Oceania Had Always Been at War with Eastasia
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Summary
The Supreme Court has concluded its term with a major blow to the deep state. Chief Justice Roberts struck down the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan in a 6-3 ruling. This is an important victory for democracy, for the democratically elected branches of government, and for our ability to pay our bills.
Transcript
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The Supreme Court has concluded its absolutely magnificent term
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and we are looking ahead, looking ahead to the midterm elections.
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This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is brought to you by American Hartford Gold.
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So pleased to be joined by the senator who is on vacation, but there is no vacation when it comes to verdict.
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So, Senator, thank you for jumping off the beach for a few moments to join us on the show.
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And it's great to celebrate our nation's birth and independence.
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And it's great to do that with the family at the beach.
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But sometimes you've got to come back and address major issues that have come up.
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One of them is we've covered so much of this Supreme Court term,
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which seems to me certainly the greatest Supreme Court term in my lifetime.
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Perhaps in American history with the overruling of Roe, you had the major win for Second Amendment rights,
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major win for religious liberty, major win for education freedom.
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And now in West Virginia versus EPA, a major blow for the administrative state.
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But this case, probably more than any of the others, is pretty complex.
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I don't know all the nuances of it, and I've really tried to dig into it.
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But the case does not overrule what is called Chevron deference,
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which is a major source of power for the administrative state.
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But it does beef up the major questions doctrine,
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to make their voices heard against the administrative agencies of the executive.
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So, cutting to the bottom line, I think this case is an important victory,
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A, for democracy, for actually having control of policy,
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B, in the democratically elected branches of government,
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and B, for jobs and our ability to pay our bills.
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So, what this concerned was under the Obama administration,
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they rolled out what they called their Clean Power Plan.
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And it was the EPA, it was a massive power grab to essentially shut down coal-fired power plants
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across the country and force a transition to natural gas and to wind and solar.
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And to do so, the EPA itself admitted that its plan, the Obama EPA,
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would cost billions of dollars in the economy, would destroy tens of thousands of jobs,
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this was their own estimate, and would drive up everyone's cost of energy.
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So, that was the Obama administration's big present to America.
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Now, the plan has been litigated ever since the Obama administration.
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In other words, they potentially teed it up again.
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Just when we've got $5 gasoline and electricity prices going through the roof,
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the Biden EPA was threatening to put yet more regulatory burdens driving up the cost of energy.
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And what the Supreme Court did is struck it down.
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And what Chief Justice Roberts relied on is, as you mentioned it there,
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The Major Questions Doctrine essentially says that if there is a regulatory decision
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that is a big deal, that has big consequences economically, politically,
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that Congress has to have been very clear in giving the agency the authority to do it.
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That the court is not going to read in some vague, ambiguous language.
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In this case, the Obama EPA was relying on language that had been on the books for decades,
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had never been applied to have such a massive power grab.
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And the Supreme Court said, look, if you're looking at a regulation that is going to have
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But Congress has to be really clear that it wants to give the agency that authority,
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that we're not going to read in just through vague and ambiguous language.
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One of the things the court relied on quite a bit is the fact that Congress had repeatedly
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debated cap and trade, had debated putting a tax on carbon, had debated a lot of these
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policies and had rejected it over and over and over again.
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And the court said, look, if Congress, when they try to vote on it, can't decide this is
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a good idea, we're not going to read into ambiguous language the ability for the agency
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So this is a big win for the conservatives who have for a long time wanted to deal a
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blow against the administrative state and against the EPA in particular.
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For goodness sakes, the EPA is the villain in Ghostbusters.
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They've been in our crosshairs for a very long time.
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But it doesn't seem to go all the way that many libertarians and conservatives have wanted
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the court to go, which is to overrule Chevron deference, which comes out of a Supreme Court
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decision that gives a lot of authority to the agencies to regulate themselves.
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And look, I think it's entirely possible that this court will overrule Chevron deference
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The court didn't need to go there in this case because the major questions doctrine resolved
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And so it was unnecessary to consider Chevron deference and to decide it on that basis.
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You know, what I would say in so a legislative proposal that I've long been a proponent of
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is something called the RAINS Act, and I'm a co-sponsor of the RAINS Act.
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The RAINS Act provides that any regulation that imposes an economic cost of $100 million or
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more requires an up-down vote from Congress before going into effect.
