Verdict with Ted Cruz - September 22, 2020


One Seat to Win Them All

Topics
Roe V. Wade and abortion laws
Hosted by
Ted Cruz
Mentioned
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Antonin Scalia Joe Biden Bush Gore Donald Trump Barack Obama Merrick Garland Hillary Clinton Sandra Day O'Connor Mitch McConnell Chuck Schumer Mitt Romney Felix Frankfurter Thurgood Marshall William Rehnquist Clarence Thomas Lisa Murkowski Louis Brandeis Susan Collins and 1 more
Hollywood Has a Predilection for Minors and Communists In the Trenches for School Choice ft. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos

Episode Stats


Length

25 minutes

Words per minute

165.38

Word count

4,283

Sentence count

331

Harmful content

Misogyny

11

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Ted Cruz joins Michael Knowles to discuss the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died at the age of 87, and whether the Senate should fill the vacancy now that a replacement has not been nominated.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:00:02.440 Guaranteed human.
00:00:04.660 There was one thing that could have happened to make this 2020 election cycle more tense,
00:00:11.560 more divisive, more dangerous.
00:00:14.280 And it happened.
00:00:16.060 Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died at the age of 87.
00:00:19.520 There is an open seat on the Supreme Court.
00:00:22.320 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
00:00:30.000 Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz.
00:00:31.600 I'm Michael Knowles, joined by someone on President Trump's shortlist for the Supreme Court,
00:00:37.520 Senator Ted Cruz.
00:00:38.540 Though, Senator Cruz, though I will ask you again and again,
00:00:41.760 you have already expressed you are not interested in the job.
00:00:45.440 Well, that's right.
00:00:47.120 I'm not.
00:00:47.920 But what I'm very interested in, and I'll tell you the reason I'm not interested in the job,
00:00:51.760 is the fight we have in the Senate.
00:00:53.720 The president has said rightly that he's going to make his nomination this week.
00:00:58.580 That's the right thing to do.
00:01:00.000 And I think it's critical that the Senate confirm that justice before Election Day.
00:01:05.340 And that's part of the reason why I don't want to serve on the court,
00:01:08.840 is that right now I got a job to do, which is lead the fight to get that justice confirmed.
00:01:14.080 And I hope several more justices afterwards in the president's second term.
00:01:18.440 So we've already established your position, which happens to be my position,
00:01:22.160 that absolutely the president should nominate a judge to fill this seat.
00:01:26.920 Absolutely the Senate should confirm that judge.
00:01:29.240 But this is, I guess, a controversial issue because Democrats are now pointing to 2016
00:01:34.820 when Justice Scalia died and Barack Obama put up Merrick Garland as a potential Supreme Court nominee.
00:01:42.020 And then and current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said,
00:01:45.040 no way, we're not going to have a hearing.
00:01:46.380 You're not going to get it in an election year.
00:01:48.160 Democrats, Senator, are accusing us of hypocrisy.
00:01:51.060 Well, and I think it's important for people to understand this issue because it's easy to look back to 2016 with Merrick Garland
00:01:57.900 and all the positions were reversed.
00:02:00.500 So the Republicans were all saying we're not going to fill that seat.
00:02:03.760 I said that the day Justice Scalia passed away.
00:02:06.640 And by the way, the Democrats were all saying we must fill the seat.
00:02:09.920 We must fill the seat.
00:02:10.680 We must fill the seat.
00:02:11.540 And now, four years later, everything is magically reversed.
00:02:15.560 And Republicans are saying we must fill the seat.
00:02:17.960 And Democrats are saying under no circumstances can you fill the seat. 0.90
00:02:21.840 And the press is having a field day saying, of course, it's the Republicans who are hypocritical, not the Democrats. 0.74
00:02:27.960 Nobody seems to have noticed that Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer 0.95
00:02:34.400 and every bloody Democrat in the U.S. Senate has reversed 180 degrees. 0.73
00:02:40.360 But actually, if you understand the history, I don't believe either side is being hypocritical.
00:02:46.220 I think they're actually following the principles they believe in.
00:02:50.140 And so, look, someone could be forgiven for saying, well, what's different?
00:02:56.640 What does the Senate typically do? 0.99
00:02:59.000 What does the president typically do?
00:03:01.080 And it turns out there's an answer.
00:03:02.780 So this is not the first time this has happened.
00:03:05.020 In our nation's history, this has happened 27 times before.
