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Feb. 3, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
17:26
Ep. 246 - Promise Kept: Trump Picks Gorsuch!
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On Wednesday, the New York Times issued an editorial filled with impotent rage and unexplored angst over President Trump.
Supreme Court nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.
They called Gorsuch's seat a stolen seat since Republicans refused to grant Democrats an up-or-down vote on Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama's nominee to fill Antonin Scalia's seat.
Instead of recognizing that the Constitution gives the Senate the ability to determine whether to vote on a given candidate or not, The Times suggested that Senate Republicans, quote, took an empty Supreme Court seat hostage.
Inaccurate, since usually there's a ransom demand with a hostage, and Republicans didn't have one.
Then, the Times characterized Gorsuch, a man unanimously approved for the Tenth Circuit by a Senate that included Barack Obama and Joe Biden, as extreme.
Of course.
Here's the New York Times, quote, President Obama had a great opportunity to repair some of that damage by nominating a moderate candidate for the vacancy, which was created when Justice Antonin Scalia died last February.
Instead, he chose Neil Gorsuch, a very conservative judge from the Federal Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Whose jurisprudence and writing style are often compared to those of Scalia.
You mean Republicans appointed someone like Scalia to fill his seat?
What horror!
The Times acknowledged that normally they'd have no leg to stand on with regard to complaining about Gorsuch.
But these, they say, are not normal times.
The destructive lesson Senate Republicans taught is that obstruction pays off.
Yes, it does.
That's part of the constitutional system.
And that's not actually a problem.
The give and take, the grind and groan of politics, that's how the system is supposed to work.
If Democrats don't like the outcome, tough!
The Times is actually upset that the Supreme Court may no longer be a super legislature of leftists rewriting the Constitution to fit leftist ends.
Here's their real complaint: "If Judge Gorsuch is confirmed, the court will once again have a majority of justices appointed by a Republican president, as it has for nearly half a century.
For starters, that spells big trouble for public sector unions and environment regulations and women's access to contraception.
If Trump gets a chance to name another justice, the consequences could be much more dire." Or maybe Democrats could stop passing unconstitutional laws and demanding that the Supreme Court greenlight them.
But that would be asking Democrats to, you know, stop being Democrats.
Perhaps the most foolish suggestion from the Times is the notion that Trump should actually govern like Hillary Clinton after beating her.
Why?
Because he refuses to, quote, acknowledge his historic unpopularity and his nearly three million vote loss to Hillary Clinton.
A wiser president faced with such circumstances would govern with humility and respect for the views of all Americans, unquote.
If the situation were reversed, does anyone think the Times would be calling for Hillary to nominate a moderate?
Or would they be pushing for a gung-ho revision of the Constitution by judicial fiat, proclaiming a win is a win?
Look, Trump promised a textualist for the court.
He won.
He fulfilled that promise.
The Senate is doing its job.
The Times is doing its job, too, whining endlessly in incoherent fashion about losing.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Yes, what you're seeing is reality.
That's right.
See, a bet is a bet.
And when I make bets with cultural correspondent Michael Knowles about whether Donald Trump is actually going to appoint a conservative to the court, and then I lose, I fulfill my end of the bet.
Now, all I ask is that if I end up being right when Trump does bad things, then other people recognize that's true.
I am honest.
I was wrong.
I was totally wrong about this.
I said there was zero chance that Trump would nominate a textualist to the court because he didn't really care about the court, and also because Mitch McConnell was not going to invoke the nuclear option.
We'll see about McConnell.
But I have never been happier to be wrong.
Donald Trump's pick of Neil Gorsuch is an excellent, excellent pick.
Good for Donald Trump for proving me wrong.
I hope he continues to do so.
We'll get to all that in a second.
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Okay, so, the big news of the day, of course, is that Donald Trump fulfills his promise.
And as I said, and I will repeat, I got it wrong.
And I am very, very happy that I got it wrong.
I said right after Trump was elected that I would be more than overjoyed if Trump would prove me wrong on things.
And this is something he proved me wrong about.
He went out, then he picked an actual textualist.
And so, in honor of Michael Mulls defeating me in a bet, instead of firing him, which I actually do technically have the power to do, I decided to fulfill my end of the bet.
Also, I know that he was celebrating a Donald Trump executive order that apparently came down last night.
Yeah.
So I'm not going to pay up on all our bets.
So he can just forget about that.
That's not going to happen.
For those who are listening to this later, it's Donald Trump signing an executive order that says I'm going to pay Michael Knowles $800 or $400.
That's not happening.
Again, he should just be happy that he escaped firing for being correct on this.