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I have fought hard to try to get it passed, and we haven't gotten it done yet.
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I tried very hard with the Trump administration for them to make it a priority, and the Trump
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White House, it just wasn't a priority for them.
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I think it would have been the most significant regulatory reform we could do to create an environment
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So this Supreme Court decision is a step in that direction because it is saying the way
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they laid out the major questions doctrine, they said if it has a big economic impact.
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Now, they didn't quantify what a big economic impact was.
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And here, the Obama administration's own estimate is that they were destroying tens of thousands
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So they were readily admitting that they were having a big, big economic impact.
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But this decision, I think, is positive for limiting executive power absent congressional
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And I think that's important for part of the reason why you see regulations that are really
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harmful to jobs and businesses coming from the executive branch is because bureaucrats are
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And there's a power to having elected officials vote on it because, look, if you're a member
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of Congress, it's not an easy vote to cast a vote to destroy tens of thousands of jobs.
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You tend to have the people whose jobs you're destroying get really ticked off at you and
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And so there's a reason even Democrats and look, some of the crazies don't mind voting that
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But even Democrats get nervous about directly voting to destroy a lot of jobs.
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That democratic accountability, I think, is good for economic freedom, because if you
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have people who vote for it, it lets the voters in the next election step up and throw the
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Now, you mentioned crazy Democrats, and this brings up a completely unrelated issue, only
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related in the sense that unaccountable people are passing lots of insane regulations right
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But I do have to get your take on it because it has somehow come to dominate a lot of the
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Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin were just thrown off of Twitter.
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Jordan for making a comment and then Dave for reposting his comment.
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And the comment was that Ellen Page, the actress, is Ellen Page, the actress.
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Jordan referred to Ellen Page, who's the girl from Juno, who now identifies as a man and
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He just called her Ellen and didn't disparage her really in any way, just pointed out that
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she had gone through this gender transition and used the female pronouns.
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Dave was then thrown off the internet for that.
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Have we really descended this far where if you call a celebrity, a very well-known woman
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by the name that she was known by for most of her career, that you can now be thrown out
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of the public square with basically no way to fight back?
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And the woke rules are changing so fast, you need a guide to reference it.
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So apparently you're not allowed to say the words Ellen Page.
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Are you allowed to say the words Ellen Page with reference to when Ellen was going by Ellen
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and starring in movies with the names Ellen Page on them?
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Are you allowed to say that Bruce Jenner was on the cover of Wheaties?
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And we didn't know it, even though it had the words Bruce Jenner printed on the cover,
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on the outside of the Wheaties box, there's a level of, you know, the term Orwellian gets
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tossed around a lot, but it really is big tech trying to erase, we're at war with Eurasia.
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And anyone who says to the contrary shall be disappeared.
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Now, look, if Ellen or Elliot or whoever wants to go by whatever name they want to go, fine.
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That's, but to say no one is allowed to say anything different.
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I think Ellen or Elliot or whatever name tomorrow, if you want to go by Moon Unit, I don't care.
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And to see Twitter just so casually flick Jordan Peterson off Twitter, so casually flick Dave Rubin off Twitter,
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I think is one of the reasons we've talked about it a lot.
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I very much hope Elon Musk goes through with this purchase.
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I think it may be the most important development for free speech in decades.
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And hopefully if and when Musk buys Twitter, this sort of garbage will stop because it is idiocy.
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There's a kind of irony here, too, because before Ellen started identifying as Elliot, she was gay married to a woman, to a woman who identifies as a lesbian.
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This was after same-sex marriage became a cultural phenomenon, but sort of before transgenderism became a cultural phenomenon.
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And it occurred to me that to affirm Ellen, who now goes by Elliot's gender identity, is to deny her lesbian partner's sexual orientation.
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I'm trying to see if I can keep that straight, which is to say we cannot simultaneously affirm so many contradictory things.
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And you mentioned it's Oceania being at war with East Asia.
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I think what is really scary for Americans who aren't keeping up and who don't really care what Ellen Page does is that you can be ostracized.
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You can be censored and removed from the town square, because Twitter and Google and Facebook, those are the town square now, for simply saying the thing that every single person believed until about five minutes ago.
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If Twitter now holds that you cannot call a woman who identifies as a man a woman, well, then effectively aren't they prohibiting any disagreement with transgenderism?