00:03:09.960 So 27 times there has been a Supreme Court vacancy that has occurred during a presidential year.
00:03:17.720 And presidents have nominated a justice to fill that vacancy 27 times.
00:03:25.240 That's what presidents do.
00:03:26.600 It's actually an easy decision for President Trump's decision.
00:03:29.120 And by the way, a total of 44 people have been president of the United States.
00:03:34.020 Half of them have faced this decision.
00:03:36.180 22.
00:03:37.020 Half of the people who've served as president have faced this decision.
00:03:40.120 And every single one has nominated.
00:03:43.220 Now, what has the Senate done?
00:03:44.660 And this is where it's important to understand why 2016 and 2020 are very, very different.
00:03:49.640 What the Senate has done is very, very different depending on whether the Senate is of the same party as the president or a different party from the president.
00:04:00.320 Those are radically different.
00:04:01.940 So, of the 27 times there have been vacancies, 19 of them have occurred when the Senate is the same party as the president.
00:04:14.560 Of those 19, the Senate has confirmed 17.
00:04:20.240 Huh.
00:04:20.560 I would have guessed all 19, but 17 makes sense.
00:04:23.380 17 of the 19, when the president and the senator of the same Senate, of the same party, the Senate confirms them.
00:04:32.680 On the other hand, what about when there are different parties?
00:04:34.980 That's happened 10 times in our nation's history.
00:04:37.140 That happened with Merrick Garland.
00:04:38.820 Barack Obama was a Democrat.
00:04:40.180 There was a Republican Senate.
00:04:43.020 Of the 10 times that's happened, the Senate has confirmed the nominee only twice.
00:04:48.600 Yeah.
00:04:48.680 So, there's a pattern that goes back two centuries.
00:04:52.520 You know, I got to say something here, Michael.
00:04:54.660 It's easy for people to say, well, gosh, well, then it's just people being partisan.
00:04:59.060 Well, there's more to it than that, actually.
00:05:02.420 Because under our Constitution, elections matter.
00:05:05.680 Under our Constitution, particularly right now, if you think about it in 2016,
00:05:09.240 Donald Trump ran on the kind of justice he intended to nominate to replace Antonin Scalia and to replace any other justices, the vacancies that occurred.
00:05:20.620 He was elected.
00:05:21.640 That was a major reason he was elected.
00:05:23.480 That was the biggest reason I voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, is the kind of justices he promised to appoint. 0.77
00:05:30.340 On the other hand, Hillary Clinton promised to nominate liberal activists, and the American people voted against her.
00:05:36.580 Likewise, the U.S. Senate, a big, big reason we have a Republican majority in the Senate is that Republican senators promise to confirm constitutionalist judges to the court and to block liberal activists.
00:05:51.320 And the American people elected Republicans to the Senate in 2014, in 2016, and they actually grew the Republican majority in 2018.
00:06:00.980 And so when you have all these reporters pulling their hair out and saying, well, because you blocked President Obama's nominee, you have to block Trump's. 0.83
00:06:12.080 That's just silly. 0.91
00:06:13.540 And it's utterly ahistorical. 0.95
00:06:15.720 And it's not consistent with the history of the country.
00:06:18.140 Of course, this charge of hypocrisy seems sort of silly to me because we elect our politicians to exercise the political power they can, and that will change by the circumstances.
00:06:28.780 But I don't fault Barack Obama for putting up Merrick Garland.
00:06:31.680 I don't fault Mitch McConnell for not taking up that nomination.
00:06:34.460 I don't fault President Trump or the senators in the GOP for now pushing forward this nomination.
00:06:40.900 And obviously, I hope it goes through on that point, Senator, since I am not in that exclusive club in Washington, D.C.
00:06:48.340 Can you tell us what is going on right now?
00:06:51.220 What is the GOP?
00:06:52.780 What are the GOP senators discussing?
00:06:55.500 How is this process going to play out?
00:06:58.360 Well, people are losing their minds.
00:06:59.540 Look, and I'm concerned – you mentioned in the open show how tense things are.
00:07:08.780 We've already seen, unfortunately, violence in the street.
00:07:11.360 I'm very concerned it's going to get worse.
00:07:12.920 You're seeing Democrats threaten it to get worse.
00:07:15.820 You're seeing liberal journalists threaten violence.
00:07:19.380 And I think the Democratic senators are – Chuck Schumer has threatened, he's boomed, everything is on the table, which, frankly, I don't think is terribly consequential because they intended to be radical and extreme regardless.
