00:02:54.600And as such, what we have to do is recalibrate how we respond to that.
00:03:00.040And it now strikes me as essential to at least begin to play to the edge of the field, right, to go as far as the law permits in combating the authoritarian excesses of Trump.
00:03:16.860And the way I wrote about in The Atlantic is is the pardon power.
00:03:20.740A pardon for Hunter Biden, a pardon for Trump's critics would be completely normative breaking.
00:03:30.540And it would be out of character, out of historical tradition.
00:03:36.340But at this point, I was listening to your earlier broadcast.
00:03:54.560But, you know, one of the realities of being investigated is that investigation has a cost, even if you're not prosecuted in the end.
00:04:04.340You have to hire a lawyer, the mental cost, the time, the resources.
00:04:07.880And so it strikes me as perfectly reasonable to ask, what can President Biden do within the bounds of law, even if it would not be normatively traditional to save his allies from that?
00:04:22.300And the answer is obviously pardon them.
00:04:30.360Senator, he's saying it's personally perfectly reasonable for Biden to pardon any Trump critic and says, well, it's a cost issue because you'll have to get a lawyer.
00:04:43.580Like everybody around Trump knows that they tried to financially break so many people around Donald Trump to work to the White House, tried to financially ruin them.
00:04:53.560I have friends, I'm not going to say their names, who worked at the White House, who were strapped with legal bills over a half a million dollars, just having to answer questions in and around what happened on January the 6th, even though they weren't involved in it.
00:05:32.460And he was one of the like he would run around Federalist Society events.
00:05:36.700And he was part of the sort of Republican lawyer cadre during the George W. Bush campaign.
00:05:46.600He is also someone who Donald Trump has broken his brain.
00:05:53.240And Trump derangement syndrome is a very real phenomenon.
00:05:56.380And he is he is now advocating that Biden pardon everybody, pardon every critic of Trump, pardon every member of the cabinet, pardon his entire family, pardon anyone who may have committed any crime because he doesn't want anybody to be held account for breaking the law.
00:06:17.980Now, I'm going to tell you what the particular irony is.
00:06:22.380Paul Rosenweig is also one of the leaders of a group called the 65 Project.
00:06:33.880And it's also David Brock, who was Hillary Clinton's attack dog, who went around filing complaints trying to get Republican lawyers disbarred for supporting Donald Trump.
00:06:44.400And Paul Rosenweig, his group, filed a complaint with the Texas bar asking that I be disbarred.
00:06:51.360Understand this guy way before the Texas bar.
00:06:53.800I remember that story, but this is the guy that was actually doing it.
00:07:18.140He chose to take on the role of lawyer and agreed to represent Mr. Trump and Pennsylvania Republicans in litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court.
00:07:27.880In doing so, Mr. Cruz moved beyond his position as United States senator and sought to use more than his Twitter account and media appearances to support Mr. Trump's anti-democratic mission.
00:07:40.360So understand, their complaint is that when I was asked, when the appeal in 2020 challenging Pennsylvania's violating the Pennsylvania Constitution and changing the law in Pennsylvania, when that was appealed to the Supreme Court, I was asked, if the court takes it, would you be willing to argue the case?
00:08:03.800And I said, yes, if the court takes it, if four justices decide they want to hear this case, and I believe they should have heard the Pennsylvania case, that I'll do the oral argument.
00:08:15.360Their argument, Paul Rosenweig's argument, is because I said yes, I would represent a client before the Supreme Court.
00:08:46.040But this is someone who was asking that I be barred from practicing law.
00:08:51.800And by the way, this group has gone after over and over and over again lawyers who dared to represent Donald Trump.
00:08:59.020So they're willing – when we talk about weaponization, weaponization of law enforcement and weaponization of law, I got to say Paul Rosenweig is a great example of that.
00:09:09.460He's happy to go and attack and try to bankrupt people.
00:09:13.040You mentioned the – look, at the end of the day, if they come after me, I am a sitting senator.
00:11:07.040So, we originally thought we were going to start this show tonight, Senator, talking about the FBI and Kaspatel being named the FBI Director.
00:11:16.040This is a name that Democrats do not like, Kaspatel, so people understand history.
