who's good for workers.

00:33:24.760 He's not being trotted out at someone who can restore the American dream for the struggling working class.

00:33:30.220 He's being trotted out as someone who can support, you know, the Yoss Queen-ification of Kamala Harris. 0.59

00:33:36.900 And on that front, obviously, that split screen we've been talking about.

00:33:41.500 I mean, how could he possibly compare to someone like J.D. Vance, one of the only people in the elites who cares about the forgotten American?

00:33:48.700 He officially brings this race to a presidential contest in which the candidates will have not just one, but two candidates with a mugshot.

00:33:59.940 We'll get into that, his role in the BLM riots and the over-the-top COVID reaction that he unleashed in Minnesota right after this.

00:34:09.940 More with Bhatia and Rich right after this quick break.

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00:35:03.440 People like J.D. Vance know nothing about small-town America.

00:35:06.780 It's not about hate. It's not about collapsing in.

00:35:09.180 The golden rule there is mind your own damn business.

00:35:12.080 Their policies are what destroyed, rule America.

00:35:14.560 They've divided us.

00:35:15.560 This is the first ad that the Harris campaign has released in favor of the Minnesota governor, Tim Wallace, as her running mate.

00:35:34.840 Back with me now, Bhatia Unger, Sargon, opinion editor at Newsweek and author of Second Class, and Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of National Review.

00:35:42.860 I mean, just so cringy, Bhatia. 1.00

00:35:44.820 Like, I guess it's—and if you look at the website now, they're trying to brat—bratify walls, too.

00:35:51.280 It's like his name and that brat, right?

00:35:53.600 What are they doing?

00:35:56.460 Right.

00:35:56.940 It's like his whole appeal is supposed to be that he's like a normie, that he's folksy, and now they're trying to, like, impose this, you know, brat campaign on top of that.

00:36:05.840 It sort of, like, cancels out the very thing that they're supposed to be going for.

00:36:09.340 No, not feeling it.

00:36:11.720 They've got to find a different way.

00:36:12.680 It's not to say that he's never going to resonate, because I do think the far-left progressives are going to love this guy.

00:36:17.160 And maybe normies will love him if the media does what we saw in that Stephanopoulos clip, Rich, which is just go along with couldn't be more normie, heartland.

00:36:25.480 They're celebrating him and his backstory in a way they did to J.D. Vance when he wrote Hillbilly Elegy, but not this time around.

00:36:32.700 And even in that clip, Kamala's team says, oh, he—Waltz says he knows nothing about small-town America.

00:36:38.360 He knows—J.D. Vance knows nothing.

00:36:40.600 I mean, this is what we're going to be subjected to, right?

00:36:43.100 The media's going to be like, this guy's got an amazing Midwestern small-town story.

00:36:47.940 This guy hates childless cat ladies. 1.00

00:36:50.660 Yeah.

00:36:51.420 It's very—that clip is very weirdly defensive and focused on J.D. Vance, right?

00:36:57.180 The election is not going to be won and lost in an argument over J.D., but it seems as though this pick is partly in response to J.D.

00:37:04.920 And what the Democrats and the media, the mistake they're making, although the media will do everything they can to make it work, they love these kind of frost belt socialists.

00:37:13.740 Because if you're from Minnesota, the chances are you actually are a nice guy, right?

00:37:18.820 Paul Wellstone, late senator from Minnesota, as left as you can get.

00:37:23.420 But everyone who is around him, right, left, and center, just love the guy.

00:37:26.700 I've never been around Waltz, but maybe that's true of him as well.

00:37:29.040 But that doesn't detract from the socialism.

00:37:32.140 That doesn't subtract the socialism.

00:37:34.900 And it's going to be incumbent—

00:37:36.220 He wants to chop body parts off of healthy children.

00:37:37.860 Yeah.

00:37:38.020 There's nothing nice about it.

00:37:39.200 There's just—there's no squaring those two things.

00:37:41.340 And it's out there, right?

00:37:42.820 It's not a secret.

00:37:43.640 Again, it's not something he wrote like Josh Shapiro 30 years ago in a college newspaper as a position that he's in favor of now, right?

00:37:51.320 And is enacted now.

00:37:52.920 So it's incumbent on the Trump campaign to make the case.

00:37:56.320 It means the guy at the top of the ticket needs to be more disciplined than he has been recently, obviously.

00:38:01.600 And bring all this back to Kamala, right?

00:38:04.420 If he lied about his military record and he gets nailed over that, ultimately it's not Tim Waltz that matters, right?

00:38:10.380 You say, oh, that shows her poor judgment and her incompetence. 1.00

00:38:13.680 The position—radical position on the trans stuff shows she really supports that stuff, whatever she says now, and bring it all back to her. 0.52

00:38:21.220 But they're obviously operating in a difficult information environment.

00:38:24.760 She hasn't had one bad news cycle since she ascended, in effect, to the nomination, and the media's intent on her not having any bad news cycles.

00:38:34.980 You mentioned him with the—you know, a super nice guy, but a socialist.

00:38:38.960 Here he is on that white dudes for Kamala Zoom call where he copped to that.

00:38:44.240 It's not 12.

00:38:45.220 Don't ever shy away from our progressive values.

00:38:48.260 One person's socialism is another person's neighborliness.

00:38:50.800 Just do the damn work.

00:38:53.300 Oh, okay.

00:38:54.920 Just another person's neighborliness.

00:38:56.780 Okay, so I mentioned before the break, now Trump is not the only candidate running who has a mugshot.

00:39:02.000 Just FYI, it was 30 years ago.

00:39:05.160 And he was going 96 in a 55 and was accused of being very drunk.

00:39:12.800 He was arrested for DUI.

00:39:14.500 He reportedly then lied to police about being deaf in an attempt to avoid the arrest.

00:39:21.080 He later pleaded it down to reckless driving and was convicted.

00:39:28.120 I mean, when you plead guilty, you're convicted of that.

00:39:29.560 So he's got an arrest record as well.

00:39:33.180 And maybe that is one of the reasons why he was so empathetic toward the BLM protesters who ruined one of Minnesota's greatest, biggest cities, Minneapolis, post the death of George Floyd. 0.67

00:39:47.880 When he sat for days and let it burn, notwithstanding urgent pleas from the mayor of Minneapolis, who was also a hot mess.

00:39:57.580 But this, too, will come back to haunt him, Batya, because what happened in Minneapolis was dark.

00:40:03.200 We actually do have some of the video queued up, just to bring people back to what was happening while Tim Waltz sat there, apparently musing about how wonderful socialism is.

00:40:12.460 Watch.

00:40:14.020 Hands up, don't shoot!

00:40:15.960 Hands up!

00:40:19.280 99.01, 99.01 emergency.

00:40:22.060 We got individuals breaching the gate at the 3rd precinct.

00:40:25.820 We also got people trying to breach the front doors.

00:40:30.060 We'll just breach the back gate.

00:40:31.700 We're taking heavy runs.

00:40:34.060 Heavy runs.

00:40:41.360 Airing information citywide, the 3rd precinct has been compromised.

00:40:47.720 3rd precinct is up in flames.

00:40:50.260 We're going to move back.

00:40:52.700 They're starting to throw Molotov cocktails.

00:40:55.580 We're going.

00:40:56.000 We're going.

00:40:56.060 The protesters are the ones that feel like these streets are their streets, which you will hear people chant.

00:41:09.660 Protesters hear.

00:41:10.540 And of course, of course, there's an explosion because there is gas and there are all kinds of things inside of these cars.

00:41:19.840 All right, and just one more for you.

00:41:22.800 J.D. Vance commented on this today while on the campaign trail.

00:41:26.080 I think he's on the airplane here.

00:41:27.460 Watch.

00:41:27.660 This is a guy who's proposed shipping more manufacturing jobs to China, who wants to make the American people more reliant on garbage energy instead of good American energy, and has proposed defunding the police just as Kamala Harris does.

00:41:42.740 I think it's interesting, actually, they make an interesting tag team because, of course, Tim Waltz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, and then the few who got caught, Kamala Harris, helped bail them out of jail.

00:41:54.080 So it is more instructive for what it says about Kamala Harris, that she doesn't care about the border. 1.00

00:41:58.760 She doesn't care about crime. 0.99

00:42:00.180 She doesn't care about American energy. 0.56

00:42:01.500 And most importantly, she doesn't care about the Americans who have been made to suffer under those policies.

00:42:06.980 What do you make of that, Baja?

00:42:08.100 This stuff looks like it's far left, right?

