00:05:33.260Jersey asks, can the federal government, after a person has been tried and judged by his and her peers, retry a case?
00:05:40.400By what authority or law do they even have that authority and power to intervene in a state's judicial system?
00:05:46.020What in the Constitution or Bill of Rights gives or retrains the federal government from the power to intervene in a concluded and tried in a court case?
00:05:55.660So the Constitution protects you from what's called double jeopardy, which is you cannot be tried twice for the same crime.
00:06:03.860So if you're charged with murder and there is a murder trial and you are acquitted, they can't come back and say, oh, we don't like that result, so let's go bring another murder charge against you.
00:06:17.400There is, however, an exception to double jeopardy, which is you can be tried for a different crime.
00:06:24.380And so there's a legal analysis of whether – so, for example, let's say you – to use an easy example, you're tried and acquitted of murder, but you also were speeding on the way to the murder.
00:06:36.940You can certainly be tried and convicted or acquitted of the speeding because those are separate and distinct crimes.
00:06:42.260When it comes to a federal crime, if it is a separate and distinct crime, you can be charged with it, but there's a legal analysis in terms of whether you're simply retrying for the acquitted conduct and the acquitted crime.
00:06:58.800So no on a murder charge, for example, but yes, if they are different and distinct crimes.
00:07:06.020All right, Michael, let me pivot over to you because this is a question that came in specifically requesting clarification from Knowles.
00:07:13.100JJ 4884 says, I know you often criticize libertarians for being too licentious and crazy when it comes to certain moral issues.
00:07:21.380Are there certain people of certain occupations or fields of interest that cannot be traditionally conservative, i.e. tech issues?
00:07:29.260Are there ways you could steel man libertarianism and any prominent libertarians you could stand alongside?
00:07:35.880Well, you know, I'm glad to hear you brought up big tech because at first when you said that you wanted to know if certain professions just naturally can't lend themselves to virtue and naturally lend themselves to licentiousness,
00:07:48.980I assumed you were talking about, say, prostitution, but working for big tech is far, far more disreputable than being a prostitute or a drug dealer or something like that.
00:07:58.980So I think that's a pretty good example to bring up big tech here.
00:08:02.660Yeah, there are certain fields that naturally are just not going to be all that conservative.
00:08:10.720And I do think it has been a mistake of the conservative movement to try to be all things to all people and to say that you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt me or scare the horses in the street.
00:08:22.200I mean this is why we still have drug laws in this country.
00:08:24.620We're saying there are some things that you can do with your body that we don't think that you should be allowed to do or actually for that matter laws against prostitution.
00:08:32.980And so now as we have discussed on this show a number of times, one of the debates on the right is over the influence that libertarianism should have versus traditionalism versus all – conservatives love all their isms.
00:08:45.940A friend of mine once told me that the obscure political monikers are the right-wing version of gender pronouns.
00:08:52.120So everyone has got one and some people have multiple.
00:08:55.460And after the Second World War, there was what's called fusionism.
00:08:59.960This was the post-war conservative movement put together by guys like Bill Buckley and Frank Meyer.
00:09:05.580You might call it the Reagan coalition of libertarians and traditional conservatives and war hawk democrats.
00:09:11.340They all had a common enemy in the Soviet Union.
00:09:14.580They might have hated communism for different reasons, but they partnered together and won the Cold War.
00:09:19.440And since that time, probably the libertarian side or the neoconservative side has led that coalition.
00:09:25.340Traditional conservatives and some of the other groups have fallen out of favor, lost some of their power.
00:09:32.440In 2016 then, you saw the more traditional conservative types or the more populist types try to take ground.
00:10:06.700I just think that in some cases the libertarians have had a little too much leeway.
00:10:14.620And frankly, I even use this term libertarianism reluctantly because I don't think that legalizing all drugs and saying that we have to totally redefine marriage and legalizing all manner of vice and licentiousness is exactly in the tradition of John Locke or Thomas Jefferson or even the 20th century.
00:10:37.020Libertarians is certainly not the classical liberals.
00:10:39.220So I just think we need to be a little more substantive about our views, not merely the right to freedom of religion or the right to freedom of speech, but actually have something to say and actually something more clearly that we can believe.
00:10:51.100And I think part of that is just intrinsic to the conservative movement in America.