00:07:35.220 So they're still going to be radical and extreme if they win.
00:07:39.960 Look, the big question is where are the Republican votes going to be?
00:07:44.320 Every Democrat is going to vote no.
00:07:46.620 So there are 53 Republicans.
00:07:48.220 There are 47 Democrats.
00:07:49.200 We know there are 47 no's. 0.99
00:07:51.600 I believe we will have the votes, and I believe it's important that we confirm this nominee before Election Day.
00:07:58.900 To be honest, the math I don't think plays out all that differently from impeachment.
00:08:04.240 And you and I spent a lot of time in verdict talking about impeachment.
00:08:09.400 We knew at the time that the votes that were really in question.
00:08:12.760 You had Susan Collins, and she's already made public comments suggesting that she does not want to confirm a nominee before Election Day. 0.89
00:08:22.460 You have Lisa Murkowski, who likewise has made public comments.
00:08:25.980 And then, look, the next votes that you look to, Mitt Romney obviously voted to convict the president of impeachment.
00:08:34.600 I think a lot of people are wondering how Mitt's going to vote.
00:08:37.520 I don't know.
00:08:38.020 He hadn't said.
00:08:38.660 He's playing his cards pretty close to the vest.
00:08:41.260 So we'll see.
00:08:42.240 I think even if the three of them end up voting no, that's still 50-50, which means the vice president breaks the tie.
00:08:51.180 I don't think there are four no votes.
00:08:53.280 Now, it depends on the nominee.
00:08:54.220 If something disastrous happened with the nominee, that could change the math.
00:08:58.640 But assuming that the president nominates a serious, credible judicial nomination, I think we'll have the votes to confirm the justice.
00:09:08.580 And I think it is very important that we do so before the election.
00:09:13.040 And let me tell you why.
00:09:14.620 Joe Biden has been incredibly clear that he intends to challenge the results of this election if he doesn't win.
00:09:23.000 He's hired a team of lawyers headed by veteran Supreme Court advocates to get ready to challenge the election.
00:09:30.480 I think there are one or two outcomes on Election Day.
00:09:32.400 Either Biden wins, in which case the Democrats celebrate and the media celebrates.
00:09:36.060 Or if Biden doesn't win, I think the chances are 100 percent they go to court and challenge the result.
00:09:41.720 We know that Hillary Clinton has told Joe Biden under no circumstances should you concede this election, no matter what.
00:09:53.000 But this weekend, I did the George Stephanopoulos show, and I made this point.
00:09:58.620 And I got to say, look, I know George fairly well.
00:10:01.300 I've done his show a number of times.
00:10:03.600 This is the point he got most agitated about.
00:10:06.320 This is the point he jumped in.
00:10:08.860 He said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:10:09.980 It's Trump who's challenging the legitimacy election.
00:10:13.340 What what nonsense?
00:10:15.240 And it's very weird.
00:10:17.540 The Democrats in the media, it's like a Freudian projection.
00:10:21.500 They accuse the other side of doing what they're doing.
00:10:25.340 Given the the almost certainty that Biden's going to be challenging the election, if this seat is not filled by Election Day, we would have eight justices on the court.
00:10:38.600 If the Supreme Court deadlocks for four, it can't reach a decision.
00:10:43.600 So an equally divided court has no authority to decide anything and understand the chaos of this.
00:10:49.880 So some people say, OK, fine.
00:10:51.540 Well, what happens if you if you don't have a Supreme Court that can decide it?
00:10:55.760 Well, I think the odds are very high that we will see if Biden loses not just one lawsuit or one contested election like we had in 2000 and Bush versus Gore in Florida.
00:11:08.160 You had multiple lawsuits, but just one state being challenged.
00:11:11.440 I think Biden is likely to bring multiple cases all over the country in any close state.
00:11:17.060 And we could end up with conflicting decisions from conflicting circuit courts.
00:11:23.340 And if there's no Supreme Court, you can't resolve those conflicts.
00:11:27.080 And we could easily find ourselves in the midst of a constitutional crisis with this presidential election taking days and then weeks and then months with no resolution.
00:11:38.800 And that that kind of chaos, I don't believe Republicans should allow to happen.
00:11:44.220 I don't think we will.
00:11:45.300 But but I think the stakes are very high to to to confirm the justice before Election Day.
00:11:52.440 So there's a full nine justice Supreme Court in place if and when there are challenges to the election.
00:11:58.660 This is a very persuasive argument that actually I haven't heard a ton of conservatives even talk about.
