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March 17, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
19:08
Ep. 271 - Courts Go Rogue, Battle Trump on Immigration
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On Wednesday, Michael Harriot of TheRoot.com ran a shocking piece titled, everything you think you know about the death of Mike Brown is wrong, and the man who killed him admits it.
Provocative!
Sally Cohen of CNN, she of hands-up-don't-shoot fame, tweeted out the article with this caption, we all need to read and reckon with how our media, courts, everything believed white cops' lies over black kids' truth.
All of which means that you'd think the article would actually substantiate the headline.
After all, most people think Michael Brown attacked a police officer, Darren Wilson, inside his vehicle after being pulled over, then tried to grab the officer's gun, then ran when a shot was fired in the car before turning around, charging the cop, and being shot.
That's what all the witness testimony said.
Repeatedly.
From Black Witnesses.
So what did Officer Wilson say that changed everything?
According to TheRoot.com, reporting on a court document originally obtained by Wesley Lowry of the Washington Post, a guy who, by the way, reported in laudatory terms about the unrest in Ferguson at the time, Wilson stated that he reached through the window of his car and grabbed for Brown's body during the encounter.
Of course, Wilson never said anything different.
He always maintained Brown punched him in the face, at which point he grabbed at Brown as Brown leaned into the car.
He pulled his gun.
Brown attempted to grab his gun.
He fired his gun, and the rest of the events ensued.
But here's how The Root describes the events.
Two men are walking down the street.
A cop pulls in front of them, blocking their path.
Instead of calling for backup or radioing in a traffic stop, He opens his car door and either Brown closes it or ricochets off of Brown's body.
The officer then chooses to reach through his window and grab the suspect by his arm and body.
Wilson had a gun and Brown is hanging inside the car.
Brown does not reach for the officer's gun and the cop admits that Brown's only weapon was his big scary black self.
The next part of the testimony will confound the conservatives who stated that Wilson did not shoot Brown in the back.
Wilson admits that after the first shot, Brown started running away from him and he fired another shot which missed Brown.
Wilson basically admits that he fired at Brown and the bullet hit a building close by.
Then, The Root alleges that Wilson admits to having used the N-word.
Other headlines have repeated this.
They neglect to mention that Wilson explicitly says he only used the N-word in order to repeat a, quote, racist remark made by someone else, but I have not made a racist remark against another individual while on duty as a police officer, unquote.
Oops.
But what about the rest of this narrative?
It's just not true.
Wilson doesn't admit any of the things the Roots says he admits, as Wesley Lowry himself tweeted.
Here's what Lowry tweeted.
The court documents reveal none of these things.
Wilson has asked specific questions.
in this piece going viral today based on the doc I reported yesterday are wrong.
The court documents reveal none of these things.
Wilson is asked specific questions.
He's not asked others.
Can't infer entire narrative by filling in the blanks based on things he's not asked.
Wilson admits that Brown did not try to remove your gun from your holster.
This is not the same as admitting Brown never reached for the gun.
Nowhere in this document does Wilson address who initiated contact.
Admits at some point he reached through the window.
Doesn't address the timeline.
There is nothing I've seen in December 28th admissions from Darren Wilson that materially alters and contradicts his previous version of the story.
Lowry is honest and reports this correctly.
I've read the entire document.
It is clear that the Root, and by proxy Sally Cohn, are confabulating Wilson's testimony into a story of their own making, a narrative repeatedly debunked by third-party witnesses and the Department of Justice itself, which found no wrongdoing by Wilson.
This is how leftist narratives spread.
And there will be violence spurred on by such narratives, because the hard left likes its riots, just so long as the riots are aimed at the establishment, meaning in this case, the cops.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, well, today is mailbag day, and so that's very exciting.
We'll be doing that a little bit later, which is why you need to become a subscriber over at dailywire.com.
We're also going to be talking, I'm going to break down this awful, awful court decision from a judge in, a federal district judge in Hawaii, striking down or at least putting a temporary hold on Donald Trump's executive, President Trump's executive order on immigration and refugees.
I will break that down for you.
Awful, awful decision.
I mean, I read the decision twice because it's so bad that it took twice just to comprehend all the stupidity inherent in it.
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Okay, so one of the worst judicial decisions in recent memory came out yesterday from a district court judge in Hawaii and he struck down Donald Trump's revised executive order.
Now, we didn't really talk too much about Donald Trump's revised executive order because basically what the revised executive order on immigration and refugees did is it got rid of a lot of the things that the Ninth Circuit objected to and the federal district court in Washington objected to originally in the first executive order.
So, first things first, the first executive order was fully constitutional and it was fully legal.
The court struck it down anyway.
They said that it affected green card holders, which was a problem.
They said that it was religiously discriminatory, which really shouldn't have been a problem, but they said it was.
So, the new version got rid of all language with regard to Islam and Christianity.
The new version got rid of its application to green card holders.
The new version broadened the ability for the Secretary of State to grant admission to people on the basis of exceptions to the rules set up.
It's a, it's a facially neutral statute, meaning it has no differentiation between Muslims and anybody else.