00:42:13.500 The Green New Deal scam, as Trump calls it, the allowing of the burning down of working class neighborhoods, the ratification of children being taken away from parents because they want to amputate parts of their bodies.

00:42:30.320 This is class warfare, OK?

00:42:32.600 Let's call it what it is.

00:42:33.940 Of course, it's far left.

00:42:34.960 Of course, it's radical.

00:42:35.780 Of course, it's extreme.

00:42:36.580 But the salient factor here is that it is class warfare on hardworking, normal Americans who just want to be left alone to live their lives.

00:42:49.800 They just want enough money to support their families and raise their children in beautiful, nice communities.

00:42:55.980 And this is what is taken away from them by these radical far left policies.

00:43:01.640 Because, Megan, the truth is, is that being progressive is a class proposition.

00:43:08.540 It is about having an elite university degree that then gives you somehow the right to lecture people who are struggling to make it and impose upon them laws that make them poorer, that make them less safe and make it impossible for them to raise children and retire in dignity.

00:43:30.440 And that is really what this ticket represents.

00:43:32.440 I mean, the BLM riots coming back up and his sitting there, Rich, is it's great fodder. 0.86

00:43:42.160 Yep.

00:43:42.680 I mean, to be honest, Trump was president when that happened, which could also come back to haunt.

00:43:50.940 Yeah, but he's not the governor of the state.

00:43:53.860 And the basic rule is you don't let your police stations get run over and burned to the ground, right?

00:43:58.420 The very basic, everyone understands that he failed by that metric.

00:44:04.540 His statements about this are the worst sort of progressive excuses for lawlessness, saying if we don't put diversity and inclusion at the center of what we do, this is what happens.

00:44:14.640 No, this is what happens when people run out of control and they're not stopped by the authorities.

00:44:20.920 And that was, by the way, another A-plus statement you played there from J.D. Vance.

00:44:24.580 Again, it's not just that Waltz failed, linking it to the radicalism of Kamala Harris, who was, in effect, on the side of these rioters by supporting a bail fund that was getting them out of jail.

00:44:37.640 That 2020 period was a time in our life when the left went crazy.

00:44:42.960 And both Waltz and Kamala have a lot on their record from that period.

00:44:47.500 Yes. Not only did she absolutely tweet out a link to the fund that was bailing out these protests, these rioters, these rioters, but she's on camera saying it's not going to stop. Watch.

00:44:58.220 I know that there are protests still happening in major cities across the United States.

00:45:02.260 I'm just not seeing the reporting on it that I had for the first few weeks.

00:45:06.320 That's right. But they're not going to stop. They're not going to stop.

00:45:09.000 And that's they're not. This is a movement.

00:45:11.100 I'm telling you, they're not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they're not going to stop.

00:45:17.060 It is going to they're not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they're not going to stop after Election Day.

00:45:22.580 And that should be everyone should take note of that on both levels, that this isn't they're not going to let up and they should not.

00:45:29.080 And we should not.

00:45:30.020 Rich, is anyone else getting a little nervous?

00:45:35.480 Like, I know it's a good thing that she selected such a radical person because I think it probably increases the Trump that, you know, Trump's chances.

00:45:43.680 But I'm getting a little scared at the thought of that pair in the White House.

00:45:49.220 Yeah, it's the most left wing ticket that we've ever experienced.

00:45:52.220 And she'd be the most left wing president we've ever had, I think, easily outpacing Barack Obama. 0.94

00:45:58.500 And, you know, what she's doing there, it's kind of the Al Sharpton play for years and years whenever he wanted something, wasn't getting a political agenda.

00:46:06.260 It was going to be a long, hot summer.

00:46:07.820 But it's like, watch out. Riots are coming. Right.

00:46:09.760 It's a way to use riots as as as as a threat.

00:46:12.860 And that's basically what she was doing.

00:46:14.880 And it's not just that, you know, that many parts of Minneapolis burned down in those several nights of disorder.

00:46:21.200 There was elevated crime and gunplay and murder, maybe still to this day.

00:46:26.580 I haven't looked at the exact figures, but for a long time.

00:46:29.920 And to Bachi's point, ordinary, hardworking minority, largely folks lived in those neighborhoods.

00:46:37.320 And they're the ones who paid the price.

00:46:40.440 So this this these progressive shibboleths and an inability to insist on what we want from our authorities, above all safety and order for them most.

00:46:52.760 And that's among among the reasons that is so shameful.

00:46:56.920 He also loved the covid lockdowns, Bhatia.

00:47:02.700 Oh, he loved them.

00:47:04.260 He actually set up a hotline for one neighbor to report on another neighbor for not complying with his draconian orders.

00:47:14.660 That's who he is.

00:47:15.920 That's who she is.

00:47:17.460 That actually is who most Democrats are.

00:47:19.620 They also loved the covid or overreach, except for the normies who have since crossed over to voting Republican.

00:47:25.380 I know a lot of them.

00:47:27.680 And except Josh Shapiro, who was very good on covid and opposed the vaccine mandates at a time when every other Democrat was pushing them at a time now when everybody knows they were a mistake.

00:47:42.100 It's crazy.

00:47:43.760 So I don't know.

00:47:44.660 I mean, how are you feeling about it, Bhatia?

00:47:46.260 Yeah. I think that this is going to be a big galvanizing moment for the American Jewish community.

00:47:52.900 I mean, how can you keep voting for a party that's telling your kids that they can't be at the top of the ticket because they are proud Jews?

00:47:59.420 It's so, so shameful.

00:48:01.880 And the funny thing is, is liberal American Jews would never tolerate this for another minority. 1.00

00:48:06.040 And I'm hoping that this is a moment when they wake up and find a little self-respect and a little dignity and walk away from this this mess.

00:48:12.940 Hope springs eternal. But I'm going to go ahead and say, don't bet on it.

00:48:20.620 OK, well, we'll see, Rich. Right.

00:48:23.020 I'll give you the last word on it, because I feel like we've got the rest of August to get through.

00:48:26.460 And then this thing's really going to kick off in earnest.

00:48:28.240 I mean, it's going to get very fierce in September.

00:48:30.360 She's going to be ahead after the convention in two weeks, you know, maybe two, three, who knows, you know, four or five points.

00:48:37.720 And we'll have to see where it settles, settles down.

00:48:39.640 And then you've got more of a UK type general election, just a two month sprint.

00:48:44.680 So, again, Trump has not had a great five or seven days or so, but he's in the past gone through these phases where he seems kind of wrong footed and like he's experimenting and nothing's working, he's hurting himself.

00:48:57.580 Then he usually settles on on some stuff that works.

00:49:00.240 It just doesn't seem complicated here. Right.

00:49:02.240 She's trying to run a future versus past campaign. 1.00

00:49:04.580 You say, no, she's not the future.

00:49:05.800 She's been part of this failed administration. 0.73

00:49:07.460 And by the way, the future they want is insane and would turn us back on what we must treasure as Americans.

00:49:14.520 He'll get there.

00:49:15.780 I think he'll get there.

00:49:16.620 Guys, thank you both so much.

00:49:18.000 Great to have you.

00:49:18.580 Thank you, Megan.

00:49:19.800 Up next, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is here, and I will ask him what he thought when he saw the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the man who appointed him.

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00:50:40.120 Be awake, not woke.

00:50:41.420 I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on Sirius XM.

00:50:47.460 It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today.

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00:51:46.360 My guest today is one of the most impactful people in Washington, D.C. and the country,

00:51:53.720 and yet you don't hear from him very often.

00:51:56.500 It is Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch.

00:52:00.640 In 2017, Justice Gorsuch was nominated to the High Court by then-President Donald Trump.

00:52:06.360 Since then, he has been part of some of the most consequential decisions in American law

00:52:11.000 when it comes to religious freedom, freedom of speech, and government overreach.

00:52:15.800 He has seen a lot during his time as a judge,

00:52:19.020 and one of his biggest warnings to the American public right now is stop the madness of law after

00:52:26.760 law after law, and the federal and state and local governments boot on the neck of regular

00:52:34.480 American citizens.

00:52:35.620 It's contrary to the way the founders envisioned the country.

00:52:39.200 It is the topic of his new book out today titled Overruled, The Human Toll of Too Much Law.

00:52:48.060 Justice Gorsuch, thank you so much for being here today.

00:52:50.900 Well, it's a delight to be with you, Megan.

00:52:52.520 Thank you for having me.

00:52:54.140 The pleasure's all mine.

00:52:55.360 So I have a lot that I want to ask you about the book.