In any case, we'll start with Judge Gorsuch.
So Judge Donald Trump comes out, and yesterday is a whole bunch of hubbub because it comes down to Thomas Hardiman from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals versus Judge Neil Gorsuch.
Hardiman is from the 7th Circuit, I believe, and Gorsuch is from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.
And so Hardiman has no record.
There's no longstanding kind of judicial philosophy you can attribute to Hardiman.
And Hardiman is recommended by Trump's sisters.
So, all of the signs therefore point to Hardiman.
Instead, he picks Gorsuch.
Very, very smart move.
Smart move for a number of reasons.
Politically, it's very smart because it shores up his base.
You know, Trump's had a chaotic first 10 days, to say the least, and this shores up his base.
I would not be surprised if in the next couple of weeks, Donald Trump starts to push something like a trillion dollar infrastructure package saying, look, I gave you your judge, now give me my infrastructure package.
That would be the smart political move if he wants to triangulate.
So he's pointing that out now.
But you got to be overjoyed if you're a conservative about Judge Gorsuch.
I want to get one other thing out of the way here, and that is everybody is already breaking out the chisels for Rushmore for Trump because of all of this.
Listen, a great thing is a great thing.
I'm wearing the frickin' hat.
What do you want from me?
Okay?
It's terrific.
You know, good things happen, and that's fantastic.
And good for Trump, again, for the ninth time already in the first four minutes of the program.
I was wrong about this.
So good for Donald Trump.
Now, there's a player on the Colorado Rockies last year.
His name is Trevor Story.
In the first three games, he had home runs.
Did he finish with 162 home runs?
Okay, this is one of the mistakes people make in evaluating sports.
Somebody goes on a hot streak and the idea is they're never going to miss again.
Listen, I'm happy to evaluate Donald Trump in two years and determine whether his presidency is a success or a failure.
In the first ten days, so far, it's a wild success.
Obviously.
Okay, so, we'll determine in two years whether it is an overall success or failure.
At that point, Then you will get an ultimate I was wrong from me if I was wrong.
But I'm not going to say that yet because we're 10 days in for God's sake, okay?
Trevor's story is not Babe Ruth.
He finished the season with 27 home runs.
He did not finish with 162 home runs.
But when a good thing happens, a good thing happens.
Okay, so here's Donald.
So Donald Trump does, leading up to this, A lot of people think he is going to do, which is he brings in Hardeman and then he brings in Gorsuch, and then they think there's going to be an actual rose ceremony.
And so the media is all abuzz with this.
And then it turns out that Trump actually does something great, not just picking Gorsuch, doing it in a dignified way.
So he has the ceremony last night where he hands the rose to Gorsuch, basically.
But it's really dignified.
It's really low key.
He does it professionally.
Here's Donald Trump introducing Judge Gorsuch.
When Justice Scalia passed away suddenly last February, I made a promise to the American people.
If I were elected President, I would find the very best judge in the country for the Supreme Court.
I promised to select someone who respects our laws and is representative of our Constitution, and who loves our Constitution, and someone who will interpret them as written.
Okay, I don't know who's writing this stuff for him, but it's great.
Okay, this is all terrific, and again, do I think that Trump deeply cares about this stuff?
No, but I don't care whether he cares about this stuff, since all I care about is the result, right?
I don't care about what his thinking process is.
The result is great, and the result is Judge Gorsuch.
So Gorsuch then comes to the stage, and here's what Gorsuch has to say about the Constitution.
Standing here, in a house of history, and acutely aware of my own imperfections, I pledge that if I am confirmed, I will do all my powers permit to be a faithful servant of the Constitution and laws of this great country.
Okay, and then he continues along those lines by saying that he talks about Justice Scalia, who he was friends with.
He said that he cried when Scalia died.
Here's what he said about Justice Scalia.
The towering judges that have served in this particular seat of the Supreme Court, including Antonin Scalia and Robert Jackson, are much in my mind at this moment.
Justice Scalia was a lion of the law.
And he went on to talk about all the things he liked about Justice Scalia.
Now, here's what you need to know about Gorsuch.
So the reason I'm excited about Gorsuch, and I actually do have a good track record as far as picking Supreme Court judges.
I'm the only person that I know who came out against Justice Roberts because I said that Roberts didn't have enough of a record.
I like Gorsuch.
I think Gorsuch is going to be very much like Alito.
He'll actually be to the right of Alito.
And the reason I say this is because, from what we can tell, from what we can tell based on the best available evidence, this is a guy who actually has a coherent judicial philosophy.
