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Feb. 10, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:16
Trump’s Senate Impeachment Trial, Day 2 | Ep. 1192
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Democrats succeed in a vote to uphold the constitutionality of impeaching President Trump after he has left office.
Democrats push the case that Trump incited violence, but try to avoid culpability for their own violent rhetoric.
And the Biden administration continues to push radical policy under the radar.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash, Ben, we'll get to all of the news in just a moment because we are at the beginning of the Senate conviction trial for President Trump over impeachment, day two.
So we'll get to that in just one moment first.
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Okay, so.
Yesterday, a vote was held in the day one of the Senate conviction trial for President Trump's impeachment.
The Senate decided to proceed with the trial.
Basically, there was a vote held last week.
It showed that 55 to 45, the Senate believed it was constitutional to hold an impeachment trial, a conviction trial for Trump after he had left office.
This was sort of an open constitutional question because certainly it's never been used against a president this way.
The constitutional case in favor of the constitutionality of Trump being tried after leaving office is that the punishment is not merely being kicked from office.
It is also being barred from future office.
Not only that, but he was actually impeached while he was in office.
He's now being tried for conviction after he leaves office.
So that's the constitutional case in short.
In favor of the constitutionality.
The constitutional case against is he's already out of office.
So what exactly are you removing him from?
There's nothing to remove him from.
Plus, when it comes to how this particular process has been run, the Supreme Court Chief Justice is supposed to preside over the process.
Here, you don't have that.
Here you have Pat Leahy from Vermont, who's actually presiding over a trial in which he is going to vote.
The Republicans are claiming that this is unfair.
Bottom line is this.
They took a vote on this last week.
They took another vote on it yesterday.
The Democrats certainly had enough of a vote majority to push forward with the actual trial.
It was 55-45 last week.
Last night it was 56-44.
Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana switched his vote.
So this was the content of the trial yesterday.
The content was, can we even go forward with the trial?
The 44 Republicans who agreed with Trump's claim a former president cannot be subjected to an impeachment trial seemed to all but guarantee he would have the 34 votes he needs on the final verdict to avoid conviction, according to the New York Times.
To succeed, the House managers would need to persuade at least 11 Republican senators to find Trump guilty in a trial they have deemed unconstitutional.
So look, it's a fait accompli.
He's not getting convicted in the Senate.
We all know this.
The Democrats know this.
The Republicans know this.
That puts to the side the question of whether he should be convicted.
In my opinion, the answer is no, the reason being that the standard that is laid out in the impeachment article is not a neutral standard that can be applied across the aisle.
If you're going to say that he is responsible for incitement, as we're going to get to in just a moment, you're also going to have to say that reckless rhetoric by a variety of politicians, which results in action that was unforeseeable, is going to be attributable to them, and therefore they also can be kicked out of the chamber.
That's going to hit a lot of members of Congress, a lot of senators, and a lot of future and past presidents, by the way.
So, in any case, the arguments were laid out yesterday.
Trump's lawyers did not do a good job by virtually all accounts.
Trump's lawyers were pretty bad.
There was a fellow named Caster, Bill Caster, who was one of Trump's lawyers, and he was not particularly good.
Jamie Raskin was given wide plaudits for his presentation of the pro-trial argument.
Jamie Raskin is, of course, a representative from Maryland.
He said, if we don't impeach Trump, that would create a January exception to the Constitution.
The case he's making, constitutionally, is that basically what you're saying is if you can't impeach him after he's left office, then let's say the president does something super duper duper duper corrupt on January 15th.
Well, I mean, now you're basically making the case the president can do whatever he wants so long as it is close enough to him leaving office.
Now, that does leave aside a couple of major issues.
One is that That kind of is true already for second-term presidents, right?
If you are a second-term president, then you being convicted after having been impeached, after leaving office, makes no difference.
You are legally barred by law from running for president of the United States again.
So if Barack Obama were to be impeached and convicted now, there would be no actual penalty that attaches because he's not actually legally allowed to run for president again.
So for second-term presidents, it already exists, this sort of January exception that Raskin is talking about.
But the broader argument is not a terrible one, which is that you don't actually want to create a feeling that the president of the United States can do whatever he wants in the final month without having to worry about any consequence whatsoever from Congress.
What it does suggest is that the proper measure here would have been censure, which is something that I had suggested months ago.
Kevin McCarthy had suggested it months ago.