00:52:57.920 Forgive me, I've got to hit a little news of the day off the top.

00:53:01.960 We just heard from Kamala Harris that she selected her running mate, 1.00

00:53:05.960 the governor of Minnesota, Tim Waltz.

00:53:08.800 And I just wonder, I know you're not going to weigh in on whether it's a good pick, a bad pick,

00:53:12.960 but is that the kind of thing that you guys will discuss at the Supreme Court?

00:53:16.620 Do you guys ever hit news of the day with each other?

00:53:19.180 Is it chummy in that way?

00:53:20.300 Megan, you're not going to be surprised that you're not going to get me to talk about politics

00:53:26.120 during a presidential election year.

00:53:29.080 We often eat lunch together.

00:53:31.440 It's true.

00:53:32.520 It's the government.

00:53:33.680 So bring your own lunch.

00:53:36.280 And sure, we'll talk about everything from baseball to politics to when Justice Breyer is

00:53:43.880 around, some pretty bad knock-knock jokes that he gets from his grandkids.

00:53:47.580 Is it like when we all go home for Thanksgiving and we have leftists and rightists and conservatives,

00:53:54.540 Republicans, everybody, liberals, you know, debating these kinds of things over the potato

00:53:59.700 salad?

00:54:00.280 Or is it, I would imagine it's a little bit more elevated than that.

00:54:03.640 Well, it's certainly like a family.

00:54:06.140 You know, there are nine people.

00:54:08.580 We've worked together for long periods of time.

00:54:11.760 We do easy things and we do hard things together.

00:54:14.280 And it's a, I always think it'd be nice if the American people could take a peek at our

00:54:20.940 discussions in the conference room.

00:54:22.400 Now, I'm glad they don't because it gives us an opportunity to speak candidly with one

00:54:26.640 another and work through difficult problems.

00:54:28.880 But I think they'd be very proud of the level of discourse and the thoughtfulness that goes

00:54:35.260 around that conference table.

00:54:36.520 Um, we have a rule, um, you, we speak in seniority and everybody goes around the table and says

00:54:43.680 their piece before any, any, any further discussion.

00:54:46.740 And then it's just a conversation back and forth.

00:54:49.680 And, um, it's amazing how often that conversation yields something that we can all agree on.

00:54:55.680 And that becomes our starting place for our work.

00:54:59.140 Is it true that you all shake hands with all of the other justices every time you see each

00:55:04.540 other?

00:55:05.160 That's 150 year old tradition, Megan.

00:55:08.280 And yes, we do.

00:55:10.320 Um, and I think that's a wonderful icebreaker for us and I, and, you know, for all people,

00:55:16.400 right.

00:55:16.740 No matter how difficult the matter of the day is, uh, no matter what disagreements we might

00:55:22.340 have had yesterday, it's, we're always greeting one another with a warm welcome and a question

00:55:28.100 about their family or what they've been up to over the summer.

00:55:32.060 And, um, yes, it's, it's, it's, it's a great tradition.

00:55:36.760 It's really nice.

00:55:37.660 I think about it sometimes in church where, you know, it's time for, uh, to say peace and

00:55:42.840 make peace with your neighbors.

00:55:44.380 And I appreciate the return of the handshake, like human touch in congregation with your neighbors,

00:55:50.720 even strangers to you, but with whom you have a common belief, there's something to it.

00:55:54.780 And you, you hit on this in the book, like that tradition of going to church, some of

00:55:59.140 the themes of bowling alone, that's really, really kind of interestingly, part of the

00:56:04.640 problem in the knee jerk over regulation of everything.

00:56:10.660 Well, now Megan, I'm a lawyer, so I like laws and, uh, you know, I think they're very important

00:56:16.620 to our freedoms, right?

00:56:18.020 Without them, we can't be safe.

00:56:20.020 Uh, we, we don't know what our responsibilities and our rights are without laws, but, you know,

00:56:26.280 James Madison, a long time ago asked the question, all right, some law is essential, but is there

00:56:31.320 an irony in law and can there be too much law in ways that actually hurt our freedoms and

00:56:37.100 our aspirations for equality and our rights?

00:56:39.820 And I, I, you know, just as a judge now for about 18 years, I've just seen so many cases

00:56:46.020 in which decent, hardworking Americans just trying to make their way, just getting overrun

00:56:52.900 by laws that they, they didn't know about.

00:56:55.500 And I felt it was important to take a moment to just tell their stories.

00:57:00.320 Um, I've reflected on it for a long time and many of them were kind enough to share their

00:57:05.920 stories with Janie, my coauthor and former law clerk and me, and, and the book really

00:57:10.780 is about them and it's dedicated to them and it, it's their stories mostly.

00:57:16.540 It's incredible the way that you've chosen to approach it.

00:57:19.300 And Janie obviously is brilliant because I'm sure she did the bulk of the research and the

00:57:24.000 stories are spectacular.

00:57:25.600 The ones that you've chosen just to put a little, you know, header on it for the audience.

00:57:30.340 You, you pose the central question of the book as follows, what happens, this is my phrase

00:57:36.140 to the little guy and their foundational freedoms, like the right to speak, the right to pray,

00:57:42.260 the right to gather freely when our laws increasingly restrict what we may say, they monitor what

00:57:48.460 we do and tell us how we may live.

00:57:51.820 And you write in the book about how rich people, people with connections or popular people, they'll

00:57:57.720 do okay.

00:57:58.760 If you look at history, it's when the unpopular or unconnected, unwealthy guy or gal gets dragged

00:58:06.600 into the courts that all of this regulation becomes a problem.

00:58:10.740 And you feature front and foremost, the story of Sandra and John Yates.

00:58:15.660 I told my family the story.

00:58:17.280 We're still talking about it.

00:58:18.440 Even my kids were completely baffled by what happened to John Yates.

00:58:22.540 Can you outline it for us quickly?

00:58:24.540 Sure.

00:58:24.700 So John and Sandra Yates are high school sweethearts.

00:58:28.580 They moved to Florida.

00:58:29.500 He pursued his life's dream of becoming a commercial fisherman, worked his way up from deckhand

00:58:34.060 to captain of his own small crew.

00:58:36.240 And he's out one day.

00:58:37.700 Somebody comes alongside, flashes a badge and says, I'd like to measure your fish.

00:58:42.860 John says, well, we've been out for some time and I've got thousands of pounds of red

00:58:46.900 grouper in the hold.

00:58:48.200 He says, fine, I got all day.

00:58:49.580 And he sits there measuring the red grouper one by one.

00:58:54.200 And he determines that there are 72 fish that are less than 20 inches long, the limit at

00:59:00.200 the time.

00:59:01.020 Now, John's not convinced this fellow knows how to measure red grouper because he doesn't

00:59:05.060 account for their long lower jaw like he should.

00:59:07.920 But put that aside.

00:59:09.000 72 it is.

00:59:10.640 The agent says, put those in a crate and I'll deal with you when you get back to dock in a

00:59:14.320 few days.

00:59:15.040 John does that.

00:59:15.960 Well, when he gets back, the agent measures them again and finds 69 now, not 72 that are

00:59:21.980 undersized.

00:59:22.740 And he's suspicious.

00:59:24.320 But John doesn't hear anything more about it for three years when a group of agents surround

00:59:30.300 his house, his wife's doing the laundry, and arrest him, take him two hours away.

00:59:35.760 He has no idea what this is about.

00:59:37.980 And he's charged with a violation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was, as you know, adopted after

00:59:44.800 the Enron accounting scandal, and it's designed to prevent people from destroying documents

00:59:50.780 when there's a federal investigation.

00:59:52.580 But the law reads, you can't destroy things like accounting records and spreadsheets and

00:59:58.180 other tangible objects.

01:00:01.320 And the government's Sarbanes-Oxley theory is that John had thrown overboard 72 undersized

01:00:08.060 red grouper and replaced them with 69 still undersized red grouper.

01:00:14.800 And John thought that was about the silliest thing he'd ever heard.

01:00:17.820 But they pursued the case even after the size limit for red grouper was dropped to 18 inches

01:00:23.940 and all of his fish, by anyone's estimation, were longer than that.

01:00:27.700 They spent years pursuing him, secured a conviction.

01:00:31.960 He spent 30 days in jail over Christmas when he and his wife were trying to raise two young

01:00:37.380 grandchildren, and he was ready to give up.

01:00:40.680 He was done.

01:00:42.220 And Sandra said, no, we have to fight this for the next person so it doesn't happen to

01:00:46.860 someone else again.