00:11:20.600This is a guy that actually the deep state went after when he was working for Donald Trump the first time with Russia, Russia, Russia.
00:11:29.700And he found out about it that when apparently Google, five years after the fact, sent him a letter saying, hey, we had to disclose to you now that we gave a bunch of your information over to the FBI.
00:11:42.700That's the now the guy that will be running the FBI if he gets confirmed.
00:11:50.080Well, I think this is a strong nomination.
00:11:52.340I think we're seeing Democrats and we're seeing the media freaking out.
00:11:56.200And they're freaking out, not because they think Kaspatel is unqualified, but rather because they believe he will actually do what Trump promised he would do.
00:12:04.800They believe he will actually clean out the corruption at the FBI, that he will take on the partisans that have burrowed into senior career positions.
00:12:15.120This is something we've been calling for on this podcast for a long time, to have leadership that is willing to really root out the partisanship and corruption and say no more.
00:12:24.500The FBI needs to restore its integrity.
00:12:27.060I think this is that this is a nomination.
00:12:30.040The reason people are losing their minds is because they believe Kashpatel is going to do exactly what Trump said he would do.
00:12:36.560And Senator, you actually talked about this on Sunday morning on Face the Nation on CBS, and it was very interesting to see the back and forth.
00:12:44.940Take a listen to that for people that may have missed it.
00:12:47.540Kashpatel suggested by Trump as the new leader of the FBI.
00:13:19.640He was a senior intelligence staffer on Capitol Hill.
00:13:23.160He was a senior intelligence staffer in the White House.
00:13:26.240He was the chief of staff at the Department of Defense.
00:13:28.660He was the deputy director of national intelligence.
00:13:31.080And I got to say, all of the weeping and gnashing of teeth, all of the people pulling their hair out are exactly the people who are dismayed about having a real reformer come into the FBI and clean out the corrupted partisans who sadly have burrowed into senior career positions at the FBI.
00:13:49.720The FBI and the Department of Justice are two institutions incredibly important to the rule of law in the United States.
00:13:58.180And one of the most tragic consequences of four years of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is both DOJ and the FBI have been politicized and weaponized.
00:14:08.120And I think Kash Patel is a very strong nominee to take on the partisan corruption in the FBI.
00:14:15.280As you know, Senator, there isn't a vacancy at the top of the FBI.
00:14:18.340What should become of Christopher Wray appointed by President Trump?
00:14:24.500I think either he will resign or President Trump will fire him.
00:14:27.460But it's no secret to anybody, including Chris Wray, that he is not going to continue to serve as the head of the FBI under Donald Trump.
00:14:35.420Listen, if you look at James Comey and Chris Wray, there has never been a period in our nation's history where the FBI has suffered a greater loss of respect,
00:14:45.840where more Americans doubt the fundamental integrity of the FBI.
00:14:50.180And it's because James Comey and Chris Wray presided over allowing the FBI to become a partisan cudgel to be used to target parents at school board meetings,
00:15:00.400to be used to target people who chose not to take the COVID vaccine, to be used to target President Trump and to target the political opponents of Joe Biden in the White House.
00:15:14.700And I've got to say, Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, I think, together are a very strong slate of nominees to go and restore integrity to both institutions.
00:15:25.080I don't think it can be better said than that.
00:15:27.520And that's why there's so many that are freaked out over Patel, because he's going to go in and do his job the way it's supposed to be done.
00:15:35.500And also, that means part of this is clearing house of the political partisans that are in there that have weaponized the government.
00:15:46.260And we've seen, you know, I wrote a book called Justice Corrupted, How the Left is Weaponized the Legal System.
00:15:53.000And in the book, I described how, starting with Barack Obama, we saw the Department of Justice and the FBI and the CIA and the alphabet soup of the federal government
00:16:02.920turned into a weapon to target and persecute the political enemies of Barack Obama.
00:16:09.500When Trump became president, those partisans, what they did is they went into senior career positions in the agencies.
00:16:18.220And from day one, from the first day of Trump's first term, they waged war on Donald Trump from within.
00:16:25.060The deep state, they wanted to destroy him.
00:16:36.100They were completely, they were not pretending anymore.