That didn't stop the court.
So, this federal district judge basically decides, and this is basically what the decision comes down to, it's an amazing thing.
The decision comes down to, I don't like Donald Trump, therefore the executive order is bad.
And that is not much of a simplification.
The entire decision rests on the idea that he's not actually going to read the verbiage, not going to read the actual wording of the executive order.
Instead, they're just going to look at stuff that Donald Trump has said over the past two years and say, look, it looks like Donald Trump doesn't like Muslims.
Therefore, even though this particular executive order doesn't discriminate against Muslims, even though this particular executive order only applies to people from six of the most terror-rich countries on earth, originally named by Barack Obama, We're still going to impute to Donald Trump some sort of nefarious motive to ban Muslims because he doesn't like Muslims.
So, in other words, we're not going to look at the law, we're going to look at what they said about the law.
And not even what they said about this law, we're going to look at what he said a year ago about different stuff.
And now, if the courts had held this about Obamacare, Obamacare would have been struck down, obviously.
Obamacare should have been struck down anyway, because Obama was telling the truth when he said Obamacare was not a tax, it was a fee.
But the courts specifically ignored Obamacare being a fee and not a tax in order to rewrite the statute and protect Obamacare.
So they ignored everything Obama said in order to ensure that Barack Obama's signature law remained law.
In this case, they're taking something that is obviously and perfectly legal, and they are saying that it is now illegal because they don't like what Donald Trump said.
So let's go through some of the dumber things about this decision, and it is demonstrative of the fact that Congress needs to crack down on the jurisdiction of federal courts.
Federal courts should not have this type of jurisdiction.
The 9th Circuit should be broken up as a Circuit Court of Appeals.
This is a long-standing opinion of mine.
This is not something that is brought about by this particular decision.
I wrote my entire third-year law paper at Harvard Law, which I've been attempting to dig up for a while now.
I wrote the entire thing on why judicial review is a constitutional error, and why it actually has nothing to do with the Constitution of the United States.
That said, this decision is perfect evidence of why you cannot have a group of judges who think they are an oligarchic super-legislature.
They think they're lawmakers.
They're not lawmakers.
So, what does this actual decision say?
Well, first, it says that the Constitution bars religious discrimination against foreigners.
It says the Establishment Clause applies to people who don't even live in the country.
It doesn't apply to American citizens alone.
It applies to some random dude on a hilltop in Yemen.
So, in other words, if you have a policy that says, random dude on a hilltop in Yemen, we're not letting you in because you are a radical Muslim.
They say, well this would violate the establishment clause because you obviously prefer Christians to Muslims.
This is asinine.
First of all, the provisions of the Constitution do not apply to foreigners.
The Constitution only applies to people who are citizens of the United States.
It does not apply to people who are living any random place in the world.
If the Constitution has to grant rights to people to immigrate, regardless of religion, regardless of viewpoint, Imagine this, okay?
The First Amendment of the Constitution also says you have freedom of speech, it says you have freedom of religion, and it has the Establishment Clause that government cannot establish religion.
So, let's say the Constitution were to apply to people all over the world.
And that applies to everyone.
Well, the First Amendment also says you have freedom of speech.
So, that means that, presumably, that applies to anybody abroad.
And those people, we can't discriminate against them based on viewpoint, right?
The government is not allowed viewpoint discrimination against you or me.
It can't shut me down because of what I'm saying.
If we took the same logic that this court is applying to the Establishment Clause and applied it to the Free Speech Clause, what you'd end up with is anyone anywhere on earth has a right to enter the United States no matter what they think about things.
Okay, that's how crazy this court decision is.
Other things that this decision says.
As I say, the court actually says that motivation matters, not text.
They explicitly acknowledge, explicitly acknowledge, that there is nothing in this executive order that discriminates against Muslims.
They then try to make the claim that it discriminates against Muslims even though it clearly does not discriminate against all Muslims.
The court says, the illogic of the government's contentions is palpable.
The notion that one can demonstrate animus toward any group of people only by targeting all of them at once is fundamentally flawed.
That doesn't make any sense at all.
If you're demonstrating animus for a group of people, obviously you have to demonstrate animus for the entire group of people.
If I have a law and it only affects a certain percentage of black people, But it doesn't affect 99% of black people.
It's very difficult to say that the law is actually motivated by animus against black people.
That seems relatively logical to me.
And in fact, the court then goes on to make exactly the same case that they're saying is illogical.
They then say this is obviously a Muslim ban because it applies to countries that are largely Muslim.
You can't make a statistical argument like that if you're just claiming that statistical arguments are irrelevant to the question of animus.
They quote Donald Trump from March 2016 saying, I think Islam hates us.
Okay, March 2016, he was still a candidate.
He wasn't even president then.
They quote Trump's infamous Muslim ban press release from late 2015, and they say all of this is the backdrop to this executive order.
And then they say that because Donald Trump says mean things about the Muslims, that means that the executive order is illegal.
And then they quote the 10th Circuit.
On this issue.
And here's what they say.