The Democrats turned it down flat because, of course, they wish to force Republicans to the mat.
The idea here is they want Republicans to vote for Trump's impeachment and conviction and nothing else.
They don't want the opportunity for Republicans to distance themselves from Trump's actions without also voting for impeachment.
Here is Jamie Raskin making the case yesterday.
This would create a brand new January exception to the Constitution of the United States of America.
A January exception.
And everyone can see immediately why this is so dangerous.
It's an invitation to the president to take his best shot at anything he may want to do on his way out the door, including using violent means to lock that door, to hang on to the Oval Office at all costs.
Okay, so a couple of things.
Okay, so now he's making a case that he has not yet made, right?
That's the case that they're gonna try and make today, which is that Trump tried to violently overthrow the United States government, which is not true.
Okay, but...
Let's talk for a second about this so-called January exception.
The reality is that presidents do bad crap on the way out all the time.
Bill Clinton pardoned a bunch of his political allies on the way out of office.
This is very, very common.
Barack Obama did a bunch of terrible political stuff on his way out of office, up to and including his administration, monitoring the incoming Trump administration and sticking law enforcement on them without any sort of cause.
And so it turns out the presidents fairly often do this sort of thing.
We're on the way out the door.
They do a bunch of stuff that they knew they couldn't get away with if there were still two years left in their terms.
That's not a particularly strong argument.
However, Bruce Castor is the name of Trump's attorney.
He did not make a particularly compelling case yesterday.
He was trying to make the case that the impeachment was unconstitutional.
Even Trump himself was apparently very angry with Bruce Castor's performance yesterday.
Virtually every Republican senator was like, I don't know where you picked this guy up.
I don't know if he was like a personal injury attorney in Dubuque and you sort of grabbed him off the line and decided to throw him up there in impeachment trial.
But he did not receive plaudits.
Not a lot of great reviews for Bruce Castor yesterday.
If we go down the road that my very worthy adversary here, Mr. Raskin, asks you to go down, The floodgates will open.
The political pendulum will shift one day.
This chamber and the chamber across the way will change one day.
And partisan impeachments will become commonplace.
Okay, so he's not wrong about that part, right?
The idea that there's going to be partisan impeachments all the way down.
He's not wrong about that.
Once you open the door to repeatedly impeaching a guy over and over and over, that does set a precedent.
Caster said, this was the most awkward moment, he sort of said, Jamie Raskin is doing an unbelievably good job here.
And we have responses to that stuff, but we'll get to that later.
It's like, okay, well, you know, you didn't need to do that.
That was not useful.
Here's Bruce Caster yesterday.
I'll be quite frank with you.
We changed what we were going to do on account that we thought that the House manager's presentation was well done.
And I wanted you to know that we have responses to those things.
We have counter-arguments to everything that they raised.
And you will hear them later on in the case from Mr. Van Der Veen and from myself.
So, um, not great.
Not great, Bob.
Meanwhile, Trump's other attorney, a guy named David Shane, he played tape of Democrats calling for impeachment since the very first days.
And this is a better case, right?
He's saying that when it comes to the constitutionality of impeaching Trump, that is one thing.
When it comes to the politics of impeaching Trump, it's pretty obvious the Democrats believe that Trump's illegitimate.
They've been after him since day one.
It was amazing to watch the media beclown themselves, by the way.
Just a quick side note as an Orthodox Jew.
The media, absolutely many in the media, beclowned themselves yesterday because Shane is an Orthodox Jew.
And there was one point where he took a swig of water.
And when he took a swig of water, he put his hand on his head.
And a bunch of people in the media were like, well, that's funny.
He put his hand on his head.
There's a leak, S.E.
Cupp from CNN.
She's like, does he have a leak up there?
No, that's not how that works.
Just so folks know, I wear a yarmulke.
Well, the reason that Jews wear a yarmulke, Orthodox Jews wear a yarmulke, is because you're supposed to cover your head when you make a blessing.
You're supposed to make a blessing every time you have food or drink.
He was not wearing a yarmulke, so this happens fairly frequently.
If you're not wearing a yarmulke, you've forgotten to put one on, or you're not wearing one, and you want to make a blessing, you put your hand over your head.
In lieu of a yarmulke.
That's what was going on yesterday.
In any case, side point, but our culturally sensitive media, ever culturally sensitive, they went nuts over that and then later had to walk that back.