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The vast majority of Americans who I suspect do not go along with a radical transgender kind of worldview.
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Does that mean that now the people who control the public square, the flow of 90 percent of information around the Internet, Google, Facebook and Twitter, we're just not allowed to express our opinions?
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Look, that's exactly what it means that they want to silence dissent.
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You know, I will say back in 2016, I actually had a person who identified herself to me as Ellen Page confront me in Iowa.
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I was actually cooking pork chops at the Iowa State Fair.
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And this this young woman walked up to me and began questioning me on I don't remember exactly.
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I had no idea who she was, but I had a conversation with her.
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And at the time she had later identified herself as actress Ellen Page.
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That's what she told me her name was when she was questioning me.
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And maybe I was being questioned by Elliot and I didn't know it like it.
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This gets pitched and it's like through the looking glass where.
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They say this is all about, I guess the phrase is dead name.
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You know, you don't have a right to control what other people say.
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You know, if, Michael, you want to go by Michelle.
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You know, it's like the old phrase, my freedom to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.
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You have all the liberty you want to say what you want, but that doesn't extend to silencing
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someone else saying something that you don't like.
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And today's left doesn't believe that part of it is.
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There are rules on things like like gender and I don't know how many hundred and fifty seven
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genders. I can't keep up with the latest the latest fantastical distinctions.
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Their rules make so little sense that I think they realize they must silence anyone questioning
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And that does fundamentally reflect an acknowledgement of weakness on their part.
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It also does seem to go along with the broad, broader leftist ethos, which is a rejection of
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Actually, if you read some of the literature around the phenomenon of dead naming, this phrase
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only cropped up about 10 years ago on the Internet to refer to the names that people have gone
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by their whole lives until they decide to identify as the opposite sex.
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The a lot of the literature around that will discuss it as a rejection of the past.
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Your Oceani was always at war with East Asia, as you say.
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And this is this is where you're you're good at theoretical navel gazing is the current
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And if that's the case, that does that imply that there actually is objective truth that
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And isn't that in contradiction with the other left wing tenet that you can change whatever
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You can become a woman, a man and a chipmunk all in the course of this podcast.
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And what I don't know is, do the leftist activists, do they distinguish?
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Like, do are they willing to say, well, Ellen may have been a woman in 2016 when she introduced
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Or do they maintain that what is today was yesterday, too, and she didn't change anything?
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Like, what's the what is the reasoning behind this?
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The current view held by the people who promote this kind of ideology is that Ellen is now and
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always was Elliot, even when she was in that movie about being pregnant and possibly having
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But but what if Elliot believes that she was Ellen then?
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Like, like, is she allowed or he allowed to do that?
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This is the key because, you know, on Wikipedia, if you look at Ellen Page or Bruce Jenner or
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any really prominent person who identifies as transgender, the way that that person will
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be described will always be with the pronouns that they are now using, including going back
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But but your question is such an important one because you're saying, well, what decides
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if Ellen wakes up tomorrow and says, oh, I'm Ellen again, I'm I'm a she again.
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I think what this ultimately comes down to is not that there is objective truth for the
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But I don't think the contention of the left and the transgender ideology is that there is
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I think what it comes down to is the primacy of the will.
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Well, whatever Ellen says is true, even if what Ellen says contradicts what Ellen said
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And so politics devolves from a reasoned debate that you constantly hear conservatives and
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old school liberals lamenting the loss of reasoned civil dialogue.
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If politics really only comes down to my will versus your will and my interest versus your
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interest, well, then we can't talk to each other.
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It's just all a bunch of sounds and pronouns and new noises that that don't really have
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Well, unless they're connected to force and you will be fired, you will be silenced, you
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will be blocked, you will be canceled if you don't comply with what I demand.
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You know, on these names, I also I also it's also seems to me that the names are intentionally
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You know, there are plenty of names that are androgynous and ambiguous.
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Taylor, Skyler, Madison, you know, but but when it comes down to this question of someone who's
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obviously a woman going by, I don't know, Hank or something that seems a little little
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And I think this issue keeps getting so much play in large part because ordinary people
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who are not engaging in all this kind of ideological navel gazing, who are not very online or marching
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with the radical leftists in the streets, who are just kind of conducting their ordinary
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They're looking at this and they're saying, I know this is obviously wrong.
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And so I download lots and lots of shows, streaming shows.