00:16:41.380And so, listen, as I said, I think Kash Patel will be confirmed.
00:16:45.780And when he is, I think it is going to be hugely important that he follow through on those promises to get rid of the partisans.
00:16:55.260And, listen, a point I made, Major Garrett was pressing back saying, well, isn't this terrible that Chris Wray would be fired?
00:17:01.380Listen, in the entire history of the FBI, we have never seen the respect for the FBI diminished as greatly as it has been under Chris Wray and under James Comey before him.
00:17:13.840The American people no longer trust the integrity of the FBI.
00:17:19.620That is, listen, with James Comey, I think he's a hard partisan.
00:17:22.920I think he was the point of the spear.
00:17:25.280With Chris Wray, I think it's different.
00:17:26.700I actually think Chris Wray, he's not a Democrat, he's a Republican, he's not a leftist.
00:17:30.940But he views his job as protecting the institution.
00:17:35.480And I think he made a fundamental mistake that he believes that protecting the career senior officials, who themselves are vicious partisans,
00:17:44.180I think he thinks that's somehow protecting the FBI, where the result is that the public respect of the FBI has been profoundly damaged.
00:17:53.460I think the new director of the FBI has a very important job to root out those partisans and to bring it back to a fidelity to law.
00:18:03.660By the way, I think the other political prosecutions that have been brought are natural candidates for the pardon power.
00:18:11.600If you look at Donald Trump, I think Donald Trump should pardon those people who've been prosecuted for January 6th who did not engage in crimes of violence.
00:18:20.000If you engage in a crime of violence, if you physically and violently assaulted a police officer, you shouldn't be pardoned.
00:18:26.400You should face criminal prosecution if you committed a crime of violence against a police officer.
00:18:31.620But if you were engaged in a peaceful protest, I think those are natural candidates for pardons.
00:18:36.620I also think Lauren Handy, who is the pro-life protester, who's right now serving six years in federal prison for nonviolent protest against abortion.
00:18:48.280I think Lauren Handy is a natural candidate for a pardon from President Trump.
00:18:53.640I think there's a very substantial likelihood she will receive a pardon.
00:18:57.100I think the nonviolent January 6th protesters are likely to receive pardons, and that is going to cause Democrats in the media to lose their mind because not only are they happy to look the other way at the weaponization of the Department of Justice and the FBI, they are vested in defending that weaponization, and that is a mandate.
00:19:16.560Understand, Donald Trump campaigned to the American people saying, I will root out this corruption, and I think this nomination and his following through on that promise is fundamentally about respecting democracy.
00:19:30.000The American people said, yes, we don't want the federal government weaponized against the political opposition of the White House.
00:19:38.040As before, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation on this topic, you can go back and download the podcast from earlier this week to hear the entire thing.
00:20:00.300And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.
00:20:04.060Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers.
00:20:07.360All at different stages of their journey.
00:20:09.820So, if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:20:13.020Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:20:18.800I want to get back to the big story, number three of the week you may have missed.
00:20:23.720Senator, I want to move to this other case.
00:20:26.220And it is a case that has really been interesting to follow.
00:20:30.480The Supreme Court hearing this case on gender transitions for minors.
00:20:35.120Now, this has all come out of a case in Tennessee where Tennessee was arguing that you must protect children from harm and body mutilation, especially at very young ages.
00:20:48.440And the left and the federal government saying, well, hold on a second.
00:20:54.380We're in favor of this transgender care, arguing that even those that are two and three and four years old, they know that they're trans.
00:21:03.480So, let them be sterilized and castrate themselves.
00:21:06.860That is what the ACLU lawyer said in his own words while he was arguing this on TV, on CNN.
00:21:15.160I want you to listen and get your reaction to that.
00:21:17.900I would say nobody has to provide this medication to adolescents.
00:21:22.520These are not doctors being forced to provide this medication.
00:21:25.260These are doctors who are wanting to treat their patients in the best way that they know how, based on the best available evidence to us.
00:21:32.500And these are young people who may have known since they were two years old exactly who they are, who suffered for six, seven years before they had any relief.
00:21:39.940And what's happening here, it's not the kids who are consenting to this treatment.
