Former Missouri Attorney General and current U.S. Senator Mike Gravel joins Betsy and Amanda to discuss his new book, How to Beat the Left in Court: The Last Line of Defense: How to Hold the Line and Win in Court.
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00:00:39.420So you were Attorney General of the state of Missouri for four years, and you've been in the Senate for three?
00:00:50.340Well, I think the Senate is sort of the apex of how you can affect a number of things.
00:00:56.000But the Senate, in many ways, is kind of broken the way it's currently constituted.
00:00:59.680And it's proclaimed to be the world's most deliberative body, but a lot of it's kabuki theater, honestly.
00:01:06.520But I think in the time in which I served as Attorney General when you had a Democrat president, you could affect a lot of things by challenging the extremism we saw from the Biden administration in court and win.
00:01:19.580And you didn't need to ask anybody's permission for that.
00:01:22.440You didn't need 50 other people to vote for it.
00:01:25.600So I think for me at that time, it was a critical moment in our country's history.
00:01:32.180And I just happened to be in that position at that time.
00:01:35.680And you've got to remember, too, I think, if you take a step back, President Trump was out of office.
00:01:40.880And so this responsibility sort of fell to a relatively unknown group of people to kind of hold the line, which is why, you know, the last line of defense and how to beat the left in court is the title of the book.
00:01:55.040Because I felt like we were really holding the line for the country until reinforcements could come.
00:02:00.580And thankfully, they came with President Trump.
00:02:59.380Will you flush that out a little bit since you've had both jobs?
00:03:01.500Yeah, no, I think it is a, and one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book was to, number one, lay out the landscape.
00:03:11.120Because in that job, you saw, I saw, the threats that were coming from all directions, from the highest levels of government and the censorship enterprise that was created by Biden and big tech companies, to the local superintendent that somehow got bought into this training that you divide every classroom by race through critical race theory.
00:03:31.900So you got to see that entirety of the landscape.
00:03:46.000So to answer your question, I think conservatives for a long time have viewed the courts as sort of where the left wins, where they cement their policies because judges sort of make it up as they go along.
00:04:00.520I do think there's an opportunity now, especially after Trump's first term, when he appointed 200 plus federal judges, and now in the second term, where you're going to have more members of the judiciary that view the law as it is not how they want it to be.
00:04:13.840But that also requires people to step up and push back.
00:04:18.080And, you know, you just think of the wins that we were able to have, like preventing 100 million people being forced to be vaccinated because OSHA, which was an agency created to make sure forklifts beep when they back up, somehow created this rule that 100 million people had to be vaccinated to keep their jobs.
00:04:37.200You just think of the guy that's, like, swinging the hammer and just wants to feed his family.
00:05:07.320The Supreme Court said, yeah, Joe Biden and the Secretary of Education didn't have any authority to wipe away a half a trillion dollars worth of debt.
00:05:15.480We had some wins on the border wall to stave that off as long as we could, even though ultimately this mass migration plan that Joe Biden had came through.
00:05:23.240But I think probably the biggest example was, you know, we intuitively knew that something was happening inside the Biden administration to suppress speech.
00:05:35.140And we filed that lawsuit in May of 2022.
00:05:39.900And we sought discovery first before we sought a preliminary injunction that was an important strategic decision.
00:05:52.800This vast censorship enterprise that had been created was exposed.
00:05:56.300And this was before Elon Musk buys Twitter.
00:05:58.720It's before you had the congressional hearings.
00:06:00.740And I think, you know, being able to draw attention to that and flesh out the truth through our court system was a really important thing to do.
00:06:10.860So, yes, I think this is a front that we have to fight in.
00:06:17.500This is sort of like, hey, we took on when school districts were forcing five-year-olds to wear a mask all day long.
00:06:23.540We sued 65 school districts in the state of Missouri, and we won.
00:06:27.840When the biggest cities in Missouri were forcing people to wear masks all day long and close businesses, we sued, and we won.
00:06:35.360When we took on ESG, we launched an investigation against some of the biggest banks in the world who controlled nearly half of the assets in this country.
00:06:43.500We opened up an investigation because we were saying that their actions violated antitrust laws.
00:07:07.160And if you really believe this stuff and you're fighting for the people, the kid who's wearing, have to wear the mask or the deaf student who couldn't learn,
00:07:13.600we would get, you know, reports of these things that were happening in school districts that you can fight for those people.
00:07:17.940And as attorney general, I was able to go do that, and we were able to score some big wins.
00:07:22.540And also, it lays out, I think, a playbook for the future because this isn't the last of it.
00:07:28.340You already see the, you know, the left-wing lawfare machine coming out to try to stop President Trump's agenda,
00:07:36.040which is inherently disruptive of the status quo, which is a good thing.
00:07:39.540So they want the status quo to come back.
00:07:42.160We want things to change, and you're going to need people who are aggressive to defend those things, too.
00:09:18.640And then this monstrosity, by the way, which has existed and grown in Republican and Democrat administrations over the years.
00:09:24.580One of the things I think that's most exciting about what President Trump is doing is he put together this group of disruptors to disrupt that.
