00:00:30.900And finally, Senator Cruz is on a codel to Latin America.
00:00:35.200What he's seeing is truly unbelievable, especially in the prison system.
00:00:39.160And some news from the Panama Canal as well.
00:00:42.600It's the Weekend Review, and it starts right now.
00:00:46.120I want to move to another big story as well, and this is one that is not going to get a lot of media attention.
00:00:51.120So I hope everyone listening will actually pay attention to this.
00:00:53.820Because it was a big victory from the Supreme Court, allowing Donald Trump to axe millions of dollars, Senator, in funding for DEI-related grants.
00:03:20.260The four who dissented were Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kagan, and Justice Jackson.
00:03:28.140So you had the chief justice plus the four liberals.
00:03:30.340Now, you had four conservatives, Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, and Justice Kavanaugh,
00:03:38.700who would have granted the Trump administration's request entirely.
00:03:43.660And so what happened was plaintiffs had their grants canceled.
00:03:48.660They went and filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts because, of course, in this lawfare,
00:03:53.500they deliberately seek out left-wing judges in extreme left-wing jurisdictions.
00:03:57.340And so Massachusetts and San Francisco have been incredibly popular places for left-wing attorneys general and radical groups to file lawsuits.
00:04:07.660And the district judge, what the district judge did is two things.
00:04:10.780Number one, vacated the guidance that the Trump administration had issued saying they were not going to give funding to DEI.
00:04:18.300Secondly, and then secondly, the district court ordered the Trump administration give the $783 million to these grant recipients.
00:04:28.300That went up on appeal to the Court of Appeals, and the Court of Appeals agreed with the district court and, again, ordered the Trump administration give the money.
00:04:36.940Now, it went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court 5-4 said,
00:04:41.280no, you do not have to give the money.
00:04:44.260So the $783 million, the Trump administration is holding on to it.
00:04:49.060And the deciding vote on this was Justice Amy Coney Barrett,
00:04:54.020who voted with the liberals on part of the case and the conservatives on part of the case.
00:05:00.200So she voted with the conservatives on, you don't have to give the money.
00:05:04.920And the basis for it, by the way, is what the five justices said, is the lawsuit was filed in the wrong place.
00:05:13.240That the lawsuit should have been filed in the Court of Federal Claims,
00:05:17.520which is where if you have a breach of contract case against the federal government,
00:05:21.720if you have a contract and they broke it, under federal law, the place to bring that case is the Court of Federal Claims.
00:05:28.500It's a specialized court that exists to adjudicate breach of contract cases against the government.
00:05:34.460They did not bring this in the Court of Federal Claims.
00:05:36.580They brought it just in an ordinary federal district court.
00:05:39.380So 5-4, the court said, wrong court, they don't have jurisdiction to decide this,
00:07:02.340This is now their effort, and it is relentless.
00:07:04.840Every day of the Trump presidency, he's going to be sued.
00:07:07.560The administration is going to be sued.
00:07:09.020I will say the Supreme Court, we talked about this in an earlier podcast, it has made important steps to rein in the abuse of nationwide or so-called universal injunctions.
00:07:22.980And this decision is important, and I will say Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Kavanaugh, wrote a concurring opinion that was significant.
00:07:42.840In Department of Education v. California, this court granted a stay because it found the government likely to prevail in showing that the district court lacked jurisdiction to order the government to pay grant obligations.
00:07:55.960The California decision explained that, quote, suits based on any express or implied contract with the United States do not belong in district court under the Administrative Procedure Act, but in the Court of Federal Claims under the Tucker Act.
00:08:12.500Rather than follow that direction, the district court in this case permitted a suit involving materially identical grants to proceed to final judgment under the APA.
00:08:24.580As support for its course, the district court invoked the, quote, persuasive authority of the dissents in California and an earlier court of appeals decision that California repudiated.
00:08:45.780In casting California aside, the district court stressed that the court there granted only interim relief pending appeal and a writ of certiorari and did not issue a final judgment on the merits.
00:08:58.680But this court often addresses requests for interim relief, sometimes pending a writ of certiorari, as in California.
00:09:05.660And either way, when this court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.
00:09:16.360He went on to say, quote, if the district court's failure to abide by California were a one off, perhaps it would not be worth writing to address it.
