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Sept. 21, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:00:42

Supreme Court Apocalypse | Ep. 1099

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	RBG dies.
	Democrats panic and threaten institutional Armageddon.
	And Trump vows to move ahead.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	You have a right to privacy protected at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	Well, me, maybe you noticed this year is crazy, man.
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	Okay, so, right before Rosh Hashanah begins, I get the information that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the longtime Supreme Court Justice, first appointed in 1993, a famous feminist voice, has passed away.
	And in Judaism, the first thing you always say is Baruch Dayan Emet, blessed is the true judge.
	So we say that, obviously, because death comes to us all, whether we are, you know, on the side of the righteous or whether we are not on the side of the righteous.
	Ruth Bader Ginsburg, For all of our disagreements, and we had many of them obviously, I disagreed with her politics thoroughly and profoundly.
	She devoted decades of her life to public service.
	She was responsible for some things that I think everyone can agree with, including the forwarding of women's rights in the workplace.
	A lot of those things are very good.
	And her passage should be met with national mourning, of course.
	This, of course, however, raises the greatest I think constitutional crisis that I've seen in modern American history, not because of what the Republicans are going to do, fill the seat, but because of what Democrats are threatening to do.
	Now, let's be real about this.
	From the very beginning, Ruth Bader Ginsburg should have stepped down when Barack Obama was president.
	Now, apparently her dying wish was that her seat not be filled.
	And Democrats are making a big deal out of this.
	There is no constitutional provision that allows a justice as their dying wish to pick their successor.
	In communist countries, judges pick their successors.
	That is not what happens in a free republic.
	In a free republic, However the process works is how the process works.
	Imagine if Justice Antonin Scalia had left a note by his bedside table before he had a heart attack and died, saying, Do you think there would have been five seconds of consideration over his dying wish?
	That is not how this works.
	You do not get to will your Supreme Court seat to somebody else because it is not, in fact, your Supreme Court seat.
	It is a seat that pre-exists you and will exist long after you.
	Just as Donald Trump doesn't get to will the presidency of the United States to whoever he wants to be his successor, RBG does not get to will her seat to anybody else.
	So her dying wishes have absolutely no constitutional value.
	We all know this, by the way.
	I mean, she was holding on tenaciously to that Supreme Court seat.
	She didn't want to step down because she didn't want Trump to fill the seat.
	And it's patently obvious that the reason that she didn't step down earlier is because she thought Hillary Clinton was going to win.
	She should have stepped down in 2010.
	Remember, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer back in 2009.
	She was 87 years old when she died.
	So that means she was 76 years old when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
	Now typically, pancreatic cancer, unfortunately, has a very high kill rate and She stayed on the court for another 11 years after her original diagnosis with pancreatic cancer, again, when Barack Obama was president.
	She could have stepped down any time in there.
	And she didn't step down in 2016 because she figured that she was going to be on the court while Hillary Clinton was president.
	Bill Clinton has said as much, right?
	Bill Clinton was asked by Margaret Brennan about this.
	Margaret Brennan said Ginsburg reportedly told her friends she had intended to retire under what she expected to be a Hillary Clinton presidency.
	Did you ever talk to her about that?
	Do you know who she envisioned taking her place?
	And Clinton said, no, I mean, I knew, I hoped Hillary would be elected in 2016.
	I thought she would and hoped she'd have some time because she wanted to leave the court while she was still at full steam.
	She wanted to leave the court with someone who she thought was not an ideologue.
	Someone who was too far to the right, but I don't think she necessarily had a preferred candidate.
	I think she trusted Hillary to make a good decision.
	It was perfectly obvious that she was sticking around because she thought Hillary was going to win, then Trump won, and then it became basically a race against the clock for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
	And you could see this in the way that the Democratic Party infrastructure mobilized around her.
	She became the notorious RBG.
	She moved from being just like a normal left-wing Supreme Court justice to being this iconic figure because the idea was that she stood between the Democrats and doom.
	She stood between the Democrats and Armageddon.
	And here's the thing.
	This demonstrates full scale how the Democrats think of the Supreme Court, which is why, honestly, they should never be picking Supreme Court justices.
	So as we will see, we're going to discuss a little bit later on the so-called McConnell Doctrine from back in 2016, what he actually said.
	Was he saying that in the final year of a presidency that the president should not select or that his selection should not be confirmed?
	No, he didn't say that.
	He never said that.
	What he said instead was that if the Senate was controlled by a different party than the president, the Senate had no obligation to move forward with a nomination if they were of a different party than the president until The American public had sounded off on what they wanted to be, the final combination of factors leading to the selection of the Supreme Court justice.
	But in the final year of a presidency, we've had some 29 selections by presidents, and it's perfectly normal for a president to select the person to fill a Supreme Court seat.
	In 17 of those cases, the president, or in 17, yeah, 17 of those cases, the president and Senate have been controlled by the same party.
	And in 15 of those 17 cases, That person has been confirmed.
	This is something Senator Ted Cruz pointed out over the weekend.
	This is, of course, exactly historically correct.
	29 times there has been a vacancy in a presidential election year.
	Now, presidents have made nominations all 29 times.
	When the Senate has been of the same party of the president, a vacancy occurs in an election year, of the 29 times, those are 19 of them.
	Of those 19, the Senate has confirmed those nominees 17 times.
	So if the parties are the same, the Senate confirms the nominee.
	When the parties are different, that's happened 10 times.
	Merrick Garland was one of them.
	Of those 10, the Senate has confirmed the nominees only twice.
	Okay, it is very uncontroversial constitutionally speaking.
	The president gets to fill the seat and then the Senate gets to decide whether they decide to go up or down on it.
	I thought that McConnell, you can go back and listen to my show at the time, I thought McConnell in 2016 was being too cute by half on the Merrick Garland thing by saying, well, you know, it's the last year of the presidency.
	We'll wait until the election is decided.
	To me, this is a very simple thing.
	You should not vote for any nominee who you feel is not going to interpret the constitution properly.
	I don't care whether it is the first year of Barack Obama's term and he is selecting Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan, or whether it is the last year of Barack Obama's term and he is selecting Merrick Garland.
	It makes no difference to me whatsoever in any way.
	The bottom line is this.
	The constitutional rule of the Supreme Court is to interpret the Constitution properly.
	The Democrats have used the Supreme Court to enact policy.
	From the bench for decades.
	Republicans have gone along with this out of some sense of nostalgia for a time when the Supreme Court was far less political.
	But the Democrats made this whole thing political way back in the 80s.
	This all started with Bork and we've seen its culmination in the attempt to go after Justice Kavanaugh with false charges of gang rape and such.
	With ridiculous charges that he was involved in a boofing when he was 17 years old.
	The Democrats made this political.
	They've decided that the Supreme Court is merely another political tool in their arsenal.
	They have no institutional respect for the Supreme Court.