They basically say that maybe at some future point he could pass the exact same executive order and we wouldn't strike it down.
We wouldn't put a temporary restraining order on it because we would know that he actually is not a mean guy.
So now they're judging Trump as a person.
He's a mean guy.
Right?
This is what they say.
From the above principles, we conclude that a government cure should be one, purposeful, two, public, and three, at least as persuasive as the initial endorsement of religion.
It should be purposeful enough for an objective observer to know unequivocally that the government does not endorse religion.
So, in other words, if Donald Trump spends the next two years talking about how Islam is just awesome, then they might allow him to pursue this executive order.
But until then, until he goes out and says publicly that Islam is the best religion that ever was, and he loves Islam like no other, That it is a big league, in his own words.
Until he actually does that, they are going to ban this executive order.
So they're going to mind-read Donald Trump, which is a challenging thing under any circumstances.
It's particularly stupid when the people attempting to mind-read Trump are obviously not mind-reading Trump.
They are mind-reading themselves in their perceptions about Trump.
Okay, other things that are idiotic about this decision.
So they reinforce in this decision this notion pushed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and that federal district judge in Washington that a state is able to sue and get immigration policy held up if it doesn't benefit the state to have more immigration.
So the state said, one of the big issues in lawyering is something called standing.
I can't sue the government based on some random law that doesn't affect me.
I can't sue Mathis today based on the fact that I get food poisoning from a separate restaurant.
I don't have standing because Mathis hasn't done me any harm, right?
Standing means that the person you're suing has some connection with the harm that is being inflicted upon you.
So what the court does here is they broaden the issue of standing because, really, the state doesn't have any standing to sue the federal government based on immigration policy.
They don't.
If they could, then presumably the state of Arizona could have sued the federal government long ago for not enforcing its immigration laws, affecting the state of Arizona in negative ways.
They weren't able to.
But now the court finds standing to open the borders.
Why?
Because universities in states like Hawaii won't be able to recruit that dude on the hilltop in Yemen.
Seriously, this is what it says.
It says, the state has preliminarily demonstrated that its universities will suffer monetary damages and intangible harms.
So now we are now measuring the state's standing based on intangible harms, things that can't be measured or felt.
That's totally insane as well.
And then finally, I think that the most insane thing here of all, I'll tell you in one second.
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Okay, so the stupidest thing of all about this ruling... I should say the second stupidest thing.
The stupidest thing is this whole feelings routine.
This routine that Donald Trump's feelings about Islam shape how the court rules on an executive order.
I'll tell you the reason that that's the stupidest thing.
The reason that's the stupidest thing is...
If people can now sue the President of the United States and say that he is violating the Establishment Clause simply because he has quote-unquote animus for some group outside the United States that violates the Establishment Clause, then you could theoretically have somebody sue Trump to stop him from pursuing military action against like Al-Qaeda and ISIS because he doesn't really hate Al-Qaeda and ISIS, he hates all of Islam.
Right?
They could use exactly the same logic they're using right now on immigration.
The logic they're using on immigration, Trump says, I want to stop Al-Qaeda, I want to stop ISIS, I want to stop terrorists from coming into the country.
And they say, no, what you really mean is you hate Muslims.
Why couldn't you use that exact same logic with regard to what he's doing in war?
Why couldn't you say, well, what he really means is, he doesn't hate Al-Qaeda or ISIS, he hates all Muslims.
He wants a war with Islam.
And that means I'm going to sue him because the Establishment Clause doesn't allow him to make policy that discriminates based on religion.
This is crazy talk.
The second stupidest thing in this ruling, however, is the granting of standing to the plaintiff, a guy named Dr. Ismail El-Sheikh.
Dr. El-Sheikh is an American citizen of Egyptian descent.
There are two issues that make him not ripe for standing here, that don't grant him standing in this case.
One, he's an American citizen.
The executive order does not apply to American citizens.
Two, he's from Egypt.
It doesn't apply to Egyptians.
Egypt is not one of the countries on the list.
So, there are two separate reasons why... So, number one, he's an American citizen.
It doesn't apply to him.
Two, even if it didn't apply to American citizens, it still wouldn't apply to him because he's from Egypt.
So who does it apply to?
He's suing because his mother-in-law is from Syria and she wants to come visit.
Seriously.
First of all, this alone should mean that he never gets standing because no one wants their mother-in-law to visit.
But second of all, the idea that he's getting standing based on his mother-in-law living in Syria is insane.
How does the court come up with the idea of standing?
They say he has standing because, this is a direct quote, he thinks that the executive order is devastating to me, my wife and children, since it saddened him.
I am not making that up.
That is in the court decision.
The court decision says that this guy has standing to sue the federal government because the policy of the federal government made him sad.
Okay, I am now going to sue the federal government for every law and regulation it has passed in the last 20 years.
Because they all make me sad.
Because they all suck.
It doesn't work that way.
This is not how law works.
This is a usurpatious court.
This is a court that is usurping, obviously, the power of the presidency, and it's about time for Congress to step in and do something about it, because this is fully crazy.
This is fully crazy.
We'll talk more about that.
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