01:00:48.020 She took it all the way to the United States Supreme Court and won by a single vote. 0.99

01:00:52.620 Now, that kind of spirit I admire, but look at the costs that it came to that family.

01:00:59.620 John was no longer able to pursue his life's dream as a commercial fisherman, put out of

01:01:05.500 work.

01:01:06.080 His wife now supports the family, and they live in a trailer.

01:01:10.520 So that's the human toll of too much law, right?

01:01:15.780 And, you know, it's something that's happened in my lifetime, Megan.

01:01:19.460 I don't know about yours, but our laws have just simply exploded.

01:01:24.380 The federal criminal code has more than doubled in my lifetime in length.

01:01:28.680 There are so many federal crimes now in regulatory provisions that nobody can be sure because it

01:01:34.720 would take years just to read them.

01:01:37.120 There are at least 300,000, we know.

01:01:40.400 And, you know, everybody says Congress isn't busy.

01:01:43.560 They write two to three million new words of statutory law every year.

01:01:49.080 And the federal regulations, forget about Congress.

01:01:52.460 That's just the tip of the iceberg.

01:01:54.540 The federal register used to be 16 pages long when it started in the 1930s.

01:01:59.400 Now, every year, we see 60,000 to 70,000 pages added annually.

01:02:04.780 The, uh, this, this John's wife, Sandra is really the heroine of the book.

01:02:12.560 Um, she, she brought this case, notwithstanding the enormous challenges to doing that when

01:02:17.920 you don't have a lot of money, as you point out, it lasted eight years, three courts, 13

01:02:22.020 different judges.

01:02:23.320 Uh, and John was forced to do the time and pay the price, even though he was ultimately

01:02:28.860 successful at the U S Supreme court.

01:02:30.860 Um, you, you point out in the book, all of this is very contrary to the founder's vision

01:02:36.460 of what, what America would be about.

01:02:39.980 And you say that one of the essential purposes in our founding documents as, as recognized

01:02:44.600 by justice William O Douglas was to take government off the backs of the people and to keep it

01:02:51.640 off.

01:02:52.340 And somehow that's been turned on its head with the numbers that you just espoused that by

01:02:59.220 a hundred years ago, all the federal government laws fit into a single volume.

01:03:02.820 This is all from the book overruled by 2018 U S code was 54 volume, 60,000 pages.

01:03:08.200 There are 300,000 federal agency regulations, many of which have criminal penalties and on

01:03:12.460 and on.

01:03:12.960 It's, it's just spun out of control to where no one could ever understand what all the

01:03:18.400 laws are out there and how many we violate in a day.

01:03:21.500 Yeah.

01:03:22.500 Yeah.

01:03:23.500 Some people say some academics say that anyone over the age of 18 in this country could be

01:03:28.460 charged with a federal felony.

01:03:30.220 And that does raise a lot of questions in my mind, right?

01:03:35.080 Uh, our founders wanted for us written laws.

01:03:38.660 They wrote a constitution.

01:03:40.300 That was a novel idea in human history at the time.

01:03:43.720 And it was designed to divide and check and balance power and make lawmaking difficult.

01:03:50.700 We forget that they, they saw law as restrictions on freedoms.

01:03:55.320 And so they wanted lawmaking to be especially difficult task.

01:03:59.900 And that's why we have two houses of Congress, why you have to then get the president to sign

01:04:05.500 it or override his veto.

01:04:07.020 And, um, we, we've kind of taken that process where we're supposed to have the wisdom of

01:04:14.100 the masses, all the people involved, their representatives coming together, compromising,

01:04:19.500 working through problems and passing laws that we can all maybe understand and agree on.

01:04:25.020 We've outsourced a lot of that work, uh, to federal agencies where there are experts and

01:04:31.080 they have very important contributions to make, but there aren't the kinds of checks and balances

01:04:36.080 that Madison had in mind for us.

01:04:39.640 Yeah, they're, they're not elected.

01:04:41.480 And as you point out in the book overruled, they often not only will be the promulgators

01:04:47.120 of these basically criminal statutes that we're going to have to abide by, but then they're

01:04:52.360 the judge and jury too.

01:04:54.500 They will create the regulation.

01:04:56.800 They'll charge us with violating it.

01:04:58.400 And then they'll try the case and surprise, surprise.

01:05:02.120 They're not the most objective judge.

01:05:04.720 Well, you know, um, uh, when Janie and I sat down to work on the book, we wondered how many

01:05:11.100 federal agencies there are Megan.

01:05:13.720 And it turns out federal agencies can't agree on how many federal agencies exist.

01:05:19.200 There are at least three different published numbers of how many of them there are.

01:05:24.080 And you're right.

01:05:25.020 They, they write rules, very important work.

01:05:27.780 They prosecute people for violations of those rules.

01:05:31.240 And then in many cases they serve as the judge or the case to, uh, Jonathan Turley, professor

01:05:37.780 at George Washington says that the average American is 10 times more likely to be brought

01:05:42.700 before one of these administrative judges.

01:05:44.720 They used to be called hearing officers, but now they call themselves administrative judges.

01:05:49.380 It's great, uh, than they are to be, than an American is likely to ever face a judge and a jury.

01:05:55.640 And, you know, what's at stake there?

01:05:57.360 Why do, why, why do we care about this?

01:05:59.560 Why do we write about this in the book?

01:06:01.580 Well, when you're before a judge, you're before somebody who is pretty independent,

01:06:06.860 who's been appointed and confirmed and been through that process.

01:06:10.580 But after that doesn't owe anything to anybody, right?

01:06:15.040 Um, his only job or her job is to apply the law as faithfully and fairly as, as, as they

01:06:21.020 can.

01:06:21.700 And you have a jury, the jury of your peers to decide your case before an agency, your

01:06:28.700 administrative judge or administrative law judge is likely to be somebody who works for

01:06:33.320 the very same agency that's bringing the charges against you.

01:06:36.740 You're not going to have a jury.

01:06:38.180 And many of the procedures that you'd get in court, including basic rights, like cross

01:06:44.280 examination are not always given to you the way they would be in court.

01:06:49.000 It's a very, very different system.

01:06:51.640 And it's unsurprising as a result that, uh, agencies almost always win before their own

01:06:57.600 judges in ways that they wouldn't win in court.

01:07:01.400 That fierce independence of the judiciary is going to come back into this discussion as we

01:07:07.220 get into some of the criticisms of the courts these days and the push to make them more

01:07:12.280 accountable, uh, and whether that's also inconsistent with the founders vision.

01:07:17.740 You, you go through, you do an excellent job of outlining the problem in terms of the volume

01:07:23.140 of law, the impossibility of understanding the laws, real man and women stories of how

01:07:29.200 it's impossible to navigate the system and how people have gotten caught in this web.

01:07:32.840 But I do want to tick through a couple of the passing references because they bring it

01:07:36.980 home.

01:07:37.900 Uh, just as Gorsuch goes through the six-year-old you may have heard of who landed in court for

01:07:42.820 picking a tulip by the bus stop, 10-year-old whose lemonade stand was shuttered for lack

01:07:48.180 of a business license.

01:07:49.260 We talked about those kids all the time when I was on Fox.

01:07:51.580 It's a federal crime to enter a post office while intoxicated.

01:07:56.040 There goes my Saturday night to sell a mattress without a warning label.

01:08:00.300 I never knew that was real.

01:08:01.520 We all rip those off of our mattresses thinking that's a joke to injure a government owned lamp

01:08:06.960 in DC.

01:08:08.080 And I mean, absurdly to consult with a known pirate, which is right on point.

01:08:14.840 It's who spends their time coming up with this stuff, nevermind enforcing it.

01:08:19.880 Well, that's the thing.

01:08:22.300 I used to think those were like stray anecdotes.

01:08:25.380 And then I started seeing them in my courtroom.

01:08:28.340 When I was a 10th circuit judge, I had a case, I think it was a seventh grader, certainly a

01:08:33.300 middle schooler who was trading burps for laughs in his classroom.

01:08:38.240 And I might've been guilty of that in the day.

01:08:40.980 And instead of being just taken to the principal's office or maybe his parents called or maybe

01:08:47.500 a detention, he was arrested and handcuffed and went to court.

01:08:54.100 Now, I don't know what's happening in our society that leads to things like that.

01:08:59.320 I mean, another one, a small healthcare company in Kansas was accused of Medicare fraud.

01:09:05.360 Big, big deal.

01:09:06.820 That's the kind of thing we can put your company out of business.