	The Supreme Court is not something they care about.
	And this is something I talk about in my book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
	For Democrats, unfortunately, it has become the case that the institutions of the United States government are an obstacle to them.
	And when they are an obstacle, they seek to destroy the obstacle.
	This is why over the past several years since Trump was elected, they've talked about abolishing the Electoral College.
	They've talked about completely redoing the Senate or abolishing the Senate altogether.
	They are now talking about packing the Supreme Court.
	They were talking about that a year ago.
	Pete Buttigieg said openly in the middle of this race that he was willing to pack the Supreme Court.
	And this became a question on the debate stage as to whether people were going to pack the Supreme Court.
	Democrats have nothing but scorn for the institutional checks and balances of the government of the United States because they believe that those institutional checks and balances are an obstacle to complete rule from above.
	It has been true for a very long time.
	Now, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not opportunist enough to believe that packing the court was a good idea.
	Ruth Bader Ginsburg, all the way back in 2016, I believe, was specifically asked about packing the court.
	And here is what she said at the time.
	I have heard that there are some people on the Democratic side who would like to Increase the number of judges.
	I think that was a bad idea when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to pack the court.
	If anything would make the court appear partisan, it would be that one side saying, when we're in power, we're going to enlarge the number of judges so we will have more people who will vote the way we want them to.
	OK, so even Ruth Bader Ginsburg recognized the threat to the institutions.
	The old school liberals, however, are no longer in control of the Democratic Party.
	They don't believe in the institutions of the Constitution.
	They believe in overthrowing them.
	And honestly, this has a long legacy inside of the Democratic Party.
	Woodrow Wilson sought to overthrow the checks and balances of the Constitution by radically expanding the executive branch and overthrowing all checks and balances.
	Taking all the powers of the legislature and placing them inside the executive.
	You saw FDR attempt to pack the court back in the 1930s.
	This led to the Supreme Court changing a lot of its doctrine in what was called a switch in time that saved nine.
	Meaning that it saved nine seats on the Supreme Court as opposed to 13 seats on the Supreme Court because FDR was threatening to pack the court.
	Institutions for the Democratic Party are of no interest.
	They don't like the Structural Constitution because they don't like the fundamental philosophy underlying the Structural Constitution, which is that of limited government and checks and balances that protect your rights.
	The Constitution was written for a very specific purpose.
	That purpose was to protect the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
	And the basic idea was that a government that is unitary in nature, a government that has unified power at the top and no checks and balances, either hierarchically with the states or horizontally between the branches, So why in the world would you let Democrats appoint people to the Supreme Court who are promptly going to use the Supreme Court as another political body?
	and a government big enough to give you what you want is a government that is also big enough to take away what you have.
	Democrats have always seen these institutional checks and balances as a problem.
	So why in the world would you let Democrats appoint people to the Supreme Court who are promptly going to use the Supreme Court as another political body?
	The Supreme Court's original designation was to interpret the Constitution of the United States.
	Democrats don't like the Constitution of the United States and have appointed justices who similarly do not like the Constitution of the United States and see it as an obstacle to what they attempt to do.
	They see the Constitution as a bit of poetry that they can interpret however they see fit.
	From the Obamacare cases to Roe vs. Wade, Democratic justices never miss.
	They never miss because they are politically motivated.
	They do not bother reading the Constitution.
	The way that you can tell whether a justice reads the Constitution or does not read the Constitution is whether that justice always votes with your political priors or whether that justice sometimes votes against your political priors based on the text of a law before them.
	Democrats Get what they want from their justices, no question, which is a good indicator as to how they see the court.
	And you have to understand all of this because that is what is undergirding the battle that we are currently undergoing.
	The battle that is about to break upon us is one that is, honestly, country-shattering in nature.
	And it's not because of anything Trump or the Republicans is about to do.
	As we're about to discuss, what Democrats are threatening to do, violate the structural integrity of the Constitution in massive new ways, violate every norm, break institutions of the Constitution, What they're threatening to do can, in fact, split the country apart.
	And they're using this as blackmail in order to prevent Republicans from fulfilling their constitutional duty to fill that seat and so that they can pack the court unofficially with another member of the hard left who will then rule in favor of all of their Democratic political strategies.
	In order to understand that, you have to understand how Democrats see the court.
	The Democrats do not see the court as an expositor of the Constitution.
	They see the court as a second legislature.
	This is why the worship for RBG.
	You know, conservatives.
	We really like Clarence Thomas.
	I'm a huge Clarence Thomas fan.
	We really like Justice Scalia a lot.
	But there was never the sort of worshipful insanity you see for Democrats and RBG.
	RBG was a near idol for many Democrats.
	In the same way that Democrats have a tendency to buy votive candles of Robert Mueller if he's gonna stop Trump or something.
	They were worshipful toward RBG.
	Again, they were calling her the notorious RBG.
	She was an octogenarian liberal justice who spends her life in the law, and they were treating her as the notorious RBG because she was slaying Queen.
	Because for the Democrats, when it comes to the Constitution, the Constitution is secondary, political priority is primary.
	And you can see this in the reaction to RBG's death.
	Just to take an example, I mean, I think this is the id of the Democratic Party right here.
	There is a video going around online over the weekend of a liberal woman having a screaming meltdown over the death of RBG.
	Now, can we be clear about something?
	If Trump fills this seat, and he fills it with Amy Coney Barrett, or if he fills it With a justice from Florida named Barbara Lagoa.
	If he fills that seat, the chances of Roe vs. Wade being overturned are nearly zero.
	I say nearly zero only because I hedge my bets a little bit.
	They're basically zero.
	Roe vs. Wade is not going to be overturned.
	There are not five votes for it.
	Even if you put someone on the court right now who vowed to overturn Roe v. Wade, there's still not five votes for it.
	Kavanaugh's not going to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
	Alito, I doubt he's going to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
	And I don't think Gorsuch is going to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
	I think, legit, you have one vote to overturn Roe v. Wade on the Supreme Court right now, and it's Clarence Thomas.
	So all of the panic, the insane panic you see from Democrats over this seat is because what they want the Supreme Court to be is a green light for every Democratic priority, and they are afraid of anyone appointed to the court who will in any way provide some sort of speed bump in their pursuit of power.
	That's all this is.
	So here is this liberal crazy lady screaming about RBG.
	Holy f*ing s*, you guys!
	I'm driving your car, but I just got a notification that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died!
	Could this year get any f***ing worse?!
	Ruth!
	You just had to make it to 2021!
	Okay, so why you would film this and then put it online, except that this does channel a lot of what Democrats are feeling, because for them, the Supreme Court is a tool of power.
	It was never supposed to be just another member of the triumvirate of checks and balances, executive, legislative, and judicial.
	This is unreasonable behavior.
	It is not reasonable behavior.
	Nobody on the Republican side reacted this way when Sonia Sotomayor filled the seat.