00:12:03.960 And obviously conservatives are more eager to fill the seat than liberals or leftists are.
00:12:09.160 But you've you've got this issue of possibly a Bush v. Gore, you know, 20 years later, but not just in one state.
00:12:17.060 Now you could have it in, I don't know, three states, five states, even more.
00:12:20.080 And you get all the way up to the Supreme Court.
00:12:22.600 Imagine if Bush v. Gore had been an equally divided court.
00:12:26.340 That would have been chaotic enough.
00:12:27.940 That that is really not something to look forward to.
00:12:30.220 It's a very persuasive argument.
00:12:31.800 You know, a lot of this debate now over whether or not to fill the seat has come down to the personal wishes of Justice Ginsburg.
00:12:40.300 You have some Democrats now saying that it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dying wish that no Republican fill her seat.
00:12:47.640 And of course, I don't know of any dying wish clause in the Constitution.
00:12:51.360 But regardless, we also have video of Justice Ginsburg saying now after the 2016 election cycle that the president absolutely must nominate a judge, even in an election year, that the president does not cease to be the president just because it is an election year.
00:13:07.560 So we've heard from her own mouth this idea that we should go forward with the nomination.
00:13:11.680 We've heard from some people, I suppose, who knew her that she wouldn't have wanted them to.
00:13:15.520 It occurs to me, Senator, you have met Justice Ginsburg on a number of occasions.
00:13:21.040 You've argued cases before the Supreme Court.
00:13:23.360 Do you have any personal insight into the justice, any personal reflections now that she's passed?
00:13:29.560 Well, well, sure.
00:13:30.360 Look, I did know Justice Ginsburg personally.
00:13:33.660 I argued before her nine times.
00:13:36.720 She she was brilliant.
00:13:38.380 Her personal story is is remarkable.
00:13:41.180 I mean, she was born and grew up in New York City.
00:13:45.460 She ended up going to Cornell.
00:13:46.940 She went to Harvard Law School, was one of the very first women ever to go to Harvard Law School.
00:13:52.200 Her husband got a job at a New York law firm.
00:13:55.500 And so she transferred from Harvard to Columbia and she graduated from Columbia Law School, graduated tied number one in the class.
00:14:02.380 She was on the Harvard Law Review.
00:14:03.980 She was on the Columbia Law Review.
00:14:05.180 And, you know, it's an amazing thing when she was coming out of Columbia Law School, she applied for a Supreme Supreme Court clerkship with Justice Felix Frankfurter, renowned liberal justice.
00:14:17.240 And he turned her down because she was a woman.
00:14:19.560 He wouldn't hire a woman, despite she had professors from law school making the case for her. 0.77
00:14:24.780 But she got denied the clerkship.
00:14:27.040 She had a hard time getting hired as a lawyer. 0.99
00:14:31.020 And it's actually quite an amazing thing.
00:14:33.240 And Sandra Day O'Connor, who came out of Stanford Law School, she was number three in the class. 0.99
00:14:38.180 Both of them were offered jobs as legal secretaries.
00:14:41.520 I mean, you want to you want to talk about serious discrimination.
00:14:45.660 They're graduating at or near the top of their class and they can't get hired as first year lawyers.
00:14:51.560 Justice Ginsburg ended up becoming a professor and then becoming a Supreme Court advocate.
00:14:56.740 And she was actually one of one of the finest Supreme Court advocates to have ever lived.
00:15:02.080 You know, you know, when it comes to race and issues of equal justice before the law, Thurgood Marshall is really the pioneer of arguing cases to expand to fight racial injustice.
00:15:16.400 Ruth Bader Ginsburg did the same thing when it comes to gender inequality. 1.00
00:15:20.300 And she had a litigation strategy where she would challenge laws that were designed to benefit women, to give special benefits to women. 1.00
00:15:30.020 But she challenged them as being inconsistent with the Constitution's equal protection clause that the Constitution, she would argue, mandated that you treat men and women the same.
00:15:40.120 And she really pioneered a transformation in law that that that I got to say, as as the father of two daughters, I'm really proud that we have moved away from legal discrimination and and and and and separate standards for men and women.
00:15:56.980 And Justice Ginsburg, as an advocate, played a critical role in that.
00:16:00.800 Hearing this sort of personal account from you is is helping me to bolster my sort of personal like of Justice Ginsburg, because, of course, very famously, she was friends with Antonin Scalia.
00:16:15.060 And for a lot of conservatives, that's enough for us to say, oh, she can't be all that bad.
