Verdict with Ted Cruz - August 30, 2025


Trump DEI Spending Win, Cracker Barrel Pulls the Plug on Rebrand & Panama Canal at Risk by Far Reaching China Week In Review

Topics
DEI grants termination reverse migration shutting down Panama Canal
Hosted by
Ted Cruz
Mentioned
Donald Trump Cracker Barrel Verdict Ben Ferguson Bud Light Amy Coney Barrett Jennifer Stewart Caitlin Clark Sardar Big Laurie Justice Kavanaugh MD Anderson Red Lobster Sotomayor Roberts Jackson Thomas Bukali Kagan Alito Nemo
Inside El Salvador's CECOT Prison for MS-13 Gang Members, plus Stopping China from Having Control of the Panama Canal On the Road in Mexico Urging the Mexican Government to get Serious about Defeating Cartels plus Dems Bemoan Trump's Fighting Violent Crime

Episode Stats


Length

30 minutes

Words per minute

161.85

Word count

4,880

Sentence count

309

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Ted Cruz is on a trip to Latin America and is in the Panama Canal. First up, the Supreme Court allows Donald Trump to axe $783 million worth of Department of Education (DEI) grants. Also, Cracker Barrel reverses course and saves the brand. And finally, Senator Cruz is in Latin America, and what he s seeing is truly unbelievable.