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And one of the shows that I've watched on Netflix is something called Umbrella Academy
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about these students who have sort of superhero type powers.
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And for the first two seasons, Umbrella Academy starred Ellen Page.
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And the third season, which I just finished watching, it now stars Elliot Page.
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And what's interesting is the character in the Netflix series has the same transition
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And in fact, the beginning of season three, the character is a woman.
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Although the credits say it's Elliot Page playing a woman.
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And then the character decides that she is a he.
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And part of how Hollywood does this is every single person immediately just.
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And it was an interesting example because when I started watching season three, I was kind
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of curious how they were going to handle this issue.
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And so they made the character completely mirror what the actor was going through as
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well, which I just thought was an interesting wrinkle.
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Also, it seems that now it used to be that acting was when you pretended to be someone
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Now we're told that unless you're gay, you can't play a gay character.
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Unless you're this specific sub race of a group of people, you can't play a person of
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Now, in order to play Michael Knowles, one must be a Catholic, conservative, Italian,
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And nobody other than Michael Knowles can play not Michael Knowles.
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And the whole concept of acting has gone, you know, there's a famous story of when Sir
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Laurence Olivier was doing a movie along with Dustin Hoffman.
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And, you know, Hoffman is famously a method actor.
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And in the scene, he was required to be very, very tired.
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So he stayed up all night and he was exhausted.
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And for some reason, there was a problem shooting and they weren't able to film the scene.
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And Hoffman got upset and, you know, was like, look, I stayed up all night.
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And Sir Laurence Olivier famously quipped to him.
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He said, my dear boy, why don't you try acting?
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And then the sort of meta story on top of that, did you ever see the movie Hook?
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You know, it's a great movie with Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman.
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And apparently while they were filming Hook, Robin Williams would make fun of Hoffman.
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And he would, you know, he'd make the voice of a parrot and he'd go,
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If you do want to play me, not just any Italian will do.
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It's got to be from the town in Sicily where my family comes from.
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Now that, you know, they say that politics is show business for ugly people.
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And speaking of particularity, I want to get nitty.
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Of course, obviously for the people on this podcast.
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But, you know, when we're looking ahead to the midterms, we got a whole lot of seats.
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We got all of those hundreds of congressional seats.
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We've got a whole bunch of Senate seats up to say nothing about the state houses.
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So since you're much more focused on the ground, on the nitty gritty, know the players very closely,
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I think the chances of our taking the House are approaching 100%.
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I think it is virtually a certainty that we'll take the House.
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I think the real question is how big of a margin.
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And I think the chances are good that we'll take the Senate.
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On the House side, some of the reason why I'm so optimistic.
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Let me give you just some of the specific data because the two best predictors for elections historically
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have been the generic congressional ballot, which is just asking people in the upcoming congressional election,
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That's a very good predictor for what's going to happen in November.
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And then the presidential approval or disapproval.
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And consistently, those two together had been very good predictors.
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So if you look at, for example, 2010, which was an historic year,
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in that election, the generic ballot was Republican plus 9.4.
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Presidential approval was actually not too bad.
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So it was just the disapproval was just slightly above approval.
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And we ended up picking up 63 seats, getting to a majority of 242 seats.
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Now, if you look at where we are today in 2022, the generic congressional is R plus 3.3.
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So that means by 3.3 percent, people say they're going to vote Republican instead of Democrat.
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That's better than it was in 2014, although not as good as it was in 2010.
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But the presidential approval is minus 11.5, which is by far the worst, much, much worse than 2010, much, much worse than 2014.
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Let me give you another stat that is a very interesting predictor, which is the enthusiasm gap.
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Now, if you ask voters, are you very excited to vote in November, it's a really good predictor of what's going to happen.
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And if you go back and look at it, in 2006, Democrats who were very interested in voting in November, 69 percent, Republicans, 56 percent.
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So the Democrats had a 13 percentage advantage on enthusiasm.
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2010, Democrats who were very interested was 49 percent.
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Since 2018, the differential Democrats who were interested was 66 percent, Republicans 57.
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So Democrats had a nine point advantage in enthusiasm.
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And then if you go and look to March of 2022, Democrats, 50 percent are very interested in voting in November.
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All of that is suggesting that we could see a Republican victory in the House with potentially a pickup anywhere from 30 to 60 seats.