01:09:10.040 And it went through six years of those kinds of administrative law proceedings.

01:09:14.520 We talked about a moment ago, got to my court and the three of us, we sit in panels of three

01:09:20.280 on the courts of appeals.

01:09:21.260 Usually we looked at each other and said, we think, gosh, I think they comply with all the

01:09:27.440 rules that were in existence at the time they provided their services.

01:09:30.940 And the government's accusing them of violating rules that it didn't even promulgate until

01:09:36.000 years after they provided the services.

01:09:38.740 Are we missing something?

01:09:40.700 And we got the government lawyer in front of us and heard argument.

01:09:44.120 And it turned out the government had just become confused.

01:09:48.000 There was, it was producing so many rules so fast.

01:09:50.780 It had no idea that it was accusing somebody for violating rules that didn't even exist at

01:09:55.780 the time.

01:09:56.200 The, the theme I see out of the book, again, overruled, uh, is these government entities

01:10:05.760 overreact to problematic behavior, minor problematic behavior, and they punish good or neutral behavior

01:10:18.160 over and over and over.

01:10:20.180 There's so many examples in the book, but one of them that our audience may be familiar

01:10:24.620 with is Hemingway's cats down at his estate, which some regulator deemed a problem.

01:10:33.220 Everyone was perfectly happy.

01:10:34.740 No one was suffering, but then they were once the regulators stepped in.

01:10:41.020 Yeah.

01:10:41.140 So there's this, uh, law that said that if you're an animal exhibitor, like a zoo or a

01:10:47.120 circus, you have to have a federal license for your animals.

01:10:51.260 Fine.

01:10:52.200 Then the agency took that and kind of ran with it and said, basically animal exhibitors include

01:10:58.120 everybody from, uh, children's, uh, magician, Marty Hahn.

01:11:03.020 I talk about him in the book too.

01:11:04.580 That's a crazy story.

01:11:05.700 Yeah, it's a crazy, that's a crazy story, but, but the Hemingway museum turns out they

01:11:11.080 needed a federal license and, uh, somebody from the U S department of agriculture went

01:11:15.680 down there and said, okay, you have these cats.

01:11:18.400 They're all descendants of Ernest Hemingway's original six toed cat that he got from a ship

01:11:24.200 captain is good luck.

01:11:25.580 And they've been taking care of them for years down there.

01:11:28.080 They even, they even stayed during hurricanes to make sure the cats are okay.

01:11:32.520 And they have a little cat cemetery with tombstones.

01:11:36.540 I mean, these are, these cats are loved, uh, and they're all named like Marilyn Monroe and

01:11:41.140 Cary Grant.

01:11:42.160 And anyway, this person from the department of agriculture says, you got a problem taking

01:11:47.480 care of these cats because the wall isn't tall enough.

01:11:51.100 So the cats kind of wander into town.

01:11:53.200 People love them, but you know that you got to keep them in.

01:11:56.320 And so you got to put the wall higher.

01:11:57.940 And the museum said, well, we'd love to, but there's another federal agency that says

01:12:03.280 we're a historical site and we can't change the wall.

01:12:06.640 So, all right.

01:12:08.220 Um, then the, the, then the agent said, well, you, maybe you need to put a hot wire on top

01:12:12.460 of the, on top of that wall.

01:12:14.420 So they put the hot wire in and, and of course that, that fried the cats and, and, and the

01:12:20.880 agency got very angry about that.

01:12:22.420 And the museum said, well, hold on, you guys are the experts.

01:12:24.600 So we're just trying to do, anyway, they went through three rounds of applying for

01:12:29.060 permits.

01:12:30.260 The, the, the American government spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending agents to

01:12:35.580 Key West, uh, that they rented an apartment across the museum, took surreptitious photos.

01:12:41.580 You know, they're labeled like could be a cat from Hemingway museum on them.

01:12:47.160 And, uh, PETA did a study.

01:12:49.100 They brought in PETA and PETA said they saw a bunch of fat and happy cats down there.

01:12:53.860 Uh, it took years and ultimately, of course it got resolved, but the museum tried to fight

01:13:01.180 it and said, this regulation is, is too broad an interpretation of the statute.

01:13:05.360 They fought it all the way to the 11th circuit and lost the 11th circuit said, you got a pretty

01:13:11.120 good reading of the statute there, but there's something called Chevron deference, which requires

01:13:16.060 us to favor the agency when there's any question about how best to read the statute.

01:13:20.700 So, so you lose and you point out to, I want to get to Chevron, but, uh, in New York city,

01:13:27.180 for an example, opening a restaurant in New York, citing a New York times article, it you'd

01:13:32.000 have to go through 11 city agencies, often with conflicting regulations, get up to 30 permits,

01:13:37.940 registrations, licenses, and certificates, and pass 23 different inspections.

01:13:42.740 That's exactly the kind of bureaucracy that they were running into down at the Hemingway

01:13:46.880 museum where they just wanted to love these cats and not electrify them or electrocute

01:13:51.300 them.

01:13:52.080 Same thing as the poor magician who had similar problems.

01:13:54.760 You got to read the book to find out his story, Marty Hayne, where he's just trying to pull

01:13:58.420 a rabbit out of a hat.

01:13:59.600 And if he wanted to pull an iguana out of the hat, he could have done whatever he wanted

01:14:02.440 to it.

01:14:02.900 But ultimately they were actually getting down to the nitty gritty of, well, if a tornado

01:14:07.180 comes, the cat needs to go into the holding shelter first before the dogs.

01:14:11.560 And I mean, it's insane, Megan, Megan, when he had a, so, so yeah, he got the whack, just

01:14:18.360 like the people, the Hemingway museum, an agent came up when he's doing a show, children's

01:14:22.960 show and pulled the rabbit out of the hat and said, do you have a license for that?

01:14:25.360 And he said, no, do I need a license?

01:14:28.820 I mean, he's a law abiding guy.

01:14:30.680 He wants to do it right.

01:14:31.800 And they told him if it's an iguana, you don't need one.

01:14:34.480 And if it were rabbit meant for stew, that's okay.

01:14:37.320 You don't need one.

01:14:38.020 But, but for the children's show, you need a federal license and he got one of course.

01:14:42.940 And then, you know, later after hurricane Katrina, they said, well, now you need to have an emergency

01:14:47.760 preparedness plan and, you know, for chemical spills and hurricanes and all kinds, all manner

01:14:54.700 of disasters.

01:14:55.360 And he had to hire a disaster management expert to help him write a 28 page disaster management.

01:15:01.240 He lives in Missouri.

01:15:02.320 He says, we do have one thing I'm worried about, and that's tornadoes.

01:15:05.720 And my plan is to get the family in the basement, then the dog and the cat.

01:15:10.560 And if there's time, I'll get the rabbit.

01:15:12.780 And of course, you know, the agent, no, no, I don't care about the dog or the family or

01:15:17.120 the, you know, the rabbit's got to go first.

01:15:19.880 He even had a home visit.

01:15:21.560 He had a home visit when they wanted to see, you know, how he carries the rabbit to the

01:15:26.320 shows and he showed them the cage.

01:15:28.300 And the agent said, well, now how do you know which way is up when you carry the rabbit?

01:15:33.440 And Marty says, well, I've got a handle that I carry from the handle.

01:15:38.300 And they said, no, you have to have one of those stickers that says this way up on it.

01:15:42.500 And he said, well, where do I get some?

01:15:43.960 And the agent said, well, I'll send you some.

01:15:46.160 And two weeks later, he got 200 stickers in the mail.

01:15:49.980 Thanks to your tax dollars.

01:15:51.400 It's so we have to laugh because it's truly just absurd, but it's one of those laugh or

01:15:58.680 cry situations, you know, of all these cases because they wound their way through the judicial

01:16:03.780 system.

01:16:04.600 These people were forced to defend themselves against an overreaching federal government

01:16:09.540 that does not understand those founding principles of how limited it was supposed to be and how

01:16:15.660 we formed the whole country because we didn't want that boot on our neck inside of our homes.

01:16:21.280 And when we do a magic show, not everything has to be overregulated.

01:16:26.420 And one of the examples is the most heartbreaking in the book, not least of which because we actually

01:16:31.480 went there for a short time during the covid lockdown was what happened in Butte, Montana.

01:16:36.760 It's where you may you may not know this, Justice Rob O'Neill, the guy who shot bin Laden,

01:16:40.900 is from Butte, Montana.

01:16:43.880 And boy, I've talked to him many times where I've never talked to him about the history

01:16:48.040 of his hometown and how this government overregulation stopped people from helping themselves.