00:09:26.500But two months ago, another district court tried to, quote, compel compliance with a different order that this court had stayed.
00:09:36.860Still another district court recently diverged from one of this court's decisions, even though the case at hand did not differ in any pertinent respect from the one this court had decided.
00:09:50.280So now this is the third time in a matter of weeks, this court has had to intercede in a case squarely controlled by one of its precedents.
00:10:03.880All these interventions should have been unnecessary.
00:10:07.580But together, they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system.
00:10:12.120Whatever their own views, judges are duty bound to respect the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress.
00:10:24.140Look, this highlights a pattern we're seeing of lawless district judges.
00:10:29.340That is, Justice Gorsuch and Kavanaugh lay out.
00:10:32.400Three in just three weeks that have defied the Supreme Court of the United States.
00:10:36.560Said we don't care what the court said.
00:10:40.420Look, I'm reading from a Supreme Court opinion, and some of that sounds like legalese.
00:10:44.300But I'll tell you one of the most amazing things that Justice Gorsuch described the district court did is it said it found persuasive the dissents in the California decision.
00:10:57.540Well, a dissent, by definition, means you lost.
00:11:05.080A dissent is someone who disagrees with the opinion.
00:11:07.280And the way precedent works, the way our judicial system works, is a decision that it issues from the Supreme Court is a precedent that all of the district courts and all of the courts of appeals are bound to follow.
00:11:20.300So if you are citing a dissent, you are saying right on the front of it, I don't care what the majority held.
00:12:23.920Yeah, well, look, we saw an illustration of this with Cracker Barrel.
00:12:27.180Cracker Barrel is a terrific institution, particularly in the South.
00:12:31.160And their woke leadership decided that everything the company was built on, they didn't like.
00:12:35.940And in particular, they didn't like their customers.
00:12:38.680You know, their customers, they thought were not nearly as enlightened as they should be.
00:12:43.460They were not nearly as woke as they should be.
00:12:45.860And the whole thing was very reminiscent of Bud Light.
00:12:48.580You know, Bud Light, you had a marketing executive who said, you know, the people who buy Bud Light, we don't like them.
00:12:54.240We need to have, you know, a bunch of woke transgender activists drinking our beer instead.
00:13:00.400It was reminiscent of what happened with Target where they decided to market, you know, to market to transgender toddlers and do it prominently pushing, pushing bathing suits for two-year-old boys to tuck their genitals to hide them away to pretend they're not boys.
00:13:22.900That was Target thinking, this is really what America wants, because, you know, if you're the parent of a two-year-old, clearly you want your son to believe he's a daughter when he's two.
00:13:31.440This is a phenomenon of business leaders who buy into an ideology that is wildly unpopular and ultimately directly antithetical to their customers.
00:13:46.080And so Cracker Barrel had a logo, had a logo of, you know, an old guy sitting on a chair next to a giant barrel, and they decided, okay, let's get rid of the cracker, let's get rid of the barrel, let's get rid of it all.
00:13:57.080And we'll just have anodyne words because we're really embarrassed that we're for anything nostalgic, anything that is Americana.
00:14:10.600Their stock price has tanked, just like Bud Light, just like Target.
00:14:14.660And just today they announced, never mind, okay, yeah, this has not worked well, the beatings are really hurting, so we're going to stop.
00:14:24.740But it is striking that it took the reaction of the market for them to figure it out.
00:14:32.860I want to say, though, it is a great, great victory for common sense that Cracker Barrel finally gave in and said, you know what, we're going to stop being woke because we'd like to actually have one or two customers when this is all said and done.
00:14:47.140Yeah, I think the frustration of conservatives now voting with our dollars, and that is what ultimately this came down to with Cracker Barrel.
00:14:55.460This was a bunch of Americans that said, okay, you despise us, you despise, you know, who we are as a customer base.
00:15:05.060You're basically telling us you don't want us anymore.
00:15:09.460And that is exactly how they got to this point very quickly.
00:15:13.100And look, I also think when you have people like you and the president who are willing to speak out on this and say, you guys are being stupid,
00:15:19.440they realize how quickly others are like, yeah, us too, like we're going to, you know, we're going to say that we think this is ridiculous.
00:15:27.840And we're starting to finally, I think, see the pendulum swing back the other way, which is really, really cool.