00:16:18.720 But to hear these personal stories does does bolster that as well.
00:16:22.480 Well, Scalia and Ginsburg really liked each other.
00:16:24.440 And so it was interesting. Scalia was much closer to Ginsburg than, say, he was to Clarence Thomas.
00:16:29.140 Jurisprudentially, they were much closer, but personally, and it was almost it was an almost an odd couple friendship because Scalia was loud and boisterous and brilliant.
00:16:41.820 I mean, Scalia was was an extraordinary person.
00:16:45.700 Ginsburg temperamentally was very quiet.
00:16:48.980 Yeah, she was very prim and proper.
00:16:50.820 She she had the personality almost of a librarian, but she was brilliant.
00:16:55.660 And it was interesting.
00:16:56.780 She and Scalia enjoyed opera together.
00:16:59.140 And they would go to opera.
00:17:00.660 And I think Scalia made her laugh.
00:17:03.000 He was such an an ebullient personality that that she enjoyed him.
00:17:10.020 You know, when I was arguing in front of her, her questions were always careful.
00:17:14.580 They were incisive.
00:17:15.880 She was a dangerous questioner.
00:17:18.960 Most of the big cases that I argued before her, she voted against me, although interestingly enough,
00:17:23.560 one of the bigger cases I argued was Medellin versus Texas, where Texas stood up and fought the world court and the United Nations and the president of the United States.
00:17:33.960 And I argued it twice, won five, four the first time, six, three the second time.
00:17:39.540 The first time I won, the five, four included Justice Ginsburg.
00:17:44.020 She was the necessary fifth vote that if she had voted against the state of Texas, we would have lost. 0.69
00:17:49.020 We lost Sandra Day O'Connor, but we picked up Justice Ginsburg as our fifth vote.
00:17:53.820 And that was very important for the court ultimately striking down the world court and the president's overreach of power.
00:18:00.960 However, I can tell you another Ginsburg story, which is one of the cases I argued before the court was the Texas redistricting case.
00:18:10.360 And you may remember that that about 15 years ago, there was some news about Justice Ginsburg falling asleep at oral argument.
00:18:19.780 And it made the papers all over the place.
00:18:21.980 Well, here's a bit of trivia.
00:18:24.640 The lawyer at the podium when she fell asleep was me.
00:18:30.160 You're kidding.
00:18:31.620 It was the Texas redistricting case.
00:18:34.260 It was it was an afternoon argument, which is unusual.
00:18:36.580 Normally arguments are in the morning.
00:18:37.900 This argument was from one to three p.m.
00:18:40.580 So it was double the length of a normal argument.
00:18:43.740 And and so I argued for 50 minutes and she put her head down and she was out for a good 20 minutes. 0.99
00:18:52.560 I mean, she was asleep.
00:18:54.200 Um, and and and at the time when I was teaching a class on Supreme Court litigation at University of Texas Law School.
00:19:03.140 So I came back the next week to my class and my students were cracking up laughing.
00:19:08.600 I mean, this is made news that Justice Ginsburg had fallen asleep.
00:19:11.820 And I told her I said, look, you know, I told my students, I said, listen, that's really what every advocate aspires to.
00:19:19.560 To render your adjudicator unconscious.
00:19:23.100 Yeah, that's through the power of your arguments.
00:19:25.940 Well, I joke there's a way you do it, which which is you speak in a soporific tone and you gently rock side by side and you just knock them right out.
00:19:37.100 And interestingly enough, in that case, Justice Ginsburg did not need to be awake to vote against me.
00:19:42.480 She voted in dissent.
00:19:43.420 Fortunately, I won the case five four, but she was on the dissenting side.
00:19:47.660 One other Ginsburg story I'll tell. 0.98
00:19:50.160 Yeah.
00:19:51.000 When I started my career as a law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the chief liked Justice Ginsburg.
00:19:58.580 He thought she was a very careful lawyer.
00:20:01.040 And if there was a case whose legal outcome the chief didn't like, but he was in the majority and there were some instances where the votes on the court were with the left and the chief would be with the majority.
00:20:16.320 Justice Ginsburg was the liberal justice he most liked to assign the opinion to because she was a very careful lawyer. 0.99
00:20:26.560 And so if there's a particular issue that he may have not been thrilled with the legal outcome, he knew that she would just resolve that narrow issue before the court and wouldn't write this this undisciplined opinion.
00:20:41.060 You know, it would be interesting.
00:20:42.520 Justice Souter, who was on the court, if he had a majority opinion, he could drop footnotes that would wreak havoc to whole other areas of law.