00:21:43.280It's the parents who are consenting to the treatment.
00:21:45.380And as a parent, I would say we, when our children are suffering, we are suffering.
00:21:49.580And these are parents who love their children, who are listening to the advice of their doctors, of the mainstream medical community, and doing what's right for their kids.
00:21:57.220And the state of Tennessee has displaced their judgment.
00:22:00.080Now, you hear that argument, and that to me is just, I'm sorry, child abuse.
00:22:04.280If you're mutilating a child at two and three and four years old, and that's what Tennessee was saying.
00:22:09.480Well, Tennessee passed, I think, a very reasonable law that prohibited puberty blockers and hormones and sterilizing children, sterilizing minors.
00:22:21.480And we're seeing multiple state legislatures that are acting to protect children.
00:22:26.120I think that is a reasonable and common sense step.
00:22:28.400And what happened is, unsurprisingly, that the state got sued, and the ACLU argued that making it illegal for a small child to be sterilized and made permanently unable to have children, or even to be mutilated, that prohibiting that violated the 14th Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
00:22:52.480That was the argument, and the Court of Appeals upheld the Tennessee law, and the Supreme Court took the case.
00:23:01.220You heard right there the ACLU lawyers arguing for being able to sterilize eight-year-olds.
00:23:07.660Just using the math the lawyer laid out, the lawyer talked about a child at the age of two might know that he or she is transgender, and they might have had to wait six years.
00:23:19.280Last I checked, two plus six is eight.
00:23:21.500Eight, and so the legal argument is that eight-year-old, the parent should be able to sterilize that child.
00:23:29.600If that child decides that at 18 he or she wants to be a dad or wants to be a mom, well, too late now, because when you were eight, we went ahead and sterilized you.
00:23:58.780The three liberal justices all were asking questions that I got to say were really extreme and showing the modern left, they are all in on mutilating and sterilizing children.
00:24:16.680However, this is not a fringe view on the left.
00:24:20.600Today's elected Democrats and sadly, the left-wing activists they put on the courts are absolutely committed to this extreme agenda.
00:25:00.440Every medical treatment has a risk, even taking aspirin.
00:25:07.120There is always going to be a percentage of the population under any medical treatment that's going to suffer a harm.
00:25:14.820So the question in my mind is not, do policymakers decide whether one person's life is more valuable than the millions of others who get relief from this treatment?
00:25:31.600The question is, can you stop one sex from the other?
00:25:35.120I mean, she's saying this is not a big deal at all if you're mutilating a child because even aspirin has risks and effects.
00:25:46.740So therefore, just put it under the category of everything goes.
00:25:50.860Well, that sums up today's radical left.
00:25:55.040In their view, severing a child's genitals is comparable to taking aspirin.
00:26:02.700She also claimed, quote, millions of people are getting relief from this.
00:26:10.180Now, thankfully, we do not currently have millions of children being sterilized.
00:26:15.280But let's be clear, that's the left's worldview, is that sterilizing little boys and little girls, mutilating them, making them permanently unable to have children,
00:26:26.400that should be happening on the scale of millions and millions of little boys and little girls.
00:26:43.180That was sort of like the starting point.
00:26:45.000The question was whether it was discriminatory because it applied to both races and it wasn't necessarily invidious or whatever.
00:26:52.540But as I read the statute here, excuse me, the case here, the court starts off by saying that Virginia is now one of 16 states which prohibit and punish marriages on the basis of racial classifications.
00:27:04.540And when you look at the structure of that law, it looks in terms of, you know, you can't do something that is inconsistent with your own characteristics.
00:27:14.840So it's interesting to me that we now have this different argument.
00:27:17.880And I wonder whether Virginia could have gotten away with what they did here by just making a classification argument the way that Tennessee is in this case.
00:27:30.080I think that there is absolutely a parallel between any law that says you can't act inconsistent with a protected characteristic and in all other contexts.
00:27:39.560This is another example of just how extreme these.
00:27:42.700And this is why the elections, by the way, are so important, Senator.
00:27:45.120I mean, this is why Donald Trump being elected was so important, because when he's not when you don't have a conservative in the White House, you get these radical activists who are Supreme Court justices.