00:15:34.040I was gratified because yesterday President Trump publicly called out Cracker Barrel and said, look, you need to just go back to your old logo, like give this up in the rebranding and accept that you were wrong.
00:15:45.340And I'll tell you, I jumped in on Twitter, I retweeted him, I said, this is absolutely right.
00:15:50.020And the two of us were very vocal saying, go back to where you were.
00:16:02.580And it's worth noting, it isn't just in the last week that people noticed that what Cracker Barrel was doing was nuts.
00:16:12.020Almost a year ago, November of last year, a big investor in Cracker Barrel, a guy named Sardar Big Laurie, he owns approximately 5% of the restaurant chain stock.
00:16:27.120He wrote to his fellow shareholders that the Cracker Barrel transformation was a, quote, mistake of misguided executives falling into a textbook trap of overspending on cosmetic remodeling.
00:16:40.280And he continued, the day Cracker Barrel opened, it was already old.
00:17:09.120The company's $700 million remodel plan will not work.
00:17:16.620And he called in a letter to the shareholders in October of 2024, the board's transformation plan, quote, obvious folly.
00:17:25.760And yet the corporate leadership ignored the shareholder owned 5% of the company.
00:17:31.260And they charged down that road anyway and they vaporized roughly 15% of the market cap of the company because they were more interested in listening to woke marketing executives.
00:17:44.460And by the way, the entire marketing world, much of that is a scam of left-wing woke people who despise their customers.
00:17:53.420And let me say, if you're in corporate America, don't listen to marketing executives that don't understand and don't like your customers.
00:17:59.400But in this instance, Cracker Barrel should have listened to its investor and not these marketing execs.
00:18:33.320This is a multi-day trip and we're traveling to two other countries throughout Latin America.
00:18:38.400And the focus is really on meeting with heads of state, meeting with leaders in each of these countries, where the issues directly impact the United States, directly impact Texas.
00:19:54.100There are roughly 6 million Salvadorans in El Salvador.
00:19:57.380There are about 3 million Salvadorans in the United States.
00:20:01.240President Bukali told me roughly half of those Salvadorans in America, about 1.5 million, have said they want to come back to El Salvador.
00:20:09.960They're seeing reverse migration because suddenly people are saying, wait, I fled my country because I was terrified for my safety and my family.
00:20:45.180And as I said, this is the beginning of a multi-day trip throughout Latin America.
00:20:49.600So in two days, we'll report on the rest of the trip.
00:20:52.500As before, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation on this topic, you can go back and download the podcast from early this week to hear the entire thing.
00:21:13.760And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.
00:21:17.500Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.
00:21:23.200So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:21:26.420Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:21:30.460I want to get back to the big story, number three of the week you may have missed.
00:21:36.640All right, Senator, you're on this Codown Latin America.
00:21:39.100One of the other parts of your trip involved going to the Panama Canal and seeing some different things, including a lot that deals with China now.
00:21:51.200Yeah, so I spent a day and a half in Panama.
00:21:55.200I flew from El Salvador to Panama and met with multiple cabinet members, the finance minister, the defense minister, the public safety minister, and the head of the Panama Canal.
00:22:09.960And I will say, number one, Panama is a beautiful country.
00:22:26.760Repeatedly, the government officials, the Panamanians that I visited with, there's a long history and a close, close affinity for the United States.
00:22:39.880So I went out on a boat and went to the outer parts of the Panama Canal, and then I went to one of the locks, and I saw one of the Panamex, like the super tankers coming through, and then also saw a little sailboat coming through, and then a kind of medium-sized container ship coming through.
00:23:02.400It is very, like, it is very cool, number one, just how the Panama Canal operates.
00:23:09.260Like, you see the Panamex, the super tanker, the container ship, is the largest size possible to fit through the Panama Canal, and it's built for that size.
00:23:21.580I mean, it is literally this massive ship that is going through these locks, and these locks have concrete on the side, and it's built so the sides of the ship are within two feet of the concrete walls on both sides.
00:23:36.560And what happens, so we were on the Pacific end of the canal, and a ship comes in, and each of the locks has to lower the ship 27 feet.