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.
00:00:02.620 Guaranteed human.
00:00:04.440 Welcome, it is Verdict with Ted Cruz Weekend Review.
00:00:07.320 Ben Ferguson with you, and these are the stories you may have missed that we talked about this week.
00:00:11.620 First up, the Supreme Court allowing Donald Trump to axe DEI grants.
00:00:17.500 This is a big move, and it can save you a lot of money.
00:00:20.800 I'll have those details in a moment.
00:00:22.600 Also, Cracker Barrel, they reversed course, well, pretty quickly.
00:00:26.900 But was it quick enough to save the brand?
00:00:29.100 We'll talk about that.
00:00:30.900 And finally, Senator Cruz is on a codel to Latin America.
00:00:35.200 What he's seeing is truly unbelievable, especially in the prison system.
00:00:39.160 And some news from the Panama Canal as well.
00:00:42.600 It's the Weekend Review, and it starts right now.
00:00:46.120 I want to move to another big story as well, and this is one that is not going to get a lot of media attention.
00:00:51.120 So I hope everyone listening will actually pay attention to this.
00:00:53.820 Because it was a big victory from the Supreme Court, allowing Donald Trump to axe millions of dollars, Senator, in funding for DEI-related grants.
00:01:03.380 This is huge.
00:01:05.540 It is.
00:01:07.400 So it was a 5-4 vote, and it allowed the Trump administration to terminate $783 million worth of grants.
00:01:16.380 They're grants from the National Institute of Health.
00:01:18.200 And they were canceled because of the administration's policy positions on diversity, equity, and inclusion in gender ideology.
00:01:28.160 And the Trump administration quite reasonably said, we're not going to give away $783 million for DEI.
00:01:37.240 And these were awards that were studying all sorts of ideological objectives.
00:01:43.800 And in many instances, these were awards that were granted because of the researchers' race.
00:01:49.660 They made that a criterion.
00:01:50.720 And, listen, I've got to say, there is an important role for scientific and medical research.
00:01:58.140 NIH does good work.
00:02:00.340 And, you know, early in the Trump administration, I was flying from D.C. back to Houston, and a woman came up to me on the plane.
00:02:06.840 And she said she was a cancer researcher at MD Anderson.
00:02:10.120 And she said she was very worried about funding getting cut, and she wanted to express that to me.
00:02:15.920 And I said, listen, thank you for the work you do.
00:02:18.340 MD Anderson is incredible.
00:02:19.660 They do phenomenal work fighting cancer.
00:02:23.320 And I said everyone, or at least everyone with any sense, agrees that we ought to be doing cancer research.
00:02:28.680 And part of the reason, a big part of the reason, you want to scrutinize and you want to cut out wasteful expenditures,
00:02:36.120 things like funding, you know, transgender education in Guatemala, which was one of the USAID grants that the administration canceled,
00:02:45.000 is so that you can spend the money where it actually should be spent.
00:02:49.320 And so $783 million in NIH grants that is not actually going to disease and curing disease and helping people who are suffering,
00:02:58.720 but instead are granted based on ideology, that is an absolute waste and it is wrong.
00:03:04.040 But I got to tell you, the ruling from the court was only 5-4.
00:03:09.480 It was very narrow, and it had a bit of a complicated lineup.
00:03:17.280 So four justices dissented.
00:03:20.260 The four who dissented were Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kagan, and Justice Jackson.
00:03:28.140 So you had the chief justice plus the four liberals.
00:03:30.340 Now, you had four conservatives, Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, and Justice Kavanaugh,
00:03:38.700 who would have granted the Trump administration's request entirely.
00:03:43.660 And so what happened was plaintiffs had their grants canceled.
00:03:48.660 They went and filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts because, of course, in this lawfare,
00:03:53.500 they deliberately seek out left-wing judges in extreme left-wing jurisdictions.
00:03:57.340 And so Massachusetts and San Francisco have been incredibly popular places for left-wing attorneys general and radical groups to file lawsuits.
00:04:07.660 And the district judge, what the district judge did is two things.
00:04:10.780 Number one, vacated the guidance that the Trump administration had issued saying they were not going to give funding to DEI.
00:04:18.300 Secondly, and then secondly, the district court ordered the Trump administration give the $783 million to these grant recipients.
00:04:28.300 That 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.
00:04:36.940 Now, it went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court 5-4 said,
00:04:41.280 no, you do not have to give the money.
00:04:44.260 So the $783 million, the Trump administration is holding on to it.
00:04:49.060 And the deciding vote on this was Justice Amy Coney Barrett,
00:04:54.020 who voted with the liberals on part of the case and the conservatives on part of the case.
00:05:00.200 So she voted with the conservatives on, you don't have to give the money.
00:05:04.920 And the basis for it, by the way, is what the five justices said, is the lawsuit was filed in the wrong place.
00:05:13.240 That the lawsuit should have been filed in the Court of Federal Claims,
00:05:17.520 which is where if you have a breach of contract case against the federal government,
00:05:21.720 if you have a contract and they broke it, under federal law, the place to bring that case is the Court of Federal Claims.
00:05:28.500 It's a specialized court that exists to adjudicate breach of contract cases against the government.
00:05:34.460 They did not bring this in the Court of Federal Claims.
00:05:36.580 They brought it just in an ordinary federal district court.
00:05:39.380 So 5-4, the court said, wrong court, they don't have jurisdiction to decide this,
00:05:43.960 so they don't have to give the money.
00:05:46.680 Now, Justice Barrett sided with the liberals in refusing to reverse the district courts vacating the guidance on DEI.
