Feb. 3, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
16:00
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| In their quest to bully everyone in any position of prominence into publicly ripping President Trump, the media have set their sights on New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. | |
| Brady became a campaign issue when, in September 2015, somebody took a photo of a Make America Great Again hat in his locker and said he hoped Trump became president. | |
| Trump repeatedly referenced Brady's support on the campaign trail, too. | |
| Then, after becoming president, Trump bragged that Brady had called him to congratulate him. | |
| All of this prompted USA Today sports writer Nancy Armour to write a piece demanding Brady denounce Trump. | |
| Quote, Brady inserted himself into the national firestorm. | |
| He can't be surprised that people want to know more. | |
| Brady, for his part, has refused to talk about Trump. | |
| Trump. | |
| He said, I'm not talking politics at all because I just want to focus on the positive aspects of this game and my teammates and the reason why we're here, which is smart, given that football is a team sport and those who have supported Trump have come under public fire from their own teammates and players for doing so. | |
| When Rex Ryan endorsed Trump, created this huge firestorm. | |
| This follows on the heels of the left's attempt to bully Taylor Swift into more clearly endorsing the women's march, force companies to reject Trump's executive orders, rip Uber for the crime of providing people at JFK airport rides, destroy Sage Steele for having temerity to want to make her flight and blackball Curt Schilling for likening radical jihadists to This is ideological hectoring that frays the social fabric. | |
| Voting for Donald Trump doesn't mean you have to defend every decision he makes, any more than voting for Bill Clinton meant you were answerable for his perjury. | |
| And turning celebrities into moral guides is always a risky business, given their regular penchant for amorality in any case. | |
| Listen, America is rooting against Tom Brady by polling data in the Super Bowl. | |
| But that will change if the media decide to declare him the enemy for holding a political opinion of which they do not approve. | |
| I'm Ben Shapiro. | |
| This is the Ben Shapiro Show. | |
| Okay, so we're going to get to the so-called Monday Night Massacre in a second. | |
| We're gonna debunk some myths about what just happened with Donald Trump firing the acting Attorney General and what exactly happened there. | |
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| Okay, so we begin of course with the big story of the morning and of last evening, which is Donald Trump's late-night firing of the assistant, well, the acting Attorney General. | |
| So remember, Loretta Lynch is now gone, she's resigned, and Jeff Sessions has not yet been approved, President Trump's pick for Attorney General. | |
| And that leaves this lady named Sally Yates. | |
| So Sally Yates was the person who's the acting Attorney General. | |
| And she released a statement yesterday in which she suggested that she was not going to enforce or even defend in court the Trump immigration and refugee executive order. | |
| And her statement really had nothing to do with the law. | |
| Her statement was just grandstanding. | |
| It was her saying, I'm not going to defend this law because I don't think it's right. | |
| Here's what she actually said. | |
| She said, I am responsible for ensuring that the positions we take in court remain consistent with this institution's solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right. | |
| Well, no, actually, that is not your job. | |
| Your job is to defend everything under the law, meaning that if there's no reasonable defense of the statute, that's one thing. | |
| If there's no reasonable defense of an executive order, that's one thing. | |
| If it's unconstitutional, that's one thing. | |
| But she doesn't even make that argument. | |
| Her statement basically just says, I'm going to do what I think is right as acting Attorney General. | |
| Well, no, that's not your job. | |
| The Attorney General serves at the pleasure of the President, swears an oath to the Constitution. | |
| If you're not claiming that the executive order is unconstitutional, which you can't since it's not, the executive order is not unconstitutional. | |
| Immigrants to the country do not have any rights under the Constitution, meaning if you're not yet a citizen, if you're just trying to immigrate, or if you're just a refugee, you don't have rights under the Constitution of the United States. | |
| So clearly this is not unconstitutional. | |
| Yates says instead, I just don't feel like doing it, which makes her a hero on the left. | |
| So Donald Trump immediately tweets out, The Democrats are delaying my cabinet picks for purely political reasons. | |
| We'll talk about that in a second. | |
| They have nothing going but to obstruct. | |
| Now I have an Obama AG. | |
| And then Trump fired her. | |
| Right? | |
| So the administration on the firing sounds like it was dictated by Trump personally. | |
| I mean it really is like it's in full Trumpian language. | |
| You can tell. | |
| I mean, it goes, the acting Attorney General Sally Yates has betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States. | |
| This order was approved as to form and legality by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel. | |
| Ms. | |