00:09:34.840And so, but look at the hue and cry that comes out in D.C. when you're trying to, like, pare down the size of government.
00:09:41.280And why, again, the courts are going to be really important here because President Trump and whoever the executive is certainly has Article II core powers to control programming and personnel, right?
00:09:53.920And the Democrats don't want him to go do that.
00:09:56.480Now, the good news is he's, by and large, won these cases.
00:09:59.300There might be a district court case here or there, but that ultimately, as it makes its way to the appellate courts, the Supreme Court, President Trump is winning on this front.
00:10:06.980So, again, I think it's a testament to the idea we have to be willing to fight, whether it's in the legislative branch, in the executive branch, or in the Article III branch for the things that we hold dear in this country because they're constantly under assault by the left.
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00:14:49.220But the net effect is to convince people in a way that was not true when I was a kid that the courts are political.
00:14:55.700Even the highest court is fundamentally a political body, which maybe has always been true.
00:15:01.800But it does seem a little scary when everyone thinks that because, I mean, it used to be if there's a Supreme Court decision, you have to abide by it, whether you like it or not.
00:15:10.320But if people think it's all just partisan, then maybe they stop obeying.
00:15:15.640Yeah, but I think that's, again, why, and I referenced this in the book.
00:15:19.960When I was sort of coming of age, when I went to law school, people were still talking about this thing called the living constitution, which is a fiction, right?
00:15:28.260And Scalia was the first one who wrote with this sort of dramatic prose about originalism.
00:15:34.300And I think that's our best hope moving forward is the constitution means exactly what it says, nothing more, nothing less, right?
00:15:41.460It shouldn't be the Supreme Court, shouldn't be the super legislator, which is what the left has traditionally wanted.
00:15:47.740You take Roe versus Wade, for example, right?
00:15:49.620They sort of invented this right out of whole cloth and took that decision away from the people as this is supposed to be decided in the states by legislatures.
00:15:59.140So my hope is that as you have a more conservative court, it's not about our ideology winning because somebody's wearing a red jersey or a blue jersey.
00:16:08.520It's that Congress passes laws and those laws are interpreted as they are written, not making stuff up as you go along.
00:16:15.560And I think that's what we need to get to is return to that.
00:16:18.100That's the only way you're going to have credibility.
00:16:19.300But the Democrats, you know, when Chuck Schumer is saying you're going to reap a whirlwind and you have these hearings about, you know, trying to on the Supreme Court.
00:16:28.340We know especially they target Clarence Thomas.
00:16:30.420They really despise him for a variety of reasons.
00:16:34.000But he is, you know, now I think like the sixth longest serving Supreme Court justice of all time.
00:16:39.600But but they want to undermine the courts because ultimately they want to pack the court.
00:16:42.840And that's if they ever really I mean, if you play this out, Tucker, if they ever had.
00:16:47.500And what we have right now, which is a Republican or a Democrat House, Democrat, Senate, Democrat president, they would pack the Supreme Court.
00:16:55.900They would make D.C. a state, maybe Puerto Rico.
00:17:48.180You just think of what and we can get into it on the sort of the Russia hoax stuff.
00:17:53.220But what that did, it gave all the folks on the left a sort of a reason or a cause to undermine not just the president of the United States, but to spy on a on a candidate like they did.
00:18:06.000And I think justice should be coming for the people that are involved.
00:18:10.760Brendan, Clapper, Comey, there should be indictments that come because what they did to this country, not just for those four years, but it extended when Trump was, of course, out of office and they tried to put him in jail for the rest of his life.
00:18:22.660He had bankrupt bankrupt his entire family.
00:18:24.320The Hunter Biden laptop part of the FBI was very well aware.
00:18:29.660I mean, we took the deposition in Missouri versus Biden of Elvis Chan, who admitted that they had months and months of monthly meetings pre bunking that story, telling them there was a Russian hack and leak operation.
00:18:39.440Yoel Roth, who was the integrity person at Twitter, said they specifically mentioned the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:18:49.180The FBI had the laptop in November of 2019.
00:18:51.980They had it all along, but they were claiming it was a Russian hack and leak operation.
00:18:56.240Well, you have a system that's captured by people who were obsessed with taking President Trump down and then they never wanted to get back in office and they can't believe it.
00:19:05.700I think what you're seeing right now, this sort of weird phase, the Democrats are in, they can't believe he actually pulled it off.
00:19:12.640They literally thought he had him buried, right?
00:19:14.840Yeah, we are in this weird phase where the Democrat, the Democratic Party really doesn't seem like a factor in the national conversation in American politics.
00:19:24.040All the real fights are between, you know, our intra-Republican fights, Republican versus Republican.
00:19:29.080But that's got to be just a period, right, that we're in.
00:19:32.740Yeah, that's why I think it would seem, to your point, it almost, I think the tendency would believe that all of this, and now that we're on the other side of the fever dream, that this was all inevitable, right?
00:19:48.060That what we're seeing, all the things that are taking place, the dismantling of some of these things, you know, going after USAID, having a Justice Department that's not going after Catholics because they're traditional Catholics or parents because they show up to school board meetings.