01:16:58.520 Yeah.

01:16:59.180 So Butte, Montana, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, is one of the richest places on the planet.

01:17:05.120 They discovered copper there and the wires for our telegraphs, our telephones, bullets,

01:17:10.900 for World War One.

01:17:12.460 They came from Butte, Montana.

01:17:13.740 It was so important in World War One that Omar Bradley was sent there to guard it.

01:17:18.700 And of course, over time, the plant closes, the smelters close, and it becomes it's a tough

01:17:27.880 place to grow up these days economically.

01:17:30.660 And they also discovered that that smelter had poured a lot of arsenic into the air that had

01:17:37.300 settled on the land.

01:17:38.860 300 square miles around Butte became a Superfund site.

01:17:44.020 And EPA did a good job with industry trying to clean it up.

01:17:48.360 But they set the acceptable arsenic ranges to be left in the soil at 250 parts per million

01:17:56.020 in residential yards.

01:17:59.320 And in many municipalities today, you cannot put anything in a landfill that's greater than

01:18:05.800 100 parts per million.

01:18:08.060 And about 100 people in Butte said, wow, I don't feel comfortable with 250 parts per million.

01:18:14.300 Where did this come from?

01:18:15.680 And can we do better than that?

01:18:17.860 And EPA said, well, we think that's an acceptable cancer range, that 250.

01:18:24.300 And the people of Butte said, well, we'd like to clean up our own land or get this company

01:18:30.660 to help us do better.

01:18:32.620 I mean, we're talking about daycares and kids' backyards.

01:18:35.940 And of course, the industry fought it, fair enough.

01:18:39.760 But EPA came in on the side of industry, and they said that federal law preempted any efforts

01:18:46.840 by the states to clean up the land, or even by the people themselves in Butte, Montana,

01:18:53.840 without EPA's permission.

01:18:56.240 The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and we held that the law was exactly as EPA and

01:19:02.180 the industry read it.

01:19:03.060 And I dissented, but I admit my colleagues had a pretty strong reading of the law.

01:19:09.500 I guess my question just is, suppose that is what the law is.

01:19:14.240 Is that how it should be?

01:19:16.120 What do we think?

01:19:16.920 Of course, environmental regulation is very important.

01:19:19.560 And maybe if there had been some earlier, we wouldn't have had the problem that we had

01:19:23.120 in Butte.

01:19:23.460 But at the same time, while expertise is important and Washington regulation is important, isn't

01:19:32.260 the local knowledge of Butte also important?

01:19:35.360 Can't those people, aren't those people entitled to think about cleaning up their own land without

01:19:40.260 asking people 3,000 miles away in Washington for permission?

01:19:44.340 This over-reliance on experts is another theme that comes up in the book about how we're seeding

01:19:54.120 what we know in our hearts as, you know, street sense to this, you know, Washingtonian sense

01:20:01.340 of authority time and time again.

01:20:03.320 And you do get in repeatedly to what happened during the COVID lockdowns.

01:20:06.780 Before we go there, though, I want to point this out because you've got some great, great

01:20:10.840 quotes in here.

01:20:12.080 I mean, I am a lawyer, recovering lawyer.

01:20:15.100 I practiced for 10 years.

01:20:15.940 I know you are.

01:20:17.100 And covered the court, too, didn't you?

01:20:19.400 I did.

01:20:20.100 I sat there for years listening to the arguments.

01:20:22.160 It was my favorite part of my job.

01:20:25.480 But you weren't there yet.

01:20:26.660 I'm sure it was even better today.

01:20:28.020 But I love the quotes from the old justices and legal titans.

01:20:32.360 And there's this one from Judge Learned Hand.

01:20:35.160 It reads as follows, quote,

01:20:36.780 Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women.

01:20:39.880 When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.

01:20:47.620 That's what's starting to happen to us.

01:20:50.200 We're allowing, in too many cases, the government overreach and the overregulation.

01:20:56.480 And you go through the nutty things that we went through during the COVID lockdowns,

01:21:01.520 like some guy was on his front porch listening to music.

01:21:05.080 I mean, just craziness of it.

01:21:07.480 And you're not saying as a justice on the high court, you know, I will stop this.

01:21:11.780 You're saying people look at what we're allowing in our in our country.

01:21:16.160 Yeah.

01:21:18.120 So, you know, COVID is tricky, right?

01:21:21.480 People didn't know a lot early in the pandemic.

01:21:24.120 And of course, we need experts to help guide us.

01:21:27.640 But during COVID, we saw an interesting thing.

01:21:31.260 Right.

01:21:31.420 Lawmaking basically stopped in legislatures.

01:21:34.240 The courts largely fell silent.

01:21:37.280 And we had an intense Wilsonian efficiency of executive decrees changing from jurisdiction

01:21:46.400 to jurisdiction, neighborhood to neighborhood, week to week.

01:21:49.700 And we just asked the question, the book, that's kind of an insight into maybe kind of the core

01:21:57.360 of what we're talking about.

01:21:58.560 What happens when lawmaking moves away from we, the people, and into other, into executive

01:22:05.640 areas where you're just a few people are deciding everything for us?

01:22:09.900 And, you know, lots of good things can happen, but there are also some costs, right?

01:22:16.780 Who's best equipped to deal with that world?

01:22:19.960 It's often the people who have money and connections.

01:22:23.280 And it's often the people, ordinary Americans, the mom and pop stores and the unpopular, they

01:22:29.680 get whacked. 0.60

01:22:31.080 And so you look at what happened during COVID, who, with respect to companies, for example,

01:22:36.640 who can deal with this massive new wave of regulation?

01:22:40.500 The mom and pop stores shutter.

01:22:42.260 Meanwhile, billionaires saw their net worth increase by 70% during those years.

01:22:49.480 That's incredible.

01:22:51.140 And then you look at how those regulations impacted popular and unpopular people.

01:22:56.920 In Nevada, for a period, casinos could open with 50% occupancy and no restrictions about

01:23:03.260 how people interact.

01:23:04.320 Hundreds or thousands of people, you know, interacting in a casino just fine.

01:23:09.640 But a church down the street could only have 50 people in it, no matter how large it was,

01:23:14.540 no matter what precautions they took.

01:23:17.200 And you just see what happens to popular versus unpopular people.

01:23:20.900 And of course, as you alluded to, Megan, there were laws that, you know, made it impermissible

01:23:27.220 to even meet with people on a street corner.

01:23:29.480 And you see, maybe not too surprisingly, that those laws tended to be enforced disparately

01:23:35.540 with respect to African Americans versus, say, other citizens.

01:23:40.280 Yeah, you're going down a dangerous path there.

01:23:44.300 You talked about the churches.

01:23:45.560 That's the story we covered a lot during the lockdowns.

01:23:48.200 And I know I read that you said in an earlier interview a couple years ago that when you were

01:23:53.980 going through your confirmation hearings, you did pray.

01:23:57.500 And the power of prayer, you said, really helped you.

01:23:59.980 People would stop you a lot in the street.

01:24:02.080 Are you a man of faith?

01:24:03.440 What role does that play in your very important job?

01:24:07.140 It plays no role in my job.

01:24:08.800 I want to be very clear about that, Megan.

01:24:11.160 You know, when you don the robe, it's a reminder to put all those things aside.

01:24:17.260 Your job is to squarely look at the law and squarely look at the facts and pretty much nothing

01:24:23.180 else.

01:24:24.440 All right.

01:24:24.880 But if you're asking me as a person, is my faith important to me?

01:24:29.920 It's right up there with my family and my country.

01:24:32.680 Those are those are things I love and I value more than anything else.

01:24:37.740 And yes, during the confirmation period, I can't tell you how many notes I got.

01:24:42.680 And I still get from the American people saying, we're praying for you.

01:24:47.420 I don't always agree with you.

01:24:49.760 And I may not like the person who appointed you or the Senate that confirmed you.

01:24:54.520 And I know I'm not going to like all your rulings, but I'm praying for you and I'm praying

01:24:58.820 for our country.

01:25:00.260 That personally means a great deal to me.

01:25:02.680 Yeah.

01:25:03.380 Oh, that's I mean, that's the kind of thing that makes you believe in our little experiment

01:25:09.100 we call America.

01:25:10.160 Right.

01:25:10.340 I mean, this is something you hit many times is the importance of being with our fellow

01:25:14.440 Americans, reminding ourselves that political differences don't mean we can't respect,

01:25:20.600 think well of, think well of, root for people who are on the other side.