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I think that's the spread that's in play, which is a whole lot of seats.
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What we're seeing is congressional seats that are, say, a D plus six or a D plus eight are right now polling time.
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If you look at Virginia, Virginia last year, as you know, elected Glenn Youngkin.
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And on election day last year, it went Republican.
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If we're winning D plus 10 congressional seats, we're looking at 60 plus pickups in the House.
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So there are far too many congressional House seats to track in terms of the Senate races.
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Dr. Oz is already a celebrity and has been for a long time in Pennsylvania.
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What are the races that we should really be looking at, whether because they're bellwethers, you know, they're going to they're going to tell us which way the winds are blowing or just because they're so crucial for Republicans to pick.
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Sure. So the reason the Senate is far less certain than the House is that we don't have a great map this year.
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So Republicans are defending more vulnerable seats than Democrats are.
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And that just is luck of the draw of who happens to be up, because in the Senate, only a third of the senators are up every two years.
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If you look at Republican pickup opportunities.
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Are Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and New Hampshire.
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Georgia and Arizona have historically been red states.
00:30:54.300
Just a couple of years ago, they had both had two reds, two Republican senators.
00:30:59.880
Now, both Georgia and Arizona have two Democrat senators in Georgia.
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00:31:08.220
I think I think Walker's got a good shot at winning that race.
00:31:11.800
I think Georgia is still fundamentally a red state.
00:31:14.780
The special elections or the runoff elections that that happened in in twenty twenty one.
00:31:26.800
I saw it, that that our base was demoralized and didn't show up in that special election.
00:31:31.680
And if if your guys stay home and the other guys show up, that's that's a recipe for losing.
00:31:36.300
So I think Georgia is a real pickup opportunity.
00:31:43.740
There's several candidates slugging it out in that primary.
00:31:46.020
So it's not clear who the Republican nominee is going to be.
00:31:50.840
Mark Kelly is the incumbent Democrat, and he is he's formidable.
00:32:01.700
I do think Kelly has been really, really hurt by Kyrsten Sinema, the other Democrat senator from Arizona,
00:32:08.480
because Sinema on a number of issues, most notably the filibuster, has stood up to party leadership and has has tacked a more moderate course.
00:32:21.880
His voting record is in many ways indistinguishable from Bernie Sanders.
00:32:24.800
And I think that even though he cultivates a persona of being a moderate, his voting record now does not match up with that.
00:32:33.200
I think Arizona, we got a good pickup opportunity.
00:32:45.580
In fact, I think Nevada, Adam is the most likely Republican pickup this cycle, because I think he's done a good job of unifying the party.
00:32:56.380
Nevada, New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan is on the ballot.
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00:33:09.780
It's not clear who the Republican is going to be.
00:33:12.540
And if we're going to have a strong candidate, I hope we do.
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If we have a strong candidate, I think New Hampshire is winnable.
00:33:18.740
But we've got to get someone who is able to raise the money and be competitive.
00:33:23.820
If the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, had run, I think he would have won easily.
00:33:30.700
And so New Hampshire is a state where we just got to wait and see if we're going to have a candidate that can be competitive.
00:33:40.460
There are other pickup opportunities that are more of a long shot.
00:33:45.220
Colorado, Michael Bennett, I think, is vulnerable.
00:33:50.280
He hasn't accomplished much of anything in the Senate.
00:33:52.600
Colorado is a bluish state that in a really good year could conceivably go red.
00:34:00.340
Washington state right now, the polling in Washington state is showing the Republican within just a couple of points of Patty Murray, the incumbent Democrat.
00:34:18.760
Pat Leahy is actually the only Democrat in the history of Vermont elected to the Senate, which is really quite remarkable.
00:34:24.760
The other senator is Bernie Sanders, who's not a Democrat.
00:34:33.580
attorney running in Vermont, a woman who I think is in a really good year, has a shot at that race.
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00:34:41.560
So there are, depending on how good a year there is, there are four natural pickup opportunities and then I think several more.
00:34:52.360
We're on defense, number one, in Pennsylvania, as you noted.
00:35:04.860
He just went through a tough primary between him and Dave McCormick, who's another very strong candidate.
00:35:12.780
But I'm optimistic that Oz's numbers are not terrific right now, but he just came out of the primary.
00:35:19.760
I'm optimistic that's a winnable seat, but we need to hold Pennsylvania.