00:20:01.120I think it's an important reminder, which is, you know, a big part of the book, too, is just how close we were to losing it all.
00:20:15.560I think power reveals more than anything else.
00:20:18.440You see the true nature of people when they have power, how they handle it.
00:20:22.100And I think particularly during COVID, people who never should have had that kind of power had it, and they wield it in ways that people could have never imagined in this country.
00:20:47.840And so in many ways, it's sort of a playbook of how you push back, what strategies you employ to go do that.
00:20:55.880And you have to be aggressive and you have to, I think that my biggest takeaway from my time as attorney general is you have to be willing to be in that arena, take the criticism and, you know, fight for the things that you believe in.
00:21:07.140And I think that is, you know, that I ask judges, now I'm on the Judiciary Committee, when judges come forward, I ask less about, I mean, I want to know what their judicial philosophy is.
00:21:17.200But to me, I think the next phase, the next line of questioning that's most important moving forward is do you have the courage when people are outside your home, when you're being threatened, when people at the cocktail parties in Washington may not want you to do something, will you rule the appropriate way?
00:21:42.860And I don't think it's from a lack of decency.
00:21:44.760I don't think Amy Coney Barrett is an indecent person or like some closet lefty or sandwich on Roberts.
00:21:50.940They're just afraid like everybody and they want, you know, they don't want to be snarled at when they go to the Chevy Chase Club for cocktails or whatever.
00:22:06.120Yeah, I think obviously some, maybe some positions that they took.
00:22:09.860I mean, I'll just, you know, some of the judges that in some of these cases that are cited in the book, you know, basically in the Missouri versus Biden case, when we got favorable rulings, not only the district court, the appellate court, I mean, really went on a limb and said this is the most egregious violation of the first amendment we've seen in American history.
00:22:31.800When you look at the sprawling expanse of the agencies that were captured by this.
00:22:37.240Okay, so would you mind telling that story just from beginning to end?
00:22:40.360Because I think even people who are interested in the topic may not fully appreciate what happened.
00:22:45.140So the Biden administration comes in and on the third day, the third day in office, start to begin to hammer this home.
00:22:53.240Now, there had been semblances of this that predate the Biden administration in that the FBI, for example, when we took the deposition of Elvis Chan, he was the FBI guy in Northern California that's working with the big tech companies.
00:23:05.900Okay, even in the Trump administration, they were, the FBI was working with Democrat staffers to connect with big tech companies to look for things to censor under the guise of Russian disinformation, right?
00:23:20.060Again, it's, it's kind of a legacy of what that hoax really meant for the country.
00:23:24.520That foundation was laid down for a lot of folks in the administrative state or the deep state, whatever you want to call it, as a way to undermine an agenda under the guise of this is misinformation or disinformation.
00:23:35.640So when Biden comes into office, all these agencies that are galvanized, you're mentioned actually very ironically, Tucker Carlson was mentioned, Alex Berenson was mentioned, RFK Jr. were mentioned in these emails about people promoting vaccine hesitancy or these sort of things that they wanted to stamp out.
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00:27:20.480Yeah, and by the way, in a weird quirk of history, James Baker, who was the general counsel for the FBI, goes, and after he does his stint at Brookings, is the general counsel for Twitter.
00:28:25.800Those are basically, in the 1990s, when the internet becomes a thing in the Telecommunications Act, they say that these are platforms that can't be sued, unlike publishers who can be sued.
00:28:37.440Publishers are supposed to be more arbiters of what you can say.
00:28:40.540It's why CNN gets sued by President Trump for false things.
00:28:45.460But like Twitter, Facebook, those are considered platforms.
00:29:25.440How does the president or his staff exert pressure on, say, Facebook or Google or Twitter?
00:29:31.960So they had direct lines of communication.
00:29:33.640They had a secret portal where executives from these social media companies could communicate directly with high-ranking White House officials.
00:29:40.100Rob Faraday, who was the deputy communications guy in the Biden White House, was in constant communication berating these people, telling them that's not good enough.
00:29:51.000Let me assure you, this is coming from the highest levels of the administration.
00:29:54.840Those sorts of things were constantly streaming at the social media companies.
00:30:00.320And then you also had, as we took the deposition in that case, of people from the CDC, they literally, the CDC, were just giving them lines that they should censor.
00:30:10.620So the government is saying, censor these exact phrases, right?
00:30:16.700That is exactly what they're giving this off to the social media companies.
00:30:20.420If this is uttered, we want you to silence these people.
00:31:06.200CISA, which is an agency I know you're familiar with, but maybe in your audience, probably of all audiences would know,
00:31:11.680is the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Administration, Security Administration.
00:31:20.380Their job, purportedly, was to make sure that, you know, cyber, you know, our infrastructure is, you know, resilient against cyber attacks.
00:31:29.000They were very much involved in something called the Election Integrity Project,
00:31:33.100where they outsourced their censorship to Stanford and the University of Washington
00:31:36.940to flag certain posts that would then be given to social media companies to censor.