00:05:59.260 So the guidance on DEI is currently blocked, although that lawsuit will continue, so it's not necessarily permanently blocked.
00:06:09.000 And she declined to have the Supreme Court reverse that decision.
00:06:13.320 And so this was, at the end of the day, this really should have been 9-0.
00:06:19.620 But I'm glad it was at least 5-4 the right way, because that means that this money doesn't have to go out the door.
00:06:25.160 Yeah, it's certainly big that it didn't have to go out the door.
00:06:28.180 Moving forward, does this also have some sort of precedent that the president will be harassed maybe a little bit less?
00:06:34.600 Or do you think Democrats say, we'll harass no matter what, we'll argue wherever we can, a liberal court we can find,
00:06:40.400 and that will at least slow him down?
00:06:42.480 Yeah, look, the Democrats are going to keep trying, and the left-wing activist groups are going to keep trying.
00:06:47.360 This is their next generation of lawfare, just like before when they indicted him four times.
00:06:54.040 That was an effort to use the courts, to use law enforcement to stop President Trump, but also to stop the voters from re-electing him.
00:07:01.000 They failed in that.
00:07:02.340 This is now their effort, and it is relentless.
00:07:04.840 Every day of the Trump presidency, he's going to be sued.
00:07:07.560 The administration is going to be sued.
00:07:09.020 I 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.
00:07:21.640 That was important.
00:07:22.980 And this decision is important, and I will say Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Kavanaugh, wrote a concurring opinion that was significant.
00:07:31.620 Here's what Justice Gorsuch said.
00:07:32.880 Quote, lower court decisions may sometimes disagree with this court's decision.
00:07:39.020 But they are never free to defy them.
00:07:42.840 In 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.
00:07:55.960 The 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.
00:08:12.500 Rather 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.
00:08:24.580 As 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.
00:08:41.400 That was error.
00:08:45.780 In 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.
00:08:58.160 True enough.
00:08:58.680 But this court often addresses requests for interim relief, sometimes pending a writ of certiorari, as in California.
00:09:05.660 And either way, when this court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.
00:09:16.360 He 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.
00:09:26.500 But two months ago, another district court tried to, quote, compel compliance with a different order that this court had stayed.
00:09:36.860 Still 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.
00:09:50.280 So 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.
00:10:03.880 All these interventions should have been unnecessary.
00:10:07.580 But together, they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system.
00:10:12.120 Whatever their own views, judges are duty bound to respect the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress.
00:10:24.140 Look, this highlights a pattern we're seeing of lawless district judges.
00:10:29.340 That is, Justice Gorsuch and Kavanaugh lay out.
00:10:32.400 Three in just three weeks that have defied the Supreme Court of the United States.
00:10:36.560 Said we don't care what the court said.
00:10:39.220 And, you know, it was striking.
00:10:40.420 Look, I'm reading from a Supreme Court opinion, and some of that sounds like legalese.
00:10:44.300 But 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.
00:10:57.540 Well, a dissent, by definition, means you lost.
00:11:01.080 You did not get the majority.
00:11:02.300 The majority issues the opinion.
00:11:05.080 A dissent is someone who disagrees with the opinion.
00:11:07.280 And 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.
00:11:20.300 So if you are citing a dissent, you are saying right on the front of it, I don't care what the majority held.
00:11:27.480 I agree with the dissenters.
00:11:29.380 No lower court judge has the authority to do that.
00:11:32.520 That is the definition of lawlessness, and it is why these plaintiffs are seeking out radicals on the bench who they know will be lawless.
00:11:42.680 Now, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation, you can go back and listen to the full podcast from earlier this week.
00:11:49.500 Canadian women are looking for more, more out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around them. 0.98
00:11:56.440 And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:12:00.140 I'm Jennifer Stewart.
00:12:01.360 And I'm Catherine Clark.
00:12:02.580 And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.
00:12:06.340 Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.
00:12:12.060 So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:12:15.060 Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:12:21.300 Now on to story number two.
00:12:23.920 Yeah, well, look, we saw an illustration of this with Cracker Barrel.
00:12:27.180 Cracker Barrel is a terrific institution, particularly in the South.
00:12:31.160 And their woke leadership decided that everything the company was built on, they didn't like.
00:12:35.940 And in particular, they didn't like their customers.
00:12:38.680 You know, their customers, they thought were not nearly as enlightened as they should be.
00:12:43.460 They were not nearly as woke as they should be.
00:12:45.860 And the whole thing was very reminiscent of Bud Light.
00:12:48.580 You know, Bud Light, you had a marketing executive who said, you know, the people who buy Bud Light, we don't like them.
00:12:54.240 We need to have, you know, a bunch of woke transgender activists drinking our beer instead. 1.00
00:13:00.400 It 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.
00:13:22.900 That 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.
00:13:31.440 This is a phenomenon of business leaders who buy into an ideology that is wildly unpopular and ultimately directly antithetical to their customers.