01:25:26.140 Yeah.

01:25:26.700 And that's kind of the end of the book, if you will.

01:25:29.860 What's the what's the way forward?

01:25:32.540 How do we get past some of these problems?

01:25:34.880 And I think, you know, it makes it reminds me of Tocqueville, who visited this country in

01:25:40.980 the 1830s.

01:25:42.580 And he marveled that when a great undertaking needed to happen in England, you know, a British 0.72

01:25:49.440 lord would be in charge.

01:25:50.800 In France, it would be a government.

01:25:52.240 But in America, the people came together and they made it happen, whether it was through

01:25:58.720 their charities or their local governments or just as private citizens.

01:26:03.760 And it's that spirit that's always distinguished America.

01:26:06.980 And I see that still.

01:26:09.940 And it gives me hope in the problems we've been talking about, because I see people like

01:26:14.820 Sandra Yates and Marty Hahn who are standing up and trying to make real change.

01:26:20.080 And they have.

01:26:21.740 And it's happening at our state level, too.

01:26:25.400 We see a lot of states taking this issue, starting to take this issue seriously.

01:26:30.580 Idaho recently, not too long ago, passed a law saying the entire administrative code of

01:26:36.940 the state is abolished, except for basically those provisions of the governor subsequently

01:26:42.120 deemed important enough to keep.

01:26:44.560 Texas has got a sunset law that now abolishes agencies after a set period of time, unless

01:26:52.260 they they're affirmatively and affirmatively renewed.

01:26:56.000 And we're starting to see that sort of thing take root across the country because of people

01:27:01.200 like Sandra Yates. 0.99

01:27:03.660 And it isn't going to happen from that one old man sitting in Washington.

01:27:07.780 He isn't going to make the difference.

01:27:09.260 All right.

01:27:09.720 Now, be careful with the old. 0.93

01:27:11.260 I think you're only three years older than I am.

01:27:13.020 So let's reel that in, Justice.

01:27:16.080 All right.

01:27:16.660 You're only 56.

01:27:17.420 You're a young man.

01:27:18.200 One of the many reasons Trump appointed you.

01:27:21.280 You go through the prescriptions on how we might consider getting out of this.

01:27:25.660 And one of them you just mentioned.

01:27:27.560 Another is civics.

01:27:29.260 Yeah.

01:27:29.640 I want to talk to you just about a couple of them.

01:27:31.820 You talk a bit about free speech and the importance of remembering how important that

01:27:36.440 is in the context of don't don't totally demonize the people who disagree with you.

01:27:40.600 Hear them out.

01:27:41.180 Let's I mean, my take on it is let's not have safe spaces where we don't express ideas

01:27:46.640 where in which it's not OK to say how one actually feels.

01:27:51.260 And free speech is one of my own favorite issues.

01:27:53.620 And it's something that's really important under the First Amendment and to most Americans.

01:27:59.420 You were the justice who authored 303 Creative the following finding.

01:28:06.540 And that was we covered that we had on the plaintiff in three.

01:28:09.020 Well, I guess she was the defendant.

01:28:10.240 I don't know her stance when she went out.

01:28:11.620 But in any event, we had this woman on. 0.98

01:28:13.840 She was a graphic designer. 0.98

01:28:15.400 She did not want to design a wedding website for gay marriages because it conflicted with

01:28:20.580 her Christian beliefs and they tried to force her. 0.99

01:28:23.420 The state tried to force her to do it, saying it's you're violating our anti-discrimination

01:28:26.980 laws.

01:28:27.680 And that case is very interesting because it puts somebody's free speech rights right

01:28:31.520 up against our anti-discrimination laws, both of which are laws on the books, you know,

01:28:37.240 or in the Constitution.

01:28:38.660 So you guys had a serious decision to make.

01:28:41.520 Eugene Volokh pointed out that the court has a longstanding hesitation to enforce anti-discrimination

01:28:46.360 statutes in the speech context.

01:28:47.780 So I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise.

01:28:48.960 But she wrote as follows.

01:28:50.820 The First Amendment protects an individual's right to speak his mind, regardless of whether

01:28:56.220 the government considers his speech sensible and well-intentioned or deeply misguided and

01:29:02.220 likely to cause anguish or incalculable grief.

01:29:06.600 That is just so important.

01:29:08.200 I just feel like we're drifting from our understanding and value of this concept.

01:29:15.540 The First Amendment protects an individual's right to speak his mind, regardless of whether

01:29:21.500 the government considers his speech sensible and well-intentioned or deeply misguided and

01:29:26.920 likely to cause anguish and grief.

01:29:28.800 Can you just put some meat on that bone?

01:29:31.740 Sure.

01:29:32.020 So, you know, our whole system of government, Madison, wanted us to disagree, right?

01:29:39.360 Because he thought through our disagreements, the best ideas would emerge, compromises would

01:29:45.240 be hashed out, and we would tap the wisdom of the whole people, the wisdom of the masses,

01:29:50.420 you might call it today, in political science jargon.

01:29:54.200 And what is that?

01:29:55.200 Well, Francis Galton, who is a cousin of Charles Darwin, went to a county fair in England, and

01:30:02.260 he put it this way.

01:30:03.720 There was a guess the weight of the ox contest, and he wrote down all of the guesses of the

01:30:09.440 experts.

01:30:11.020 And then he averaged the guesses of the regular people.

01:30:14.960 And guess which was closer?

01:30:16.340 It was the average of the regular people.

01:30:18.860 That's tapping the wisdom of the masses.

01:30:21.340 And that's what Madison wanted for us.

01:30:23.860 He knew that more than any one person, the American people will have greater wisdom.

01:30:31.540 To do that, you have to be able to debate.

01:30:34.440 You have to disagree in order to then decide and to move on as a country, just as we do

01:30:39.960 in this court, right?

01:30:41.500 We debate, we disagree, we decide, we move on.

01:30:45.220 And you attack the root of that whole process, the foundation of it, when you suppress ideas.

01:30:55.740 And that is a very, very concerning thing to me when I read that a lot of millennials today

01:31:01.720 don't even think it's important to live in a democracy, a third of them, according to some

01:31:05.780 reports.

01:31:06.360 When Americans today report that they often and increasingly think of people on the other

01:31:13.500 side of the political divide, not just as wrong, of course, fine, but as evil.

01:31:19.420 When you don't want to just say you're wrong, but you hate the other person, you might want

01:31:25.360 to hurt the other person.

01:31:26.540 That is not what our founders had in mind.

01:31:30.280 And we have to be able to debate and disagree in order to decide.

01:31:35.160 I think of my friend, Steve Breyer, with whom I often disagree.

01:31:39.080 And he says this, and just, I think, a healthy reminder for us all.

01:31:43.120 If you listen to somebody long enough, long enough, take the time, you're likely, aren't

01:31:49.560 you, to find something you agree with them about?

01:31:52.340 And maybe you start there.

01:31:54.020 Yeah, I think of that as the bomb shelter principle.

01:32:00.360 God forbid we found ourselves with our enemy, quote unquote, in a bomb shelter.

01:32:05.240 We'd be hugging them.

01:32:06.300 We'd be talking about our kids.

01:32:07.780 We'd be talking about our lives.

01:32:09.000 And we wouldn't be talking about politics or all the things that divide us.

01:32:13.140 I wonder, Justice, if you felt this personally.

01:32:15.560 I mean, being on the Supreme Court is, it's got a lot of responsibility and it's growing more

01:32:21.920 and more volatile.

01:32:23.000 I mean, we've been covering for a couple of years now, since Dobbs, the protests outside

01:32:28.580 of your house, some of the other justices' houses, and the rhetoric getting more pointed

01:32:34.500 and whether you have felt that personally or your family has.

01:32:40.060 Megan, I'm not going to sit here and complain.

01:32:42.200 There's what you say is real, but I count myself as one of the most fortunate and blessed people

01:32:51.600 I know.

01:32:52.820 To be able to serve the American people in this court with these colleagues is just an incredible

01:33:00.740 privilege.

01:33:01.360 And I surely agree, though, that we all do need to be able to talk with one another more

01:33:09.160 and listen and learn how to win and lose again.

01:33:13.360 Right.

01:33:13.800 And recognize that the person with whom we disagree probably loves this country every bit as much

01:33:21.680 as you do.

01:33:24.120 Weird question.

01:33:25.140 But speaking of vitriol, did you this is I'm not going to ask you to weigh in on anything

01:33:30.540 other than did you see the assassination attempt on President Trump?