	If Merrick Garland had been confirmed by the Republican Senate, People would have been upset.
	Would it have been screaming fits like this?
	I have serious, serious doubts.
	The attempt to turn the Supreme Court into just another avenue of power has been the legacy of the Democratic Party for a very long time, which is why they should not be in charge of selecting justices under nearly any circumstances.
	And we're gonna get to more of this in just one second.
	As we will see, it is their belief that the Supreme Court, as an institution of power, must be held by Democrats, and therefore all institutions must be broken to achieve power.
	We'll get to that in one second.
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	Okay, so it's not just that screaming lady who reacts this way.
	Democrats reacted this way.
	So AOC, she's talking about, What is on the line here?
	And this is so ridiculous.
	I mean, I'm sorry.
	It's absolutely ridiculous.
	Here is AOC explaining what is on the line.
	For Democrats, because they believe the Supreme Court is just supposed to be a second Democratic legislature doing what they want, they don't actually understand what the Supreme Court does.
	So you're going to hear her say, for example, our reproductive rights are on the line here.
	No, they really are not.
	There are legislatures all across the country.
	Like, lest you forget, if Roe vs. Wade were overturned, which it will not be, To my great chagrin and rage.
	If Roe vs. Wade were overturned, all that would mean is that New York and Massachusetts and California and Connecticut and every other liberal state would all continue to have abortion on demand.
	Because it would just devolve all authority back to the state level.
	It would not actually create a new federal rule against abortion.
	But here is AOC.
	Again, they just want what they want from the Supreme Court.
	And if they don't get it, they're gonna scream and break things.
	It's extraordinarily important that we understand the stakes of this vacancy.
	Our reproductive rights are on the line.
	Our labor rights are on the line.
	Our right to health care is on the line.
	Labor and union protections are on the line.
	Our climate is on the line.
	Okay, so again, for them, everything is on the line because if they don't have this super legislature that is going to cram down what they want, they're gonna break all of the things.
	Amy Klobuchar, who's supposed to be a moderate, she said the same thing.
	She said, our democracy is at stake here.
	Our democracy is not at stake.
	If you believe that our democracy was hanging by the slender thread of an 87-year-old woman with pancreatic cancer, if you believe that our democracy was really that thin, the problem is not RBG dying.
	The problem is that the country is fundamentally broken.
	But here's Klobuchar saying exactly that.
	When my Republican colleagues, and some of them have already come out and said the right thing because they understand what's at stake here, that they don't want to join in with the president who is lying and lying and lying in terms of how he's going to handle a Supreme Court nomination.
	Literally, our democracy is at stake.
	And I think Michelle Obama said it best when she said, your life depends on it, so you better vote.
	This is insane.
	Your life does not depend on your vote.
	You're not going to die if you vote for a Democrat, and you're not going to die if you vote for a Republican, and you're not going to die if Amy Coney Barrett joins the Supreme Court.
	I mean, you might die, but it's going to have nothing to do with any of those things.
	Chuck Schumer says the same thing.
	Again, for the Democrats, every institution is an institutional club that can be wielded for power, and if we can't wield it, we're going to break it.
	It is that simple.
	This is a weapon, and if I can't wield the weapon, I'm going to break the weapon.
	That's what Chuck Schumer is saying here.
	We're here to protect the rights of our globe and the people who live on it so that climate is protected.
	A court with the kind of nominee President Trump will choose will undo all of that.
	Okay, can I just point out there is no constitutional right for the globe in the Constitution.
	Okay, the Earth, you know, a big ball of matter, it does not actually have rights under the Constitution of the United States because it's a giant inanimate object floating through space.
	Also, it is not the job of the Supreme Court to make global warming policy.
	It is the job of the Supreme Court to interpret whether, in fact, an executive agency is acting in accordance with legislative policy or whether that legislative policy actually violates the tenets of the Constitution.
	It is your job.
	You're the Senate Minority Leader.
	It's your job to make policy you think protects the globe and global warming.
	That's not the job of the Supreme Court.
	What he's really talking about there is he wants the Supreme Court to read into the Clean Air Act that carbon emissions can be considered a pollutant, which of course was never considered under the Clean Air Act.
	But this is exactly how Democrats think about the court.
	The court is just a tool of power to hammer.
	And so this leads to tremendous levels of dishonesty.
	AOC said, I can't believe that Mitch McConnell won't honor RBG's last wish.
	Again, what does she think we live in, a monarchy?
	That's not the way this works, honor RBG's last wish.
	First of all, honestly, I hope that RBG had other wishes besides that for her last wish.
	I hope that that is a bit of exaggerated rhetoric for purposes of the political moment from the family.
	I hope that she was thinking about other things on her deathbed because I wouldn't want to be thinking about politics as I died.
	That just seems like an unpleasant way to go.
	But here is AOC.
	Here's AOC saying that the Republicans are bad because they won't honor RBG's last wish.
	Well, good news.
	I guess when Clarence Thomas goes, you know, hopefully in 25 years or something, when Clarence Thomas goes, he should wish for a complete reversion to the constitutional order and structure that the founders intended, meaning that we wipe away several million federal jobs.
	And we'll just honor his last wish because that's what I didn't realize there was that constitutional provision.
	The last wish of a dying justice must be implemented by the legislature.
	Who knew?
	Who knew?
	Tonight, Mitch McConnell publicly, the night of her passing, he couldn't wait 24 hours, issued a statement saying that he was going to give Trump a vote in violation of her dying wish.
	People can say how appalling, people can say this is horrible, etc.
	But we know who this man is.
	We know who this man is.
	This is a man who does not care about a dying woman's final wish.
	What is this?
	I'm sorry.
	That's absurd.
	It's absurd.
	It's an absurdity of the highest order that the Senate should be sitting there going, yes, but what did they write in their will?
	She can't will the seat.
	She doesn't own the seat.
	But when you believe that the Democrats ought to control the auspices of power and they can will that power to other people, this is what you get.
	And so Democrats have said nothing is off the table.
	Democrats have said, nothing is off the table.
	Both Chuck Schumer and Blumenthal, Senator Blumenthal from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, they've both said, nothing is off the table.
	According to CNN's senior congressional correspondent, Manu Raju, he reported that Schumer told Democrats on a call, let me be clear, if Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans move forward with this, nothing is off the table for next year.
	Nothing is off the table.
	20 minutes later, Richard Blumenthal made the same threat.
	He tweeted, if Republicans recklessly and reprehensibly force a Supreme Court vote before the election, nothing is off the table.
	So what do they mean by nothing is off the table?
	What they mean by nothing is off the table is that they will think about packing the court.
	They will think about using impeachment.
	Axios reports today that they are talking about adding Supreme Court justices, eliminating the filibuster, and statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.
	Now, there's only one problem.
	As Mitch McConnell's spokesperson said, every single threat they are currently making, they already made four months ago.