00:13:46.080 And 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.
00:13:57.080 And we'll just have anodyne words because we're really embarrassed that we're for anything nostalgic, anything that is Americana.
00:14:07.160 And the pushback has been phenomenal.
00:14:10.600 Their stock price has tanked, just like Bud Light, just like Target.
00:14:14.660 And just today they announced, never mind, okay, yeah, this has not worked well, the beatings are really hurting, so we're going to stop.
00:14:24.740 But it is striking that it took the reaction of the market for them to figure it out.
00:14:32.860 I 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.
00:14:47.140 Yeah, I think the frustration of conservatives now voting with our dollars, and that is what ultimately this came down to with Cracker Barrel.
00:14:55.460 This was a bunch of Americans that said, okay, you despise us, you despise, you know, who we are as a customer base.
00:15:05.060 You're basically telling us you don't want us anymore.
00:15:07.740 Watch this.
00:15:09.460 And that is exactly how they got to this point very quickly. 1.00
00:15:13.100 And 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, 0.99
00:15:19.440 they 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. 0.98
00:15:27.840 And we're starting to finally, I think, see the pendulum swing back the other way, which is really, really cool.
00:15:34.040 I 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.
00:15:45.340 And I'll tell you, I jumped in on Twitter, I retweeted him, I said, this is absolutely right.
00:15:50.020 And the two of us were very vocal saying, go back to where you were.
00:15:53.940 And 24 hours later, they did so.
00:15:56.120 That was gratifying.
00:15:57.480 It's not always that people listen, they listen to common sense.
00:16:01.020 In this case, they did.
00:16:02.580 And it's worth noting, it isn't just in the last week that people noticed that what Cracker Barrel was doing was nuts.
00:16:12.020 Almost 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.
00:16:27.120 He 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.
00:16:40.280 And he continued, the day Cracker Barrel opened, it was already old.
00:16:46.660 Its theme derived from the 1920s.
00:16:50.160 And he wrote, I am concerned that not only will the remodel not work, but it could actually damage the brand further.
00:16:59.280 These decisions are taking us down the same path, I believe, as Ruby Tuesday, Red Lobster, TGI Fridays and the like.
00:17:06.420 Let me make my position clear.
00:17:09.120 The company's $700 million remodel plan will not work.
00:17:16.620 And he called in a letter to the shareholders in October of 2024, the board's transformation plan, quote, obvious folly.
00:17:25.760 And yet the corporate leadership ignored the shareholder owned 5% of the company.
00:17:31.260 And 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.
00:17:44.460 And by the way, the entire marketing world, much of that is a scam of left-wing woke people who despise their customers.
00:17:53.420 And 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.
00:17:59.400 But in this instance, Cracker Barrel should have listened to its investor and not these marketing execs.
00:18:05.420 And it paid the price.
00:18:06.420 But the good news is they finally, finally, finally listened and reversed and said, you know what?
00:18:12.540 The principles we were founded on, the principles America was founded on, those principles are pretty good.
00:18:18.160 We're going to get back to them.
00:18:19.420 Yeah, it's incredible.
00:18:20.760 All right.
00:18:21.040 Final question for you.
00:18:22.340 You've got day one in the books of the Codell.
00:18:24.700 You're going to be down there and also doing more.
00:18:28.400 We're going to be able to talk about that coming up on the next episode of Verdict.
00:18:32.340 That's right.
00:18:33.320 This is a multi-day trip and we're traveling to two other countries throughout Latin America.
00:18:38.400 And 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.
00:18:48.980 They impact our national security.
00:18:50.820 They impact our economy.
00:18:52.340 By the way, I had dinner tonight with the economy minister here in El Salvador.
00:18:56.160 They're very focused on American investment, on energy, on technology, on pharmaceuticals, on creating jobs.
00:19:04.460 And by the way, to give a sense of how much these changes matter, I'm going to give you two stats to wrap up with.
00:19:11.180 The justice minister told me they've had over 10,000 applications for people who want to be police officers.
00:19:17.640 Suddenly, people are eager to be police officers because it's making a difference because they're making their community safe.
00:19:24.440 Previously, when the gangs were running the country, they had in one year over 300 police officers murdered.
00:19:30.880 Being a police officer was literally taking your life and your family's life in danger.
00:19:36.280 Now people are lining up to be police officers because they see the difference.
00:19:39.760 But here's something else.
00:19:41.560 It used to be that the people of El Salvador were fleeing this country because, look, you were risking being murdered.
00:19:47.120 Your kids were risking being murdered.
00:19:49.060 You wanted to get out.
00:19:50.000 Now we are seeing reverse migration.
00:19:54.100 There are roughly 6 million Salvadorans in El Salvador.
00:19:57.380 There are about 3 million Salvadorans in the United States.
00:20:01.240 President Bukali told me roughly half of those Salvadorans in America, about 1.5 million, have said they want to come back to El Salvador.
00:20:09.960 They're seeing reverse migration because suddenly people are saying, wait, I fled my country because I was terrified for my safety and my family.
00:20:17.080 Now the country is safe.
00:20:19.160 I want to come back.
00:20:20.220 I love the beach and the mountains and the people and the culture.
00:20:23.980 That is changing this country.
00:20:26.500 And it ought to be an encouragement to any other leader, to any mayor, to anyone facing crime and challenges.