00:20:51.740 Right.
00:20:52.400 And Ginsburg wouldn't do that.
00:20:54.320 She would focus on the issue.
00:20:55.700 So Ginsburg, by far, was who the chief most liked to assign it to if it was going to be someone from from the left on the court.
00:21:02.680 Well, this brings us to a mailbag question that that's came out to me, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it.
00:21:08.820 This is from Rogue Millennial, who says, obviously, so much of the debate over Justice Ginsburg's old seat and filling the vacancy comes down to Roe v. Wade.
00:21:19.800 It comes down to abortion, and Rogue Millennial asks, if a conservative majority SCOTUS considers overturning Roe v. Wade, is the wiser path to overturn it simply and return legislative power to the states?
00:21:32.140 Or should they or would they seek to go further and to rule on the 14th Amendment as protecting the unborn regardless of state laws?
00:21:41.940 So that's a very savvy question, and it's important to highlight what Roe v. Wade did because a lot of people don't know.
00:21:50.500 I mean they know – they've heard of the case.
00:21:52.800 They know it has to do with abortion, but they don't actually understand what Roe v. Wade did.
00:21:56.900 So Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.
00:22:00.440 Prior to Roe v. Wade, abortion was a state law matter, and each state had different laws on abortion.
00:22:06.460 Some states were quite permissive with it.
00:22:08.400 Some states were quite restrictive with it.
00:22:10.600 What the Supreme Court did with Roe v. Wade is largely took it out of the hands of the elected legislatures.
00:22:18.040 So if Roe v. Wade were overturned, it wouldn't suddenly make abortion illegal.
00:22:25.080 What it would do is return the decision to the states, and what we would see as a practical matter is different standards, again, state by state.
00:22:33.380 So you're right now in California.
00:22:36.940 Nobody thinks there's any possibility the California legislature would act to restrict abortion.
00:22:42.680 That would be true in a number of the blue states.
00:22:45.900 New York.
00:22:46.300 In other states, New York, California.
00:22:49.520 In other states, you would see far more significant limitations put in place.
00:22:54.440 And, you know, there's a virtue to that, which is Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis talked about the 50 states as laboratories of democracy.
00:23:04.000 What you would see is abortion laws that reflect the values of the citizens of each state.
00:23:10.800 And, as you know, I've got a book coming out, One Vote Away.
00:23:15.360 It's all about the Supreme Court.
00:23:17.120 And, by the way, I announced news just this week, which we've moved up the release of the book by a week.
00:23:24.260 It was coming out October 6th.
00:23:26.140 It's now coming out a week from today, September 29th.
00:23:29.680 It's called One Vote Away, and it has an entire chapter on abortion and Roe v. Wade and partial birth abortion laws because one of the cases that I litigated, I represented the states as amici, as friends of the court, defending the federal partial birth abortion law.
00:23:50.620 So, the federal law banning partial birth abortion, the court upheld that 5-4.
00:23:57.560 We're one vote away.
00:23:59.160 If Joe Biden gets one more justice to replace one of the more conservative justices, we're one vote away from the Supreme Court concluding that every limitation on abortion is unconstitutional.
00:24:11.740 That partial birth abortion is allowed, that no parental consent, no parental notification, that taxpayer funding is mandatory.
00:24:21.580 You know, we talked about challenges to elections in Bush v. Gore.
00:24:26.600 I've got an entire chapter talking about Bush v. Gore and preserving democracy.
00:24:31.740 Bush v. Gore was 5-4.
00:24:33.480 Had there been only eight justices, that decision could have deadlocked 8-8 and instead of lasting, or 4-4 rather, and had that happened instead of lasting 36 days, Bush v. Gore could have lasted months and months and months.
00:24:50.940 And so, the book, One Vote Away, every chapter talks about a different constitutional right.
00:24:56.280 You can preorder it right now.
00:24:58.100 The website is onevoteaway.com.
00:25:00.160 It could not be more timely, and people should certainly go out and go read One Vote Away.
00:25:06.540 And, Senator, you should probably get back to the Capitol and work on this issue of making sure that that vote goes into the hands of a good constitutionalist.
00:25:14.500 Senator, thank you as always.
00:25:15.800 In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
00:25:17.560 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
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