| Yates is an Obama administration appointee who's weak on borders and very, very weak on illegal immigration. | |
| That's the part that sounds like Trump. | |
| And then he goes on talking about it's serious. | |
| Time to get serious about protecting our country. | |
| He calls for tougher vetting measures for individuals. | |
| He says it's reasonable and necessary to protect our country, you know, repeating himself. | |
| But, you know, the syntax doesn't matter here. | |
| Here's the bottom line. | |
| Trump did the right thing here. | |
| He had to fire her. | |
| And it was clear she was going to be fired from the minute that she started doing this sort of moral preening while working for Trump. | |
| It was obvious that she was going to go the way of the dodo bird in this job. | |
| And Trump's spokesperson And while they were going on, of course, we had a Monday night massacre. | |
| Trump spokesperson is essentially right. | |
| Now, the Democrats are going nuts over all this. | |
| The Democrats are saying this is the end of the world. | |
| They're portraying her as a hero. | |
| Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, he came out. | |
| He said, Yates is a profile in courage. | |
| This is a clip. | |
| Yeah, you got it. | |
| And while they were going on, of course, we had a Monday night massacre. | |
| Sally Yates, a person of great integrity who follows the law, was fired by the president. - Good. | |
| She was fired because she would not enact, pursue the executive order on the belief that it was illegal, perhaps unconstitutional. | |
| It was a profile in courage. | |
| It was a brave act and a right act. | |
| President and his people who were in the White House learned something from this. | |
| First, That we are a nation that's a rule of law. | |
| So what he's saying here is absolute nonsense. | |
| No, it does not say that you're a nation that respects the rule of law when the Attorney General refuses to do her job and defend in court measures that are clearly constitutional and clearly legal, or at least arguably legal. | |
| What's interesting here is when Schumer, there are two things that are interesting. | |
| First of all, when Schumer suddenly says that it's a Monday Night Massacre, we'll talk about that in a second, is this akin to the Saturday Night Massacre when Nixon essentially fired his Attorney General back in 1974 in the middle of Watergate? | |
| Is it like that or is it not like that? | |
| We'll talk about that In one second. | |
| The second thing that he says here that's pretty amazing is he says that she did the right thing that she was saying that it was unconstitutional and illegal. | |
| She never says that. | |
| Sally Yates never said this was unconstitutional. | |
| She never even said it was illegal. | |
| Sally Yates basically said I don't feel like enforcing this so I'm not going to. | |
| I hate that kind of stuff. | |
| In the state of California, we had this situation with our now Senator Kamala Harris. | |
| When she was Attorney General out here in the state of California, Kamala Harris did this routine where she refused to defend Proposition 8. | |
| The people of California voted for traditional marriage, and it didn't make a difference to her. | |
| She just refused to defend it in court. | |
| Until Proposition 8 basically was struck down by the Supreme Court on the grounds that no one was willing to defend it. | |
| That was gross. | |
| It was her job to defend it, whether or not she agreed with it. | |
| When your job is to do something, whether or not you agree with it, it's your job to do it. | |
| Now, it's amazing, the left is saying that this is just great heroism. | |
| I remember when they thought that Kim Davis, you remember her, she's the Kentucky County Court Clerk, There's a stronger case for Kim Davis than there is for Sally Yates here, because the fact is that Yates doesn't even contend this is illegal. | |
| Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and get started. so I'm going to go ahead and get started. | |
| In any case, the state obviously had the authority to do what it did with Kim Davis, and obviously Trump has the authority to do what he did with Sally Yates. | |
| So, as far as the Watergate thing, first of all, I think we should quote here Carl Bernstein. | |
| Carl Bernstein was one of the reporters, as in Woodward and Bernstein, who investigated Watergate. | |
| He says, trying to liken what Trump just did to Sally Yates to to what happened at the Saturday Night Massacre is ridiculous. | |
| For people who don't know, the Saturday Night Massacre is 1973. | |
| Richard Nixon demands the firing of the independent prosecutor, Archibald Cox, in the Watergate investigation. | |
| And then when the AG, Elliot Richardson, and deputy AG, a guy named William Ruckleshouse, refused to fire him, he fires both of them. | |
| Right, that's called the Saturday Night Massacre. | |
| Carl Bernstein says, no, this is not like that. | |
| Do you think that she needed to go? | |
| There's a big difference, because the Saturday Night Massacre was really about firing the Attorney General when Nixon was the target of an investigation and was actively obstructing justice. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I think the President is within his rights here to fire the Attorney General, that he has that ability. | |
| And it's not wise that he did, but what's really happened here is that the president and his presidency is in chaos. | |