00:10:56.680But whatever we've been doing for the past 20 years or so, it doesn't seem to have worked that well.
00:11:02.660We seem to have lost on every major cultural issue.
00:11:05.220And so I think we need the courage to say, no, this is good, this is bad, this is true, this is false, and stand by those convictions even if they're unpopular.
00:11:14.760Well, and Michael, let me chime in on that real briefly, which is I think I'm a little bit more libertarian than you are, but I'll go even further right now.
00:11:22.780Senator, I think Attila the Hun is a little more libertarian than I am.
00:11:41.020He may be an old school liberal, but Bill Maher is someone who I think might well admit he's a libertine and he defends licensiousness with gusto and pride.
00:11:51.880And it's an amazing statement of where we are today that Bill Maher as an unabashed libertine is finding himself relatively conservative because – and maybe the new impetus for the new fusionism will be the woke anti-Americanism of the hard left.
00:12:12.720Because when Bill Maher speaks out against cancel culture, when he speaks out against Democrats who have lost common sense, when he speaks out against the idiocy of canceling people and correcting your pronouns and – or when he speaks out against radical jihad.
00:12:31.380And today's angry left condemns him, even though Bill Maher and I disagree on a lot of issues, I'm grateful that he has the courage to speak out against the petty tyrants that would silence all of us.
00:12:48.740The next question is from Elizabeth P., and I promise I did not pick this question solely based on the fact that we share a name.
00:12:55.380I picked it because it's a good question as well, but there might have been a little element of – it's not nepotism, but, you know, some sort of similarity of name.
00:13:02.420Elizabeth P. says, please ask the senator to block all efforts by the DOJ to retrial Kyle – or to retry Kyle and attach parents – attack parents speaking out at school boards.
00:13:31.740I think this Justice Department has been wildly political.
00:13:35.860I think it's in the first year been in many ways more political than the Obama Justice Department, which is hard to believe because the Obama Justice Department was deeply politicized.
00:13:46.720You know, the second half of that question focused on going after parents, and it's one of the worst examples of the politicized Biden Justice Department where the National Association of School Boards wrote a letter to the Biden White House saying,
00:14:00.860will you please go after parents, treat them as domestic terrorists, use the Patriot Act, and silence them because, gosh, we really don't like parents getting mad at us for teaching critical race theory.
00:14:11.580We don't like parents getting mad at us for covering up sexual assaults of girls in bathrooms at school.
00:14:19.100And so if – would the Department of Justice go after these terrorists?
00:14:24.140And just five days later, the attorney general directed the DOJ and the FBI to target parents and to use tools to go after them.
00:14:33.320I think it was an absolute grotesque abuse of power.
00:16:47.240And we've talked on the pod about how I think the Biden White House knows that this vaccine mandate is illegal and it's likely to lose in court.
00:16:56.560But I think they cynically are counting on most people obeying anyway while the litigation proceeds.
00:17:02.760And I think that order was an example of – or not the order, the comment from the press secretary was an example of that lawlessness.
00:17:09.580I will say OSHA did formally suspend the order pending the resolution of that lawsuit.
00:17:16.800So you did see ultimately the administration forced to comply even while they're urging people to pretend like the order still has force of law.
00:17:26.720A second example of this concerns our open borders and the decision that Joe Biden made that caused the most havoc on our southern border was the decision to end the Remain in Mexico agreement.
00:17:41.800Remain in Mexico was an agreement Trump negotiated with Mexico where people who came illegally into Mexico were applying for U.S. asylum.
00:17:52.220They'd stay in Mexico while the asylum case was proceeding.
00:17:56.120Remain in Mexico was unbelievably effective.
00:17:58.460Last year we had the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years.
00:18:02.700Biden came in on day one, ended Remain in Mexico, and the illegal immigration skyrocketed to now the highest rate in 61 years.
00:18:10.680Biden administration was sued for pulling out of Remain in Mexico by Texas and Missouri, and Biden had been lost.
00:18:22.380A district court in Texas ruled that the Biden administration had violated the law by pulling out of the Remain in Mexico agreement without going through the notice and process and the procedural steps required to do that.
00:18:35.100So they're under an order to reenter to reenter the Remain in Mexico agreement.
00:18:40.960They are dragging their feet, and they're basically defying that order.