	So they already shot the hostage.
	If this is a hostage negotiation, they already shot the hostage.
	Also, I have a basic rule of constitutional jurisprudence.
	Do not negotiate with constitutional terrorists.
	If people are threatening to break every institution of government unless you give them what they want, why would you then give them power over that government?
	That makes no sense at all.
	We'll get to this in just one second.
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	So Democrats are threatening to break everything.
	So according to Axios, adding Supreme Court justices eliminating the Senate 60 vote threshold to end filibusters and statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. If he holds a vote in 2020, we'll pack the court in 2021, said Representative Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts.
	According to Axios, Democrats are not optimistic about blocking the nominee, but they have many ways of retaliating if they win Senate control and are licking their chops about real movement and ideas that have been pushed futilely for decades.
	For instance, the Constitution does not fix the number of justices, which could be changed by an act of Congress and the president's signature, according to the National Constitution Center.
	Apparently, again, Schumer has already said that he would think about packing the court.
	House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler tweeted yesterday, if Senator McConnell and Senate GOP were to force through a nominee during the lame duck session before a new Senate and president can take office, then the incoming Senate should immediately move to expand the Supreme Court. Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, who's been championed as Captain Abide by the Law, which was always absurd. He backed that idea yesterday as well. Also, we already know that Democrats have talked about eliminating the filibuster.
	Remember that President Obama, who used the filibuster many, many times.
	Robustly, he used the filibuster during his Senate career.
	He called the filibuster rule a Jim Crow relic.
	Remember, Democrats have used that Jim Crow relic several times this year to stymie Republican legislation, including a coronavirus relief bill, as well as a police reform bill.
	They've also talked about adding D.C.
	and adding Puerto Rico as states in the assumption that both of those will then vote Democrat, which would add four Democratic senators and completely skew the balance of power in the Senate of the United States.
	That would be a complete violation of institutional norms going back all the way to the beginning of the republic.
	If there were two sides in America, Whatever those sides were, pro-slavery, anti-slavery, Democratic versus Republican, the basic rule was, whatever the two sides were, if you were going to add states, you added them two at a time, one for one side, one for the other, so you didn't violate the constitutional structure and create an impetus for states to believe that they were being jobbed and then leave the union.
	Democrats are talking about pushing incredibly, incredibly hard.
	Brian Fallon, Executive Director of Demand Justice, And a former Toph Schumer aide said, one, a post-Trump nominee prior to the election invoking the GOP's own rule from 2016, as we'll say in a second, that was not in fact the GOP rule from 2016.
	The GOP rule was never, at least not according, as Mitch McConnell articulated it, it was never, a president cannot have his nominee confirmed in the final year of his term.
	It was, if the president is of a different party from the Senate, he cannot guarantee that his nominee will be confirmed.
	Which again, historically happens to be true.
	Okay, Erwin Chemerinsky, who is a longtime Democratic theorist from USC, he has a piece out today in the LA Times openly calling for the Democrats to pack the court.
	He says that this is the secret weapon.
	They should pack the court ASAP.
	the play there is no other play. Erwin Chemerinsky who is a longtime Democratic theorist from USC he has a piece out today in the LA Times openly calling for the Democrats to pack the court. He says that this is the secret weapon they should they should pack the court ASAP.
	He says the Democrats have few cards to play.
	Even if that happened, all that would happen is that there would be additional abortion restrictions in red states.
	There would not be abortion restrictions in blue states.
	That would continue as is.
	individual rights, including a decision to strike down Louisiana's restrictive abortion law and to invalidate Trump's rescission of DACA.
	If Ginsburg is replaced, the chance of such rulings will evaporate.
	OK, let's be frank about this again.
	Even if that happened, all that would happen is that there would be additional abortion restrictions in red states.
	There would not be abortion restrictions in blue states that would continue as is.
	And DACA, by the way, that was a bad decision.
	One way for Democrats to make clear is, according to Tremorinsky.
	One way for Democrats to make clear they will not tolerate Republicans trying to fill this seat in advance of the election would be for them to pledge that if they take the White House and Senate in November, they will increase the size of the Supreme Court to 13 justices.
	The number of justices on the court is set by federal law, not the Constitution.
	Since its beginning, it has ranged from having between five and ten members.
	Since the 1860s, it has remained at nine.
	So now he says we should pack the court.
	First of all, it's not putting party over principle to vote for a nominee that a president of your party nominated.
	And Post saying exactly the same thing.
	If McConnell pushes through a nominee, President Biden should pack the court.
	Republicans have put party over principle, Biden can do something about it.
	Hey, first of all, it's not putting party over principle to vote for a nominee that a president of your party nominated.
	That is like the way things are generally done.
	It's only the stupidity of Republicans in confirming a bunch of Democratic hacks to the Supreme Court that has led to this current belief that Republicans have an obligation to vote on Merrick Garland should not vote on the Republican nominee.
	By the way, it's fun to watch everybody rush to the other side, right?
	So you have a bunch of people who in 2016 were like, yeah, we don't have to vote on Merrick Garland.
	And Democrats are like, you have to vote on Merrick Garland.
	You must vote on Merrick Garland.
	And now it's four years later, like you must never vote on Amy Coney Barrett.
	You must never do it.
	Like the switch in time is pretty incredible.
	People just rushing side to side frantically as the Titanic goes down.
	According to Joe Filippovich, For liberals, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death brings shock that Nikon is gone, that she didn't make it until the next presidency, and terror.
	Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who in 2016 blocked President Barack Obama from filling a Supreme Court seat vacated about nine months before the presidential election, says he will permit Trump to fill one left empty less than two months before this year's election.
	Democrats have only one play here.
	If Trump and McConnell jam at a pointy through, it is not enough for Democrats to raise hell about the hypocrisy, the duplicity.
	It's not enough to target every Republican senator who goes along.
	It's not enough to have voters bombard the Republican senators' offices with phone calls and protests.
	Because those things have been happening for four years, and none of them have persuaded the GOP to put stability of the country or obligations of office ahead of that party's thirst for power.
	So Democrats should threaten to pack the court.
	And if McConnell pushes through a new justice and Joe Biden wins, they should follow through.
	So, Democrats are threatening to break the institutions.
	That's not the only institution they are threatening to break, by the way.
	They're also threatening to use impeachment.
	And so, last I checked, impeachment was for high crimes or misdemeanors.
	Now, listen, you can impeach for any reason.
	It is perfectly constitutional to impeach for any reason under the sun.
	But there has been a general rule that, at the very least, you ought to have the slender reed of some basis for an impeachment.
	Democrats are now saying, what if we just impeached Rando McFace over here to hold up the Senate's business so they can't actually confirm a justice?
	AOC said this.
	She says, what if we just impeach Trump or Barr or like Bob, you know, the janitor over at the White House?
	Let's impeach that guy because that'll hold up the Senate.
	Here was AOC.