00:35:25.240
Wisconsin, Ron Johnson is the incumbent Republican.
00:35:28.080
He probably is, faces the greatest threat for any incumbent Republican.
00:35:40.140
I was just out in Milwaukee and supporting him and campaigning for him.
00:35:46.380
But history teaches that race is likely to be close.
00:35:59.880
But Ohio has certainly historically been a swing seat.
00:36:04.200
Missouri, you've got Roy Blunt, who's retiring.
00:36:10.900
The candidate I've supported, Eric Schmidt, who's the attorney general, I think is the strongest conservative that can win.
00:36:18.720
But whether that race is competitive will depend on what happens in the primary.
00:36:25.120
One of the candidates in the primary, Eric Greitens, the former governor, resigned in scandal.
00:36:30.660
I think if Greitens wins the primary, you'll see Democrats invest a lot of money in Missouri.
00:36:35.300
I think they'll think that that's a seat they can steal if Greitens wins the nomination.
00:36:41.160
You know, another state that could get bumpy is Alaska.
00:36:44.120
So Alaska, you've got Lisa Murkowski, who's the incumbent.
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Alaska also has a weird system of voting, of ranked choice voting.
00:37:00.400
Where you vote for multiple candidates and then you eliminate the lowest vote getter and reallocate those votes.
00:37:09.600
But any time you have Republicans divided, in this case, you've got Trump on one side and the incumbent Republican on the other, it's messy.
00:37:18.080
And, you know, when I got to the Senate 10 years ago, Alaska had a Democrat, Mark Begich, in it.
00:37:30.600
But it's not impossible that we lose that state.
00:37:34.460
So put all of that together, put it in the blender.
00:37:38.220
My guess right now, if the election were today, we'd win something like 53 seats altogether.
00:37:46.500
But I think the plus minus is anywhere from 49, if things just go spectacularly bad, to 56, if they go phenomenally and we win some seats like like a Vermont or a Washington state.
00:38:03.920
If it's that good a year, we could get up in the 55, 56 range.
00:38:08.160
So then you're if you're looking at retaking the House and especially if you're also looking at retaking the Senate, then you're setting the stage for two years of stopping Biden, slowing down Biden.
00:38:23.540
But you you stop the administration and then you look ahead to 2024.
00:38:29.080
Is there is there anything that you're seeing right now that you think in 2022 will help to determine the shape of the 2024 field?
00:38:40.500
Number one, I think it's important that that we win in 22.
00:38:46.100
But then when we have majorities, we've got to do something with it.
00:38:49.120
And and, you know, that's just the beginning of the battle to win the majorities.
00:38:53.660
And if we get to January 2023 with majorities in both houses, if Republican leadership decides to play a prevent defense and do nothing and be risk averse, which is often leadership's instinct.
00:39:05.420
I think that will demoralize a lot of voters if you elect a bunch of squishes, you can't just go blaming leadership when they push squishy policies that the leadership is one trying to herd cats.
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00:39:18.920
But but two, they are taking cues from their members.
00:39:22.460
You know, they're the they're trying to operate levers of power within the confines of reality.
00:39:29.920
You got to go elect the most right, viable candidates.
00:39:33.140
And then you're going to have a much better shot of encouraging leadership to actually stand up and fight.
00:39:38.620
Now, there is much more to talk about, Senator, before you return to your lovely family vacation that we have rudely interrupted.
00:39:45.400
There's a lot more to talk about on the cloakroom with our friend Liz Wheeler.
00:39:50.680
I've been waiting in the wings and I just overheard that that perhaps you're identifying as Michelle.
00:39:56.760
I just want to be the one to note that this is breaking national news.
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We have a great topic that we're going to talk about on the cloakroom today.
00:40:03.620
We are going to talk about a very highly reported piece of the Dobbs decision.
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This is, of course, Justice Clarence Thomas, who said in future cases, we should reconsider all of this court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell.
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So we're going to talk about these cases and whether they should be overturned.
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And if they were to be overturned, how that would be done.
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It's on verdict plus go to verdict with Ted Cruz dot com slash plus.
00:40:33.260
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00:40:38.360
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00:40:42.860
You were looking at the Clarence Thomas Nashville fan club over here.
00:40:46.960
President and chairman can't wait to hear that discussion of why we need to get rid of substantive due process.
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00:41:17.300
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