00:18:44.460And I've talked to whistleblowers at Customs and Border Patrol who said that even though this court order has been in place for many, many weeks now, they're just slow rolling.
00:18:58.060So they're telling the judge, oh, we're going to comply, but in particular with this kind of order, it's easy for a defiant administration to resist it because it requires the cooperation of a sovereign nation.
00:19:11.800So all they have to do is surreptitiously tell Mexico, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, please tell us you don't want to do this.
00:19:20.160And then Mexico says, sorry, we don't want to do this.
00:19:22.300And they say, gosh, judge, nothing we can do.
00:19:39.080But, you know, you just asked a minute ago what remedies are there.
00:19:43.080I'll tell you the judge has a remedy, which is you can hold – the judge can hold specific members of the administration in contempt for violating the order and can literally incarcerate them.
00:19:53.800And, you know, I asked Secretary Mayorkas, what would you say to the judge if the judge said, Mr. Secretary, why should I not put you in jail right now for defying my order and slow walking my order?
00:20:07.260Mayorkas' answer is, well, we're trying to obey.
00:20:10.580What he didn't admit is they're doing so unbelievably slowly and allowing the chaos to unfold.
00:20:17.820Ultimately, they risk – I think there's a real possibility you see a judge enter a contempt hearing because they have, as a real and practical matter, a contempt for anything holding them to account.
00:20:29.380And what makes it even more confusing, especially for a layman like me, is we keep talking about this as a fight between the executive and the judiciary.
00:20:39.280And we're taught in school that there is the executive and the judiciary and the legislature.
00:20:43.540But there are a couple of other groups that pop up as well.
00:20:46.900We sometimes talk about the media as a fourth branch of government.
00:20:49.920But what about the administrative state?
00:20:51.560You know, in this case, the judiciary is saying don't enforce the order.
00:20:55.480Joe Biden is tasking an administrative agency, OSHA, to enforce his order.
00:21:00.580And so Biden says employers keep following the order.
00:21:03.680OSHA, the administrative agency, says, OK, we're going to suspend the order until the court finally decides on this.
00:21:08.740And so you seem to have a little bit of dissent even within the executive branch, you know, the president and his administrative agencies, all of which says to me, without a law school education, never having argued before the Supreme Court, that our government might not work quite the way we were told it does in Schoolhouse Rock.
00:21:24.820Michael, I was with you right until the moment that you cast dispersions on Schoolhouse Rock.
00:22:59.640Well, there are lots of things we can do to enhance the resiliency of the power grid.
00:23:05.820Some of it is having a diversity of sources of energy so that you don't have a particular source that goes down and that the system is dependent on that.
00:23:15.100You have coal-fired plants, which are widespread and pretty consistently the most reliable.
00:23:24.440You've got natural gas, electricity generation, natural gas is also very reliable, has much, much lower pollution, much, much lower CO2 emissions, which is a big part of the reason why last year the United States led the world in reduction of CO2 emissions because we shifted a whole bunch of electricity production from coal to natural gas.
00:23:47.120You've got wind and solar, both of which are important parts of the grid, the state of Texas.
00:23:54.120A lot of people don't know Texas is the number one producer of wind energy in the country.
00:24:00.560One of the problems with wind and solar is they're not always reliable.
00:24:04.180There are days when the sun doesn't shine, where it's cloudy or it's rainy and solar doesn't produce the same power.
00:24:09.120There are days when the wind doesn't blow.
00:24:11.440And so wind and solar can supplement your electrical output, but they're not good on days.
00:24:18.300They're not consistently reliable and they tend to be highly variable in terms of their output.
00:24:23.240And in places like Texas where we don't often have cold, we saw in the winter storm last year, a lot of the wind turbines froze because they weren't weatherized.
00:24:34.640You can weatherize wind turbines and in colder environments they do that.
00:24:38.580In Texas they hadn't and that clearly proved to be a mistake that hopefully is being corrected.
00:24:44.220I know the state legislature passed legislation to weatherize the grid.
00:24:52.540I think nuclear has enormous potential in terms of steady, reliable production of electricity with virtually no pollution or carbon emissions.
00:25:04.440We actually had in the freeze in Texas, one of our major nuclear plants went down and it went down.
00:25:12.240I actually went and visited the plant a few weeks ago and it went down because one small pipe and it was a little pipeline that transmitted water was not weatherized.