	The fact that AOC and Schumer did a joint presser about this is pretty incredible.
	What do you make of this?
	We must consider, again, all of the tools available to our disposal, and that all of these options should be entertained and on the table.
	Okay, so there it is.
	And then Nancy Pelosi was asked about this.
	And she said that we have arrows in our quiver.
	Many, many arrows in our quiver.
	It was fun.
	I mean, George Stephanopoulos, who has led a life of attempting to basically spout Democratic talking points through his questions.
	You'll recall back in 2012, when he randomly asked in the middle of a Republican debate whether Mitt Romney was going to get rid of contraceptives.
	And everybody was like, what in the hell is he talking about?
	And then immediately within a week, turned into the war on women narrative pushed by the Democratic Party.
	Well, here is George Stephanopoulos, who obviously had some ideas planted with him. I mean, it's pretty obvious here. He plants the idea of Nancy Pelosi supposedly of impeachment. Here he is saying, what if we just impeach Trump to, you know, hold up the business of the Senate? Some have mentioned the possibility if they try to push through a nominee in a lame duck session that you and the House could move to impeach President Trump or Attorney General Barr as a way of stalling and preventing the Senate from acting
	on this nomination. Well, we have our options.
	We have arrows in our quiver that I'm not about to discuss right now.
	But the fact is, we have a big challenge in our country.
	Okay, worth noting that Pelosi then completely lost her train of thought in the middle of the conversation and literally restarted the interview.
	So one of the great things about our current republic is that everybody is geriatric and senile who is currently in a position of power or running for a position of power.
	When the young buck is Chuck Schumer, you know you're in trouble.
	Here's Nancy Pelosi completely losing her train of thought and nearly keeling over.
	Ten states, as I said, on Friday started their early voting the day that we lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
	But to be clear, you're not taking any arrows out of your quiver.
	You're not ruling anything out.
	Good morning.
	Sunday morning.
	We have a responsibility.
	Wow.
	It's weird when those gears get stuck there for just a second and the Botox infuses the brain.
	So all good stuff happening in the country.
	Here's the bottom line for a lot of this.
	What's happening right now is the Democrats are threatening to destroy institutions.
	And the media are telling Trump that he is destroying institutions by doing exactly what the Constitution says a president is supposed to do.
	And that McConnell is destroying institutions by doing exactly what the Senate is supposed to do.
	You can't negotiate with political terrorists.
	It is political terrorism to threaten to burn down every institution of government unless you get your way.
	It's what my son does when he is fussing, and he decides to lie on the floor and scream and shout.
	He does not get what he wants.
	He goes to his room.
	In fact, it is significantly more important that Republicans now put through a justice simply to make the point that Democrats cannot threaten to burn down every institution of constitutional government because they don't like the outcome of the system.
	Here's the reality of the situation.
	Roe vs. Wade is not going to be overturned in all likelihood.
	2.
	Ruth Bader Ginsburg should have stepped down 10 years ago.
	If you don't like how this went, that is only on the Democrats.
	3.
	If Democrats gain power, undoubtedly they will have some opportunities to pick Supreme Court justices as well.
	This is how the system works.
	But we have now seen from the Democrats that they have no respect for any of the institutional architecture of the Constitution.
	We've been seeing this throughout.
	For all the talk about Trump violating institutional norms because Trump says vulgar things and boorish things and he's blunt and he says all this stuff.
	The fact is, Democrats trotted out Stacey Abrams at the DNC claiming she was governor of Georgia after losing by 50,000 votes.
	I don't want to hear about institutional norms when your party is openly threatening to pack the court, impeach people for no reason, just to hold up the process, Add states willy-nilly through simple majority vote and break whatever balance there is in the United States.
	And here's the predictable result of this.
	Let's say that the Democrats went forward with all of this.
	Let's say that the Democrats really went for it.
	Let's say that they did all of this.
	Let's say the Republicans appoint Amy Coney Barrett.
	They confirm Amy Coney Barrett.
	Joe Biden comes in.
	And then he says, we're adding four Supreme Court justices and Puerto Rico, D.C.
	and Guam all become states.
	We now have six new senators and they are all Democrats.
	And that's what we're doing.
	Let's say that happens.
	How long do you think the country lasts after that?
	Do you think that Texas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, any of those states are going to abide by federal dictates coming down from a perverted form of constitutional government nobody consented to?
	Do you think that they're going to abide by a constitutional decision coming from a court of 13 packed by Democrats?
	Do you think that states are simply going to remain as they become minorities in a government to which they did not consent?
	Do you think that that is going to happen?
	Or do you think we are going to come to a true constitutional impasse?
	It is not the appointment of the justice that is a constitutional impasse.
	It is the violation of the system itself that is the constitutional impasse.
	Republicans cannot give in to this.
	Because if you are living with the sword of Damocles hanging over your head every moment, that, oh, if we don't give Democrats what they want, guys, you know, next time they get power, they're going to kill the filibuster, add states, destroy the Supreme Court.
	Well, then guess what?
	We do not have a social compact anymore.
	So maybe Democrats want to make clear we don't have a social compact anymore.
	But if they do, it's on them.
	If they do, it's on them.
	And guess what?
	If a state says, if Texas says, we are not, let's say that a Democratic Senate passes a gun confiscation measure that violates the Second Amendment, and a packed Democratic Supreme Court then says, you know what?
	Second Amendment no longer is in the Constitution.
	Go ahead.
	Do what you want.
	You think Texas is going to abide by that?
	They won't, and they should not.
	Okay, because the bottom line is whoever breaks the system is now responsible for the breaking of the system.
	Appointing injustice and confirming injustice is not breaking the system.
	We're gonna get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so Democrats are now engaged in open constitutional blackmail.
	We're going to impeach people for no reason.
	We're going to pack the court.
	We're going to add states.
	We're going to kill the filibuster.
	We're going to destroy every institution of government because wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, we didn't get our way.
	That's the short version of this.
	Naturally, the media are proclaiming that Republicans are violating constitutional norms by nominating and confirming injustice.
	As we've already discussed, this is not the case.
	So President Trump came out immediately and he said he was at a rally when he found out about this and then he was told about it on the way back to his plane on the tarmac.
	He said some nice words about RBG.
	Then over the weekend, he did another rally in North Carolina and he said, I'm going to nominate a woman this week.
	I could see most likely it would be a woman.
	Yeah, I think I could say that it would be a woman.
	I would if somebody were to ask me now, I would say that a woman would be In first place, yes.
	We'll be making a decision.
	I think the process can go very, very fast.
	I'll be making my choice soon, and when the choice is made, I'll be sending it over to Mitch in the Senate, and they will do what they have to do.
	I think the choice will be next week.
	Okay, so this, of course, sets the world aflame.
	Mitch McConnell said immediately after this that he was going to fill the seat.
	He came out very quickly.