And his judicial philosophy is that you ought to read the Constitution as it was meant, when it was written.
That's his philosophy, which is Scalia's philosophy as well.
He's great on a lot of issues.
He ruled that Obamacare could not stamp on the Little Sisters of the Poor, for example.
He was on the appeals court that ruled that.
Here's what he wrote in that case.
All of us face the problem of complicity.
All of us must answer for ourselves whether and to what degree we are willing to be involved in the wrongdoing of others.
For some, religion provides an essential source of guidance both about what constitutes wrongful conduct and the degree to which those who assist others in committing wrongful conduct themselves bear moral culpability.
This statute violates their faith, representing a degree of complicity their religion disallows.
that the Ten Commandments is not establishment of religion in violation of the Constitution when put in public places, which is obvious.
He's stood in favor of the constitutionality of the death penalty.
He's ruled in favor of strengthened Second Amendment rights.
And here's what he wrote in 2005 at National Review.
Quote, American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers, rather than elected leaders in the ballot box, as the primary means of affecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private school education.
This overweening addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary.
Gorsuch has said, in a lecture just last April, that Scalia's career reminds us of the difference between judges and legislators.
He says judges should not be looking to appeal to their own moral convictions, but instead should apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward.
That's important because very often you see people on the left of the court say that the law is designed to allow judges to look forward.
He's saying we have to focus backward, not forward, looking to the text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be, not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best.
That's a pretty hard slap in that lecture at Justice Roberts, who rewrote the law in Obamacare in order to achieve a result that he thought was best.
In one area, actually, Gorsuch is better than Scalia.
He's not as good a writer as Scalia, because Scalia is one of the great judicial writers of all time, but in one area he's better, and that's what they call Chevron deference.
So Chevron deference, there's a case from 1984, I believe, it's called Chevron, and the basic case was that there was an environmental regulation that was interpreted by the EPA in a certain way, and people sued, and they said the EPA is interpreting this law wrong, and the EPA judged that those people were wrong, so these people went to court and they sued the EPA.
And the EPA said, listen, we're the ones tasked with interpreting the law.
Our interpretation is reasonable.
You don't get to review our interpretation of the law because our interpretation is reasonable.
And the court said, okay.
Gorsuch does something different.
He says, no, that allows for impermissible abdication of duty by Congress.
Because if Congress were to send a law to the EPA saying, we want you to interpret all environmental policy, that doesn't now mean that the EPA gets to be its own legislature.
It's Congress's job to pass laws, it's the executive's branch to implement them, if the executive branch implements them in ways that are not According to what a reasonable definition of the statute would be, then the judiciary can overrule them.
If they don't pick the most reasonable interpretation, the judiciary can overrule them.
In 2016, he said, quote, that the Chevron rule, excuse me, He's also a federalist.
He's a big fan of states' rights.
So, Gorsuch is a terrific pick.
core judicial and legislative power, and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the constitution of the framers' design.
He's also a federalist.
He's a big fan of states' rights.
So Gorsuch is a terrific pick.
I don't see any particular red flags for Gorsuch, as opposed to a lot of the other judges who have been named.
Even Pryor had some red flags.
I think Gorsuch has a cleaner record.
But we'll see.
In the hearings, maybe the red flag will crop up.
But I don't see anything wrong with Gorsuch.
Good for Donald Trump.
This is a home run pick for Donald Trump.
I'm not sure that he could have done any better.
And again, he comes to conclusions, Gorsuch does, based on the law, not based on what he would want the law to be.
Which sometimes means that conservatives aren't going to like the outcome.
But that's not what the Supreme Court is for.
The Supreme Court is not just to get a conservative outcome, it's to get a constitutional outcome.
He voted the right way on Hobby Lobby.
Most important, for Trump's purposes, he was easily confirmed in 2006, he was confirmed unanimously, they didn't even take a roll call vote, they took a voice vote on Gorsuch, which means Obama voted for him, Biden voted for him, they all voted for him.
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So, Republicans, naturally, are responding to all of this with great excitement, as well they should.
So, Ted Cruz comes out, he says Neil Gorsuch is a homerun.
He's absolutely right.
And tonight, President Trump honored that commitment.
He followed through on the commitment he made.
I think Judge Gorsuch is a home run.
He has a decade of proven experience on the Court of Appeals, being faithful to the Constitution, following the law, protecting the Bill of Rights and our fundamental liberties.
And I think that record will yield a swift confirmation in the United States Senate.
And we'll find out about the swift confirmation, but to talk about what the Democrats are going to do about this, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com right now and subscribe.
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