00:23:48.220So it comes into the locks, and it's interesting for the big tanker, they connect steel cables to the tanker, and they have locomotives on both sides to help keep the ship right in the center.
00:23:59.640You've got only two feet of clearance on both sides, so it would be really easy for it to smack into the side of the canal.
00:24:06.000And it is in the lock, and then it takes about eight to ten minutes for the water to drain and for it to lower 27 feet.
00:24:16.260And it's lowering 27 feet, and it goes to the next lock, and it lowers another, I believe it's 27 feet.
00:24:21.560All told, it's about, I think it's 81 feet, that it has to rise to get to the height of the lake in the interior, and then it has to lower it to get to the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.
00:24:33.700And both the Atlantic and Pacific are about the same distance.
00:24:37.700To lower the water 27 feet takes eight to ten minutes.
00:24:43.500And so the water goes down, and then the giant gates open.
00:24:47.300It was amazing to watch the technology.
00:25:25.380Now, now it's all computerized and high-tech.
00:25:27.280So the old brass controls of each lock that gives you the water height.
00:25:32.780And it was literally, it almost looked like something Captain Nemo would have in terms of the 1914 levers and switches to operate the canal that's still preserved there.
00:25:44.940When I went out on the boat, one of the things I saw, Ben, is right at the entrance, the Pacific entrance of the canal, there is a gigantic port that is owned and controlled by communist China.
00:26:31.320And it's all right there at the mouth of the canal.
00:26:34.580And, and, and, and I went, the purpose of my visit was, was to meet with the Panamanian government and say, look, China cannot have control of this canal.
00:26:46.400It is too important to the United States, to our national security, to our economic security.
00:26:52.640As you know, I'm the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
00:26:56.280The Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over the Panama Canal.
00:26:59.940And so earlier this year, I chaired a hearing on the Panama Canal in the Commerce Committee.
00:27:06.300And, and we laid out the concerns, in particular, the concerns of China.
00:27:11.520And, and what I laid out to the Panamanian officials, I said, look, if, God forbid, we find ourselves in a military conflict with China, let's say next year, China invades Taiwan.
00:27:25.320And, and President Xi has repeatedly said he wants to invade Taiwan.
00:27:29.720If he does so, there's a very real possibility that escalates into a military conflict with the United States.
00:27:36.340If China is in an active military conflict with the United States, I think the risk is unacceptable that China would try to shut down the Panama Canal.
00:27:50.340Because if they shut down the Panama Canal, it massively delays our ability to move military ships from the Atlantic to the Pacific to engage with the Chinese in Taiwan.
00:28:01.960Because it forces our military ships instead to go around the southern tip of South America rather than cut through the canal.
00:28:08.480And so if you're President Xi, look, you wouldn't do it in time of peace, but, but, but if they're at war, it becomes a, a really compelling situation to say, let's impose massive economic harm on the United States.
00:28:25.480And we get enormous benefits, billions of dollars of, of, of, of, of revenue that comes from shipping, shipping, whether it is, is oil and gas through, through the Panama Canal or goods and containers.
00:28:39.100And, and shutting down the Panama Canal would be a real blow to the United States economy, but it would also be a real blow to our military.
00:28:45.720Because it would limit our ability to move naval ships from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it would massively delay moving that, the, the, the, those ships.
00:28:55.420And, and so I, what I'm pressing Panama, I will say, when I chaired the hearing on the Panama Canal, within a week, they announced the deal to sell those two Chinese ports to, to an American business consortium.
00:29:12.620That deal has not gone through yet. The Chinese are slow walking it. And part of the purpose of my trip was, was to press the, the Panamanian government and say, look, you need to get the Chinese the hell out of here.
00:29:25.040Do not leave them in a position where they can shut down this canal, because shutting down this canal would be an enormous economic and national security blow to the United States, but it would also be an enormous blow to Panama.
00:29:36.280And so part of the case I was making them is their interests and our interests are aligned. They don't want China to be in a position to shut down the canal.
00:29:46.280As always, thank you for listening to Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you. Don't forget to download my podcast and you can listen to my podcast every other day.
00:29:54.780You're not listening to Verdict or each day when you listen to Verdict afterwards.
00:29:57.720I'd love to have you as a listener to, again, the Ben Ferguson podcast, and we will see you back here on Monday morning.
00:30:05.720This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.