	He said, we're not going to sit by and not fill the seat.
	He said, President Trump's nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.
	Senate Majority Whip John Thune, who is the number two, he said, I believe Americans sent a Republican president and a Republican Senate to Washington to ensure we have an impartial judiciary that upholds the Constitution and the rule of law.
	We will fulfill our obligation to them.
	As Leader McConnell has said, President Trump's Supreme Court nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.
	Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins immediately said no.
	They said they're not going to vote on any nominee that comes forward this year.
	That is not a shock.
	It's not a shock that Murkowski is doing that.
	That is very Murkowski.
	It's not really a shock that Collins is doing that either.
	Collins had expressed hesitance at voting this way in the final year of Trump's term, and she's an extremely competitive race in Maine right now.
	This basically leaves two senators who are up for grabs.
	So Republicans can lose three and then have Pence break the tie.
	So there is a time limit on this.
	In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly is running against GOP Senator Martha McSally.
	The winner would be sworn in probably November 30th, depending on if she is replaced.
	If that happens, then the Republicans lose a vote.
	So basically, Trump has to get this done now.
	One of the questions is, is he going to try and get this done now?
	Try to do it in a lame duck session?
	He should try and do it now.
	He should try to get it done right now.
	And let the Democrats have their hearings.
	Let them try and slime whoever the Republican nominee is, Kavanaugh style, which they absolutely will do.
	That's already begun, as we'll talk about in just a second.
	So right now, Republicans can lose three but not four.
	So they've already lost Collins, they've already lost Murkowski.
	That means they can afford to lose one more, but not two.
	So Grassley, Senator Chuck Grassley from Iowa, he had suggested earlier this year that he might not be up for voting for a Trump nominee in the final year of his term.
	So he's sort of, we don't know.
	Mitt Romney would be the other one because Romney, of course, voted in favor of impeachment.
	And he's a big, I like to be seen as genteel and civil kind of guy, even though he was absolutely obliterated by a less than genteel Obama-Biden campaign in 2012.
	But there was a rumor going around on Friday that he was already moving away from voting for the nominee, and then his spokesperson came out and said, no, that's not true.
	So right now it appears that there will be enough Republican votes, although again, this thing is on a knife's edge.
	Wouldn't be if Alabama Republicans hadn't nominated Roy Moore, but that's another story.
	So the way that the media are trying to spin this is Republicans are violating norms.
	Yes, that's correct.
	Democrats are threatening to impeach.
	They're threatening to pack the Supreme Court, add states, kill the filibuster.
	Four separate things that violate every institutional norm, including norms that have been in place for about 150 years.
	And Republicans, for performing their exact Article 1 functions, are apparently violating a constitutional norm.
	Now, the way that the Democrats are trying to claim that Republicans are violating the norm is, of course, because Republicans did not bring up Merrick Garland for a vote in 2016.
	Now, there are a couple of things to be said about this.
	One, I'm of the opinion that you should never vote for, as I've said, never vote for a justice who is going to pervert the Constitution, which means I would have voted against Sotomayor.
	I would have voted against Kagan.
	Hell, I would have voted against John Roberts.
	I mean, the fact is that unless you have a proven track record of voting constitutionally in court cases, I would not vote for you under any circumstance.
	I don't care whether it's year one.
	I don't care whether it is year seven.
	It is your absolute constitutional duty not to vote for justices you know will pervert the Constitution out of some weird perception of keeping order in the Senate.
	That's not how any of this works.
	There was this norm for many years that nominees would pass with flying colors.
	So, for example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed with an extraordinary majority, right?
	Ginsburg originally confirmed by the Senate with, I believe, was it 99 votes?
	Something like that.
	She was confirmed by an overwhelming vote.
	96 to 3.
	96 to 3, she was confirmed, which is absurd.
	I mean, she was a NOW lawyer, right?
	She was for the National Organization of Women, obviously very far to the left.
	But there was still this sort of weird hangover from the 40s, 50s, 60s, where as long as the person wasn't obviously judicially unqualified, you were going to vote for them no matter what.
	That broke during the Bork hearings, and then it broke again during the Thomas hearings, and then it seriously broke during the Kavanaugh hearings, when Democrats took a very well-qualified jurist, no matter what you think his ideology is, and suggested he was a rapist.
	At that point, Republicans were like, we're out.
	Right?
	We're done here.
	Now, this thing's been openly partisan for quite a while.
	Every time Bush nominated someone, it was a far narrower vote.
	Alito was a pretty narrow vote.
	Roberts was a fairly narrow vote, actually.
	Speaking of just broader votes.
	Okay, but, bottom line is this.
	McConnell in 2016 said, if the parties are controlled, if the chambers are controlled by different parties, we have no obligation to bring the person up for a vote in the final year of an election.
	The idea being once we get past the election, if it's Hillary, then we will confirm Merrick Garland.
	Now I always, again, I always thought that was stupid.
	I thought it was too clever by half.
	He should have just said, we're not confirming anybody that we don't like.
	He could have just done that.
	He didn't do that.
	Okay, so he got too clever.
	Because he got too clever, now Democrats are trying to suggest that it's hypocrisy.
	It is worth noting that it's hypocrisy in the other direction as well.
	I know everybody's ignoring this, but it is hypocrisy in the other direction as well.
	Here's every Democrat under the sun in 2016 saying that Merrick Garland's seat should be filled, apparently by a Republican Senate, who disagrees with the nominee.
	The blockade on filling a naturally occurring vacancy, in my view, is harmful to the independence of the Article 3 branch.
	You cannot keep a seat on the Supreme Court which represents all of us.
	You cannot keep it vacant against the Constitution.
	Do pretty much everything they can to avoid acknowledging the legitimacy of our democratically elected president.
	The American people expect the president's nominee to be given a fair hearing and a timely vote in the Senate.
	Every day that goes by without a ninth justice is another day the American people's business is not getting done.
	So every Democrat flipped, right?
	Every Democrat flipped.
	So they're saying Republicans flipped on this.
	The only difference is that Republicans were in the majority both times.
	So they said we don't have to vote on the Democrat and we will vote on the person we like.
	That is not an unprincipled stand.
	That is a perfectly principled stand, badly articulated in 2016.
	So you end up with questions like this from Chris Wallace to Tom Cotton, the senator from Arkansas.
	I really don't think there is any hypocrisy at all in saying we need to give voters, because, I mean, you can parse the 2014 election, the 2018 election any way you want, but you stated a pretty firm principle in 2016 about Merrick Garland.
	It's wrong to deny voters a chance to weigh in.
	You don't see any hypocrisy between that position then and this position now?
	Chris, the Senate majority is performing our constitutional duty and fulfilling the mandate that the voters gave us.
	Okay.
	Bottom line is this.
	There was never any principle that shouldn't have been any principle about the last year of a presidency.
	That's silly.
	Again, 29 people have been nominated in that time.