| And it's apparent to all but his most serious defenders and those who are his greatest defenders and advocates, but for Republicans on Capitol Hill, who I'm talking to, who are doubting his abilities, doubting even his stability under pressure. | |
| This is an extraordinary series of events. | |
| We now have hundreds of thousands of people who have been going into the streets as a result of this. | |
| It's relevant. | |
| What Bernstein says about the Monday Night Massacre is relevant. | |
| It's not like the Saturday Night Massacre. | |
| Saturday Night Massacre, again, was pursued because Archibald Cox was subpoenaing the Nixon tapes. | |
| And Nixon said, no, and I'm going to fire you. | |
| And then he went to his AG and his AG said no, so he fired the AG. | |
| So it was an attempted cover-up. | |
| Now, was it legal for Nixon to do it? | |
| Actually, it was. | |
| It was absolutely legal for Nixon to fire the Attorney General. | |
| And in fact, there's a solid case to be made that all of these independent prosecutor laws are actually unconstitutional. | |
| This is a case that Justice Scalia made back in the 1980s. | |
| He said there's a unitary executive, right? | |
| The Constitution doesn't say anything. | |
| About there being an investigative counsel, some independent counsel, who gets to rove around investigating the President of the United States. | |
| In fact, this is what Democrats were saying when Kenneth Starr was doing it under the Independent Counsel Act, which is why they allowed it to expire. | |
| So there have been longstanding constitutional and legal questions about whether you ought to have independent counsel doing this. | |
| But she's not even independent. | |
| Sally Yates isn't even independent. | |
| Okay, so she's actually the AG, and so the AG does not get to tell the President that she just doesn't feel like enforcing the stuff that's law. | |
| That's silly. | |
| Again, it's not unprecedented, it's not like the Saturday Night Massacre, and it is totally legal. | |
| All of it is totally legal. | |
| Alan Dershowitz says this too. | |
| Alan Dershowitz, he's a Democrat, I've taken class with him at Harvard Law School, and Professor Dershowitz says, obviously, he had every capacity to fire this acting Attorney General. | |
| It's a political decision. | |
| There's an enormous distinction between green card holders on the one hand, people who are in the country and have to be thrown out on the second hand, and people who are simply applying to get visas. | |
| There is also a distinction between what's constitutional, what's statutorily prohibited, what's bad policy, this is very bad policy, but what's lawful. | |
| And I think by lumping all of them together, she has made a political decision rather than a legal one. | |
| And he's exactly right, and because it's a political decision, not a legal one, that person should be fired, right? | |
| And so she was fired. | |
| The media are using this as an opportunity to bash Trump, but that's not fair to Trump. | |
| It's actually ridiculous criticism of Trump. | |
| It doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. | |
| Now as that goes on, the Democrats are using anything as an excuse to try and hold up Anything Trump wants to do, which is kind of shocking. | |
| If they were smart, what they'd do is go along with the stuff they like from Trump and then fight him on the stuff they don't like. | |
| But there's a mandate now from the donors that they are going to just bash Trump at every opportunity. | |
| So today, there are a bunch of Democrats who walked out of their various committees in order to try and hold up the Treasury Secretary nomination of Steve Mnuchin. | |
| I'm not a big Mnuchin fan, but that's ridiculous. | |
| It's not going to work. | |
| Also, what gain do you get from this? | |
| What gain do you obtain from blocking Trump's cabinet nominees? | |
| It's one thing to vote against them. | |
| It's another thing to not even give them an up or down vote in the cabinet, specifically because, I mean, like, what, do they think that he's going to come back with a Democrat? | |
| Or somebody even more Democratic than Mnuchin, who's a lifelong Democratic donor? | |
| Like, well, what are they aiming for here? | |
| It's really quite ridiculous. | |
| They're also talking about filibustering Trump's judicial nominee. | |
| They've said that they're going to filibuster it all along. | |
| I've been contending for a year, a full year, that they were going to filibuster Trump's judicial nominee and that it was dicey whether Mitch McConnell was going to invoke the nuclear option, whether Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, was actually going to invoke what they call the nuclear option. | |
| That means that you take a straight vote on whether to change the filibuster rule. | |
| You get rid of the filibuster and then you vote on the justice themselves. | |
| It's not clear whether McConnell is willing to do that at all, which is why my prediction is, and I could very well be wrong, I've been wrong before, my prediction is that tonight Donald Trump is probably going to nominate Thomas Hardiman of the Seventh Circuit in Pennsylvania because he's the most stealth candidate. | |
| He's the guy who we know least about. | |
| And I'll explain in just a second why I think that's a bad thing. | |
| Like what we should actually be demanding of the Supreme Court nominee and what we should be demanding of Trump and what we should be demanding of the Republican Senate in just a second. | |
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