00:25:25.040And we're talking, you know, pennies to weatherize this pipe.
00:25:29.260And that one pipe froze and it was water that was used for a sensor, but because that pipe froze, it triggered the alarms and it shut down an entire reactor for days and then took a bunch of power offline because one pipe years ago had not been weatherized.
00:25:48.020And it didn't jeopardize the safety of the plant, but because that water pipe froze, the warnings went off and they shut the plant down altogether.
00:25:59.260They've obviously since weatherized that pipe, but it was a lesson that was not fun learning in the process.
00:26:07.640You know, I'll say something else that is really potent for resiliency of the grid.
00:26:15.200And this is going to surprise at least some of you, but it's Bitcoin.
00:26:18.200And we're going to do a subsequent podcast diving into cryptocurrency and Bitcoin because that's a topic I've been getting very, very involved in.
00:27:16.600It's something – a couple of months ago I spoke at the Blockchain National Conference that was in Austin, Texas.
00:27:24.180And I talked about a win-win opportunity that there is that in West Texas, in the Permian Basin, we've got lots and lots of wells that are right now flaring natural gas.
00:27:35.940And what happens is you drill an oil well, starts producing oil.
00:27:39.560Often with the oil, there's natural gas.
00:27:41.920And there's not enough of the natural gas for it to be economical for you to build a pipeline to transmit the natural gas and use it.
00:27:49.460So instead, what they do is they flare it.
00:27:52.200And flare it literally means they light it on fire.
00:27:54.140So you go out to West Texas at night and you see these flames like torches that are just burning the natural gas that is being produced alongside the oil that they're piping out and selling.
00:28:05.760Well, what Bitcoin provides the opportunity to do is you can go and set up a Bitcoin rig.
00:28:12.220Think like an 18-wheeler, like the back of an 18-wheeler.
00:28:16.840You can set it up right there at that oil well.
00:28:21.760You can capture the natural gas, put it in a generator right there, and so produce electricity using that natural gas.
00:28:28.640That electricity can turn, can power a Bitcoin rig that is mining Bitcoin.
00:28:34.780So you're capturing, it benefits the environment because flaring natural gas is not great for the environment.
00:28:40.940It produces a lot of pollution, a lot of CO2.
00:28:43.320If you capture it and put it in a generator, it's much better for the environment.
00:28:49.680It makes, instead of economic waste, it makes it an economic profit.
00:28:53.960And if you have that rig connected to the grid, what it provides is a real opportunity for resiliency because those rigs can be switched on or off in one one-hundredth of a second.
00:29:09.260So if you have, let's say you have a weather disaster, whether it's a hurricane or a tornado or another freeze, and suddenly the grid, there's a shortage of electricity and the price for electricity shoots up.
00:29:20.220Well, if suddenly the price on the grid for electricity is higher than the value that would be generated mining Bitcoin, in a hundredth of a second, they can stop the mining of the Bitcoin and put that electricity instead onto the grid.
00:29:34.860So one way to think about Bitcoin and crypto mining is it's like a battery.
00:29:39.540It's a way of producing excess electricity that can be diverted back into the grid to meet critical needs in a time of emergency so it can enhance resiliency of the grid.
00:29:51.780You know, my answer was just going to be hamsters on wheels.
00:29:55.120So that's much more interesting, Senator.
00:29:57.380That's, gosh, and especially now, I just recently went out and bought a crypto coin.
00:30:04.960I had not really invested in crypto at all.
00:30:07.500I don't know anything about crypto or really anything about investing.
00:30:10.220So I wanted to do it, and I found a coin that was kind of mean about Joe Biden, and I bought about a billion of them.
00:30:18.380I don't want you to treat me any differently now.
00:30:19.880But I'm very excited for this future episode where I will get to learn about the thing that I just invested in, because it sounds like there's a whole lot of possibility there.
00:30:29.980So I'm very excited about it, but we'll have to hold it until then.
00:30:35.560Anybody who wants to ask a question for next week's episode, go on over to verdictwithtedcruise.com slash plus.
00:30:41.440If you are a subscriber on Verdict Plus, you too can ask a question to Michael Moles, Senator Cruz, or to me.
00:30:47.680That is verdictwithtedcruise.com slash plus.
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