	When the party of the Senate is shared with the party of the presidency, then the person ends up being confirmed.
	When not, generally not.
	Right?
	It is indeed that simple.
	Now, that's not stopping the Democrats from lying about the principle.
	So, Barack Obama put out a little statement.
	Always too long, because word counts and Barack Obama have never met.
	But, he wrote, a basic principle of the law and of everyday fairness is that we apply rules with consistency and not based on what's convenient or advantageous in the moment.
	Ha ha ha ha ha!
	I'm sorry, Barack Obama talking about applying rules fairly and not in advantageous ways?
	From Captain Penn and a phone over here?
	From Captain Let Me Drone an American Citizen While Declaring a War in Libya Without Congressional Approval?
	Neutral principles, Barack Obama, come on.
	Don't make me laugh.
	The rule of law, the legitimacy of our courts, the fundamental workings of our democracy all depend on that basic principle.
	Also, we should get rid of the filibuster, add states, destroy the integrity of the Supreme Court, and maybe just maybe, you know, basically do what I want when I'm president of the United States at all times, regardless of the politically neutral principle.
	I'm sorry.
	So I heard from some conservatives over the weekend Well, before the weekend, because it was Friday afternoon, I heard from some conservatives and they were saying, listen, if we want the country to hold together, then there needs to be some sort of compromise here.
	If we want the country to hold together, there needs to be a compromise.
	And the compromise needs to be that the Republicans back off of this and Democrats back off of their threats.
	Because, you know, we have two sides.
	They disagree on everything.
	And if we want them not to pack the court, if we want them not to add states... And I said, OK, so what is the guarantee they don't do that anyway, considering they've been talking about it for a long time?
	Where is the trust?
	There's no trust that they're not going to do it.
	The fact they're even making that threat betrays the lack of trust.
	I mean, is this a peace deal or is this a terrorist deal?
	You don't concede.
	I've said this the third time I've said it on show.
	It's true.
	You don't concede to political terrorists.
	They're threatening to fundamentally burn down the system if they do not get what they want here.
	You cannot concede to that.
	In fact, it makes it more important than ever that you fulfill the constitutional mandate and fill the seat.
	Fill the damn seat.
	Fill it right now.
	Do not wait.
	Fill it this week.
	Force the Democrats to hold hearings on Amy Coney Barrett or whomever else Donald Trump picks.
	So Joe Biden is trying to walk it back, right?
	Joe Biden, this has some real electoral implications, what's happening right now.
	So the Democrats are stuck a little bit between a rock and a hard place.
	Nobody knows how this is gonna break poll-wise, right?
	It throws a hand grenade in the middle of the election, no question.
	There are serious electoral implications to this.
	If Democrats go too far, if Democrats either try to bork Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic mother of seven from Indiana, With very well-qualified resume.
	If they try to borker, or if they threaten that they're going to add states to the country, if they threaten they're going to pack the Supreme Court, if they threaten to impeach, if they go wild here, that puts Joe Biden's campaign in danger.
	The reason it puts Joe Biden's campaign in danger is because Joe Biden was supposed to be a breath.
	That was Joe Biden's candidacy.
	He was, yes, I'm old.
	Yes, I'm doddering.
	Yes, I'm barely coherent.
	But that's the pitch.
	That's not the bug.
	That's the feature, right?
	I'm basically, I'm not even alive.
	That's why you should vote for me, because this has been crazy, right?
	I mean, it's been four years of constant, nonstop tweeting and stress and crazy.
	Elect Joe Biden.
	This walking corpse over here.
	And you can finally take a breath because I mean, really, is anything going to get done with this doddering old guy over there kind of like walking around eating his cream of wheat?
	Probably not.
	Right.
	That was the pitch.
	And it was a good pitch.
	Right.
	That is a good pitch.
	I've said for years that was going to be the Democrats best pitch was a return, a return to normalcy.
	Everything will go back to normal.
	Everybody can breathe for the first time in years.
	OK, that pitch completely disappears the moment the entire Democratic Party infrastructure threatens to destroy every institutional norm of the system.
	If the Democrats now say that if Joe Biden is president, we are adding two states and four Democratic senators permanently shifting the balance of power in the United States Senate.
	If the Democrats say we are going to add four Supreme Court justices with lifetime tenure, which means that if a Republican ever gains power, they have to pack the court.
	So we end up with 29 members of the Supreme Court.
	And if not, then Democrats have then gamed the system.
	If Democrats say, we're going to kill the filibuster and ram through whatever we damn well please with a packed Supreme Court to greenlight it, breaking the system in every way, right?
	Because no state is going to abide by that.
	Again, if you are Texas or Mississippi or Georgia or Florida, are you going to sit around and listen to a federal government with 51 votes, no filibuster, greenlit by a packed Supreme Court, tell you that constitutional norms no longer exist and they can pass whatever they damned well please?
	This is no longer a campaign running for a return to normalcy.
	This is a campaign running for a complete remaking of the American government toward a direction that nobody has consented to.
	And Joe Biden knows this, right?
	Joe Biden knows that the more Democrats fulminate over this, the more they look radical, the more they look scary.
	It becomes a referendum on what the Democrats will do, not on Donald Trump's weirdness.
	Because here's the thing, what Donald Trump's doing right now is perfectly normal.
	Every single president who has ever encountered a Supreme Court opening has nominated a human to fill that opening.
	Every single one.
	So Donald Trump is right now doing the most normal thing he has ever done in his presidency.
	Donald Trump is being extremely normal, I know.
	Sentence I never thought I would say.
	What he is doing right now is the most normal thing he has ever done in his entire presidency.
	Bar none!
	A seat has been opened.
	He is filling the seat.
	Democrats are now the party of radicalism.
	Democrats are now the party of not normal.
	It is not normal to threaten to impeach somebody just to hold up the Senate process.
	It is not normal to say that with 51 votes, you're going to pass whatever legislation you want, including full states with their own sets of senators.
	That is not normal.
	You don't get to claim Donald Trump is a threat to America's core institutions while simultaneously threatening to violate every single norm and completely change the structure of the balance of power and the institutions themselves.
	You can't do that.
	You know who knows that?
	It's Joe Biden.
	So Joe Biden is scared.
	And so what Joe Biden is saying is, we need to deescalate.
	So Joe Biden is not actually willing to make these threats.
	The reason he's not willing to make the threats is the minute he does, this becomes a referendum on Biden, not a referendum on Trump.
	So Biden's smart enough to know that, right?
	He recognizes that.
	And so instead, he's over here on the side saying, we need to deescalate.
	Guys, we really need to deescalate.
	He's gonna try, and with the media, turn this into a referendum on the Republicans being mean to Merrick Garland in 2016, which no one cares about or remembers.
	I mean, seriously, the number of people in America who are like deeply mourning for Merrick Garland.
	I remember his name.
	Very few other Americans do.