00:27:55.660And if they have the majority, this is what they want you to be able to this is what they want to happen to your children.
00:28:00.760Well, and let me break down what that exchange back and forth was.
00:28:04.440So Ketanji Brown Jackson, who Joe Biden put on the Supreme Court, is comparing this Tennessee law to the law in Loving versus Virginia.
00:28:14.620Now, Loving versus Virginia is a Supreme Court case.
00:28:16.920It's a landmark case that struck down Virginia's ban decades ago, many, many years ago on interracial marriage, on on African-Americans and Anglos choosing to get married.
00:28:29.700And she says, quote, it's sort of the same thing.
00:28:34.260Now, Virginia's law was an abomination.
00:28:37.120It was restricting adults making the decision to get married.
00:28:41.720It was deliberately doing so on the basis of race, which, mind you, we fought a civil war in significant part to end slavery and to vindicate equal rights.
00:28:55.200And we passed and adopted the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to end slavery, to protect equal protection and to give African-Americans the right to vote to ensure that there's not racial discrimination.
00:29:06.800But in the less few, not sterilizing an eight year old is the same thing like that is bizarre.
00:29:16.480And by the way, the person who responds to Justice Jackson is Joe Biden's solicitor general, the top lawyer for for the Biden administration before the United States Supreme Court.
00:29:28.360She's saying, oh, yeah, they're exactly the same thing in our worldview.
00:29:31.500You ought to be able to mutilate children.
00:29:34.300It doesn't matter how how young the Constitution protects your right to mutilate your child.
00:29:46.780And that, sadly, is is is where where today's modern left is.
00:29:53.100Final question on this issue with this case coming out of the Supreme Court.
00:29:57.200And if you look at the way that this was being argued and I think one of the other things that's just so unhinged about this, the argument for medically mutilating minors is the fact that the issue really does seem to come down to to money.
00:30:11.960The amount of money that people are now making off these surgeries is saying it is it is an increase year over year of over 14.4 percent on average.
00:30:21.440So the transgender surgery world and then the lifetime of care is expanding at a 14.4 percent rate year over year.
00:30:33.540That's why so many medical areas, doctors and hospitals are advocating for this because they make money.
00:30:43.260Vanderbilt said very clearly to their doctors, either you get on board with this or you get out.
00:30:48.460We're not going to let you say no to this because there's too much money to be made in, quote, gender care.
00:30:54.320Yeah, there are vast amounts of money at stake and and it has become it really is a strange obsession of the radical left.
00:35:47.500They could do more than three things, but three key things.
00:35:50.040One, they could affirm the Tennessee law.
00:35:52.660That's what I think they are likely to do.
00:35:54.160Two, they could strike down the Tennessee law.
00:35:57.380They could rule that this law violates the Constitution and therefore is null and void.
00:36:02.720I do not think they're likely to do that, but I think the three liberals will vote to do exactly that.
00:36:07.560The third option they could do is they could reverse the decision and conclude that this law is sex discrimination,
00:36:17.060and under the Constitution, sex discrimination is subject to what's called intermediate scrutiny.
00:36:23.100Now, the toughest standard constitutionally for legal analysis is what's called strict scrutiny,
00:36:30.320and racial discrimination under the Constitution by government is subject to strict scrutiny.
00:36:37.380Sex discrimination is subject to intermediate scrutiny.
00:36:40.440So the middle ground they could do is they could vacate the decision below and send it back to the lower court to apply intermediate scrutiny.
00:36:48.900I hope they don't do that, and I don't think they will, but there is a non-zero chance they might do that,
00:36:57.120which is what makes this case concerning.
00:37:00.460All of that being said, my prediction is they're going to conclude correctly that the Tennessee law is constitutional,
00:37:08.740and that is a judgment for the state legislatures to make.
00:37:11.620As always, thank you for listening to Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
00:37:17.280Don't forget to download my podcast, and you can listen to my podcast every other day if you're not listening to Verdict,
00:37:21.900or each day when you listen to Verdict afterwards.
00:37:24.300I'd love to have you as a listener to, again, the Ben Ferguson podcast, and we will see you back here on Monday morning.