01:33:35.560 He, of course, appointed you to the bench.

01:33:38.400 Were you can you give us any color on where you were when you saw that and how how that

01:33:43.160 affected you?

01:33:46.040 Megan, I, of course, I saw it like all Americans did. 0.52

01:33:49.180 And I am I am, you know, deeply concerned with the state of our public discourses we've

01:33:56.000 just talked about, and we all need to learn how to do better.

01:33:59.140 And I think one of the things that can kind of help us get there is maybe just learning a

01:34:04.160 little civics again.

01:34:05.860 Right.

01:34:06.420 We need to learn civility all over, but we also need to learn, you know, how our government

01:34:10.960 works and how we can make change through it.

01:34:15.500 Right.

01:34:16.060 I mean, I worry when they're not teaching civics anymore in our schools.

01:34:21.980 There are only six states that have a full year civics curriculum in in high school.

01:34:27.900 We have college students who can't name the three branches of government.

01:34:32.120 Sixty sixty percent of Americans apparently would fail the citizenship exam that my wife 1.00

01:34:38.540 took.

01:34:39.000 And that exam is not difficult.

01:34:41.240 Filling out all the paperwork is.

01:34:43.080 I can tell you that because I didn't do it right.

01:34:46.200 That's how complicated it is.

01:34:47.920 But I do think if people understood better the nature of our government, the gift we've

01:34:55.600 been given.

01:34:56.960 I mean, Daniel Webster called what happened in this country a miracle that it took six

01:35:01.960 thousand years of human history for people to be able to come together and say the people

01:35:08.860 through a democracy can rule themselves and do so wisely and peaceably together.

01:35:14.380 It took six thousand years to achieve that.

01:35:17.420 And he said, miracles do not cluster and don't expect what happens here to happen again or

01:35:23.440 easily.

01:35:24.640 And I just think sometimes we take for granted what we've been given and we don't understand

01:35:30.440 it well enough.

01:35:31.480 And I do think if you have some of that, that would help us move forward.

01:35:36.520 Fifty two percent of the American people can't name a single Supreme Court justice.

01:35:39.760 Many believe Judge Judy is is on the bench, which could be a lot of fun for you guys,

01:35:46.480 I'm just going to say.

01:35:48.020 And in the book, you quote Thomas Jefferson.

01:35:50.660 If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.

01:35:58.020 Let's talk about a couple of other things quickly.

01:36:00.780 Patriotism.

01:36:01.560 You would, I think, like to see a return to the celebration of our ideals and our country

01:36:05.620 warts and all pointing out that July 4th celebrations have come under attack.

01:36:10.200 Justice Gorsuch, every year we dress in full colonial gear at my family, with my family

01:36:16.280 and our friends.

01:36:17.000 We have a marching band.

01:36:18.220 We recite the declaration.

01:36:19.920 We have Thomas Paine there.

01:36:21.380 It's actually great.

01:36:22.180 But we need to remember our love of country.

01:36:25.600 You know, Megan, I'm so glad to hear that.

01:36:27.680 Um, there was an immigrant to our country, uh, who about a hundred years ago, she, she fled

01:36:34.540 Poland with her family in the Russian revolution.

01:36:37.060 And she started something called an, I am an American day.

01:36:41.320 And it used to be celebrated with huge fervor in this country.

01:36:46.240 And she started it on long Island, uh, with a little March to her farm in the kind of colonial

01:36:51.800 gear you're talking about.

01:36:53.100 And reading things like the declaration of independence, and it, it became so huge that

01:37:00.220 that speech you quoted from, from learned at hand was a speech you gave to over a million

01:37:04.600 people on.

01:37:05.840 I am an American day in central park in New York.

01:37:09.760 Um, that's that spirit is, I think what's key to holding us together.

01:37:16.560 And we are coming up on the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence two years

01:37:23.320 from now.

01:37:24.400 And I hope that moment will be something like it was, and I'm sure you may remember 1976

01:37:30.280 to maybe you were too young.

01:37:31.960 I do.

01:37:32.600 Now I was a little girl, but I remember it.

01:37:34.620 It was a real moment for this country after Watergate and after the Vietnam war, where we,

01:37:41.300 where we did come together and we recognized, yes, there's a lot more that unites us than

01:37:47.340 divides us.

01:37:48.600 And the declaration of independence, I think is one of the most remarkable documents in

01:37:54.620 all of human history, right?

01:37:56.320 There are three basic promises or thoughts in it that were radical at the time and nearly

01:38:02.300 got all the people who signed it killed.

01:38:04.540 One, we're all created equal to, we have inalienable rights that don't come from

01:38:10.900 government, but are given to us by our creator.

01:38:14.260 And third, that the government derives its just powers from the consent of the people.

01:38:21.720 And those were revolutionary ideas.

01:38:24.300 And the men who signed them, signed that document, knew that they were risking their lives and

01:38:30.620 committing an act.

01:38:31.160 That's a great section of the book too.

01:38:32.940 You go through the actual consequences to these guys who were a lot like Sandra Yates.

01:38:38.360 They knew what they were putting on the line and they did it anyway.

01:38:41.340 All right.

01:38:41.580 Quick, quick question to wrap us up.

01:38:43.640 We didn't get to Chevron, which is unfortunate, but it's part of this solution.

01:38:46.400 And Chevron, the Supreme Court said, we're not going to just defer to these agencies and

01:38:50.960 these regulators who are going to interpret all these regulations anymore.

01:38:54.160 That's the judge, the job of real judges like us, which a lot of us were cheering on.

01:38:59.040 So good job.

01:38:59.620 Um, but as you know, the president Biden has just called for reforms to the Supreme Court,

01:39:06.620 like term limits and an ethical code.

01:39:09.880 And I know you just passed your own, but even justice Kagan has said, it's kind of meaningless

01:39:13.760 without teeth, without somebody to enforce it.

01:39:15.940 There's no enforcement mechanism.

01:39:16.980 Um, I've heard you say, well, look, this is getting close to messing with our independence.

01:39:24.560 That's my paraphrase.

01:39:25.900 What you said to Shannon Bream of Fox news was he needs to be careful.

01:39:30.420 So what did you mean by be careful?

01:39:33.600 Listen, I'm not going to get into specifics over, uh, policy proposals, uh, by politicians

01:39:40.460 in an election year.

01:39:41.420 That's not my business.

01:39:43.740 The only thing I was trying to articulate there, and I'll repeat here is that we should

01:39:50.200 all recognize what gifts were given in our constitution.

01:39:53.600 We all do.

01:39:54.860 I, they don't, people don't need to be reminded of it, but sometimes we do forget, don't we?

01:39:59.140 And one of them is, uh, the independent judiciary.

01:40:03.480 And why do we care?

01:40:05.300 Why does that exist?

01:40:06.660 It goes back to some of the things we were talking about earlier.

01:40:09.060 If you're popular, you don't need a judge or a jury to protect you.

01:40:15.100 You're going to be in the majority, but what happens when somebody sues you?

01:40:19.660 What happens when the government has you in its crosshairs and you're the one in the

01:40:24.800 dock?

01:40:25.540 What happens when you're John and Sandra Yates or Marty Hahn or the Hemingway Museum or any

01:40:32.120 of the other countless examples in the book?

01:40:34.680 I think then you want what James Madison wanted for you and our founders wanted for you.

01:40:40.740 And the men who signed that declaration wanted for you.

01:40:43.400 You want somebody who's a fiercely independent judge who isn't beholden to politicians, decide

01:40:49.520 your case fairly under law.

01:40:51.300 And you want a jury of your peers to hear that case.

01:40:54.340 Yeah.

01:40:54.720 And that's just part of our constitutional heritage that we'd all, it's important to

01:40:59.620 all of us.

01:41:01.020 We don't want it put back in the hands of the executive who controls the judiciary.

01:41:06.120 We try to get away from that level of power.

01:41:09.200 Justice Neil Gorsuch, thank you so much for being here.

01:41:12.160 Uh, really enjoyed the book and I think our audience will love it.

01:41:14.840 Again, it's called Overruled, two words, the human toll of too much law.

01:41:20.200 God bless you.

01:41:20.860 We're praying for you too.

01:41:22.520 Thank you, Megan.

01:41:23.100 Really appreciate your time.

01:41:24.720 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show.

01:41:29.040 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - August 06, 2024

BREAKING： Kamala Picks Radical Walz as VP, and Value of Free Speech, with Justice Neil Gorsuch, Rich Lowry, and Batya Ungar-Sargon ｜ Ep. 856

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