	But he's going to try and turn this into Trump being not normal.
	That's a very difficult pitch.
	What he really has to protect himself from here is the left flank of his party, which is now the mainstream flank of his party.
	We are beginning to see the conflict break out into the open between the Kamala Harris wing of the party and the Joe Biden wing of the party.
	Remember, if Trump nominates somebody, which he will, and if that person has hearings, which they will, Kamala Harris is going to be there trying to slander that Supreme Court nominee in the same way she tried to slander Brett Kavanaugh.
	That's going to be real bad for Biden.
	So Biden, for the first time, is looking kind of vulnerable up there.
	And you can tell he gave the speech yesterday in which you can tell he doesn't know which way to go.
	He's kind of like a trapped rabbit here.
	Here is Joe Biden yesterday.
	Anger and more anger.
	Sorrow and frustration is the way things are in this country now politically.
	That's the cycle that Republican senators will continue to perpetuate if they go down this dangerous path that they put us on.
	We need to deescalate, not escalate.
	So I appeal to those few Senate Republicans, the handful who really will decide what happens.
	Please follow your conscience.
	Okay, so everybody needs to de-escalate by doing exactly what we want, because if we don't de-escalate, then we're going to blow everything up.
	Here's what Joe Biden could do, right?
	And he won't.
	Here's what Joe Biden could do.
	What Joe Biden could do is he could, right now, say to Mitch McConnell, here's the deal.
	I pledge, I pledge, right?
	In public writing, and he would have to give some sort of guarantee that makes some sense.
	I pledge we will not pack the court.
	We will not do any of the world-breaking things I'm talking about.
	We will not kill the filibuster.
	We will not add states.
	We won't do any of that if you hold the seat open.
	Joe Biden can't do that, though.
	See, that'd be an easy giveaway for him, but he can't do that because his own party will kill him for doing that.
	Remember, they were talking about this stuff before the seat opened, which means, as Josh Holmes, former press secretary for Mitch McConnell, said, they already shot the hostage.
	They already made the threat.
	It's too late.
	There is no trust that can be built on the back of Joe Biden.
	Nobody's going to trust that even if Joe Biden guarantees personally that they're not going to do any of these things, that they won't do any of those things regardless of whether the Republicans fill the seat.
	There is no stepping back from the brink here.
	It's not a thing that is going to happen.
	Republicans must, morally speaking, move forward.
	That's putting aside all of the impact that a Supreme Court justice will do, including, you know, again, I'm not a person who believes deeply in the generalized power of the Supreme Court.
	I think they tend to more green light trends than they do actually stand up for the Constitution.
	But there will be edge cases where the Supreme Court makes a difference and preventing the left from gaining complete footholds in the Supreme Court.
	That is a real thing.
	And I'm more interested in having another person on the Supreme Court to not be wild leftist than I am, you know, suggesting faith in the Supreme Court to implement the actual constitutional principle. With all of that said, Joe Biden has a problem here.
	His problem is very obvious.
	He can't appear radical.
	His party is now threatening extremely radical things.
	And Republicans know this, which is why the two people who they are talking about nominating are Amy Coney Barrett, on the one hand, and a woman named Barbara Lagoa, on the other.
	So Amy Coney Barrett is from Indiana.
	She's a Catholic.
	On a personal level, it's anti-abortion, but again, that makes no sense.
	That makes no difference in terms of her constitutional jurisprudence.
	She has seven children.
	She happens to be a very attractive candidate.
	Like, she's very camera-friendly.
	Trump first nominated her to the U.S.
	Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in 2017.
	She'd previously taught at University of Notre Dame for 15 years, so she had no previous judicial record to scrutinize.
	Barrett wasn't a total novice to the judicial system.
	She clerked for Justice Scalia.
	During her confirmation hearings, she said she would follow all Supreme Court precedent without fail and would regard Roe vs. Wade as binding precedent Democrats then went completely anti-religious on Barrett.
	They quoted her saying that a legal career is but a means to an end, and that end is building the kingdom of God.
	Well, if you've ever met a religious human being, every single religious person believes that whatever their career is, is a means toward serving God.
	That is what it means to be a religious person.
	That doesn't mean that she's going to start writing New Testament segments into Supreme Court decisions.
	That's very, very silly.
	It is true that in the past she has written, she doesn't believe the Supreme Court is bound to bad precedent.
	So she is going to be a candidate.
	It will be difficult for Democrats to attack without looking petty and ridiculous.
	The other candidate who they've been looking at is Barbara Lagoa.
	So she's quickly risen to the top of the list.
	That is because she's a Cuban-American in Florida, which of course is a swing state.
	Her record is not particularly clear because she doesn't have a long record of judicial decisions.
	Now, listen, I tend to be with Josh Hawley here.
	I think every judicial nominee should be asked, point blank, are you going to overrule Roe?
	If the answer is no, you shouldn't be nominated.
	Democrats do this.
	I don't see why Republicans should not, except they don't believe they'll be able to get away with it.
	But Barbara Lagoa has been now elevated to the top of the stack.
	Her 14-year tenure as a state and federal judge presents Democrats with opportunities to scrutinize her record, says the Washington Post.
	So she conferred this month in a federal appeals court ruling that is expected to keep 85,000 felons registered to vote in Florida from casting ballots.
	She repeatedly sided with business when she was on the Florida High Court.
	She was nominated by Ron DeSantis.
	And she has said that she would faithfully apply precedence when it came to Roe versus Wade.
	People who know her say that she is very pro-life, which again doesn't mean Anything when it comes to jurisprudence.
	It just means that she's personally pro-life.
	She's a mother of three, including a pair of twins.
	Apparently, she is quiet and collegial with shrewd political instincts.
	She was also a member of the pro bono legal team representing the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy whose mother drowned while trying to escape with him to the United States and who was turned over to his father in Cuba by the Clinton administration.
	So Lagoa is obviously very friendly with the Federalist Society.
	Her husband, Paul Huck, is a godfather of the Federalist Society in Miami, apparently.
	So these are the two kind of top nominees.
	Both of them would be difficult for Democrats to attack.
	Joe Biden has to know this.
	It's why Joe Biden has to be very concerned about the Democratic Party going too far here.
	He really should be.
	It's a danger to his election.
	And frankly, it's a danger to the system, because if the Democrats go too far, you are going to start to see the country break up.
	You're going to see states start to say the federal government has lost all legitimacy.
	Democrats got to be real careful here.
	A lot more careful than Republicans in merely fulfilling what everybody else figured, which is if Trump appoints a replacement and the Republicans hold the Senate, they get to confirm him.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
	A lot I didn't get to, including the ridiculousness of the Emmys, plus Nicole Hannah-Jones deleting her entire Twitter history.
	The 1619 Project lady who says we can't whitewash history completely whitewashed her own Twitter history over the weekend.
	We'll talk about that a little bit later on.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
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