00:20:34.260 When you fix these problems, it doesn't just keep people safe, which it does, but it has economic benefits.
00:20:40.840 It literally transforms your community.
00:20:44.240 That's inspirational.
00:20:45.180 And as I said, this is the beginning of a multi-day trip throughout Latin America.
00:20:49.600 So in two days, we'll report on the rest of the trip.
00:20:52.500 As 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.
00:21:01.260 Canadian women are looking for more. 1.00
00:21:03.400 More out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around them.
00:21:07.520 And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:21:11.220 I'm Jennifer Stewart.
00:21:12.180 And I'm Catherine Clark.
00:21:13.760 And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.
00:21:17.500 Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.
00:21:23.200 So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:21:26.420 Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:21:30.460 I want to get back to the big story, number three of the week you may have missed.
00:21:36.640 All right, Senator, you're on this Codown Latin America.
00:21:39.100 One 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.
00:21:49.060 It's been a big concern.
00:21:50.420 Talk about that.
00:21:51.200 Yeah, so I spent a day and a half in Panama.
00:21:55.200 I 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.
00:22:09.960 And I will say, number one, Panama is a beautiful country.
00:22:15.420 It is a gorgeous place.
00:22:19.320 And the people of Panama have a deep affinity for America.
00:22:23.400 I was struck by that.
00:22:26.760 Repeatedly, the government officials, the Panamanians that I visited with, there's a long history and a close, close affinity for the United States.
00:22:37.140 The Panama Canal is amazing.
00:22:39.880 So 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.
00:23:01.180 It is amazing.
00:23:02.400 It is very, like, it is very cool, number one, just how the Panama Canal operates.
00:23:09.260 Like, 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.
00:23:21.580 I 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.
00:23:35.440 Like, it's that big.
00:23:36.560 And 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.
00:23:48.220 So 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.
00:23:59.640 You'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.
00:24:06.000 And 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.
00:24:16.260 And it's lowering 27 feet, and it goes to the next lock, and it lowers another, I believe it's 27 feet.
00:24:21.560 All 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.
00:24:33.700 And both the Atlantic and Pacific are about the same distance.
00:24:37.700 To lower the water 27 feet takes eight to ten minutes.
00:24:43.500 And so the water goes down, and then the giant gates open.
00:24:47.300 It was amazing to watch the technology.
00:24:50.200 I saw the old control room.
00:24:52.420 I saw the control room where the lock is being operated.
00:24:54.900 The old control room.
00:24:56.340 So the Panama Canal was built in 1914.
00:24:58.780 The United States built it.
00:25:00.600 And we lost thousands and thousands of lives building it.
00:25:04.860 It's an incredible engineering marvel.
00:25:07.740 So the old control room had these brass GE equipment.
00:25:14.480 You saw the old GE, General Electric.
00:25:16.600 They built one of the first early computers to help operate the locks.
00:25:24.500 It's amazing.
00:25:25.380 Now, now it's all computerized and high-tech.
00:25:27.280 So the old brass controls of each lock that gives you the water height.
00:25:32.780 And 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.
00:25:44.940 When 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.
00:26:00.480 And it's right there.
00:26:02.600 And they have cranes.
00:26:04.320 They're right there in a position.
00:26:06.420 There is also, China is building a bridge, a bridge across the canal.
00:26:12.860 It is a bridge for cars.
00:26:15.060 They were awarded the contract to build the bridge.
00:26:18.960 China is also, there's a Chinese company that is digging a tunnel under the canal for a metro train.
00:26:26.200 And so I saw, I saw where the metro was going to go.
00:26:30.000 I saw the bridge being built.
00:26:31.320 And it's all right there at the mouth of the canal.
00:26:34.580 And, 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.
00:26:46.400 It is too important to the United States, to our national security, to our economic security.
00:26:52.640 As you know, I'm the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
00:26:56.280 The Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over the Panama Canal.
00:26:59.940 And so earlier this year, I chaired a hearing on the Panama Canal in the Commerce Committee.
00:27:06.300 And, and we laid out the concerns, in particular, the concerns of China.
00:27:11.520 And, 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.
00:27:25.320 And, and President Xi has repeatedly said he wants to invade Taiwan.
00:27:29.720 If he does so, there's a very real possibility that escalates into a military conflict with the United States.
00:27:36.340 If 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.
00:27:50.340 Because 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.
00:28:01.960 Because it forces our military ships instead to go around the southern tip of South America rather than cut through the canal.
00:28:08.480 And 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.
00:28:25.480 And 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.
00:28:39.100 And, 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.
00:28:45.720 Because 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.
00:28:55.420 And, 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.
00:29:12.620 That 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. 1.00
00:29:25.040 Do 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.
00:29:36.280 And 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.
00:29:46.280 As 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.
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