In any case, Shane played tape of Democrats calling for impeachment since the very first days, and this of course is true.
Who I may well be voting to impeach.
Donald Trump has already done a number of things which legitimately raise the question of impeachment.
I don't respect this president and I will fight every day until he is impeached!
That is grounds to start impeachment proceedings.
Those are grounds to start impeachment.
Those are grounds to start impeachment proceedings.
Yes, I think that's grounds to start impeachment proceedings.
I rise today, Mr. Speaker, To call for the impeachment of the President of the United States of America.
So, yes, I mean, that happens to be right from Trump's attorney's team, which is, OK, you guys keep saying that he did something impeachable, but you've been saying he's been doing impeachable stuff since literally the day he arrived on the scene.
So take everything that you say with a grain of salt.
That said, was the case particularly compelling on a constitutional level?
Not particularly.
Bill Cassidy, the senator from Louisiana, he voted.
He switched his vote since last week.
He said, listen, Trump's legal team did a really crappy job on this particular issue.
Now, that doesn't mean Cassidy's voting for impeachment.
That means that he's voting in favor of the idea that it is constitutional to impeach.
Frankly, I tend to agree that it is constitutional to impeach a president after he has left office.
That doesn't mean I think that it should be done in this case, but as far as the actual legal constitutionality of the thing, I think there's a fairly strong case, fairly strong argument that it is constitutional to do that sort of thing after somebody has left office.
So if that is the standard that we are now going to apply, then I look forward to applying it into the future.
Here's Bill Cassidy making the case yesterday.
It was disorganized, random, had nothing.
They talked about many things, but they didn't talk about the issue at hand.
And so if I'm an impartial juror, and I'm trying to make a decision based upon the facts as presented on this issue, then the House managers did a much better job.
The issue at hand is, is it constitutional to impeach a president who's left office?
And the House managers made a compelling, cogent case, and the President's team did not.
All righty, so bottom line though is that it passes, but it doesn't pass with like flying colors.
The six senators who voted in favor of the constitutionality were the five from last week, plus Cassidy.
That is not going to be nearly enough to get Democrats across the finish line on actually convicting Trump in the Senate.
In just a second, we're going to get to what exactly is going to happen today in the impeachment trial, what is happening today in the impeachment trial in the Senate.
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Okay, so now we get beyond the sort of procedurals here and we get to the actual content of the impeachment trial.
Now, let's be frank about what this is all about.
What this is really all about for Democrats is political gamesmanship.
The New York Times essentially admitted as much today when they acknowledge that basically Democrats have a win-win scenario.
Either Trump is convicted, in which case they get a big victory, not going to happen, or Trump is not convicted, in which case they've had a chance for a couple of weeks to beat up on Republicans, and in the future they get to tie Republicans in PR fashion to what happened on January 6th, so they think.
There is one possibility that backfires, and that is the longer that it goes on, the less the American people seem to love it.
So here's what the polls show right now.
According to the New York Times, a majority of Americans support convicting Trump on an impeachment charge over his role in the Capitol riot on January 6th, only by a very slender margin, according to a range of recent polls.
While there's broad agreement Trump deserves at least some blame for the violence at the Capitol, the country remains more closely split over whether he deserves to be convicted by the Senate.
In fact, the views around this impeachment trial aren't very different from how things looked a year ago, when public opinion was tilted slightly in favor of removing Trump from office during his first impeachment trial.
Democrats have since gained control of the Senate, but they'd need a bunch of Republicans to vote with them.
Basically, the split is 56-44 in a CBS News YouGov poll.
56% of Americans saying that Trump should be convicted, 44% saying he should be acquitted.
But there are other polls that are way narrower.
There are 12% of Americans who said they have no opinion on this, and only 47% of Americans saying they're in favor of the impeachment, 40% opposed, according to the AP.
A Q poll, Quinnipiac University, found last week that 50% of Americans said the Senate should convict Trump, 45% said that it should not.
Okay, so bottom line is that Americans seem to be Pretty split on this particular issue.
And as time goes on, and as it becomes apparent that Trump is no longer in office, and as Congress continues to basically just posture, I think more and more Americans are going to say this is kind of a waste of time.
That's the reason why Chuck Schumer is rushing this thing forward.
He had an interest in getting this thing done fast.
He wants a quick strike, PR hit, gets to use this for the rest of time to smear the Republican Party with.
That is his goal here.
Then, of course, he says he's doing this in the name of unity, which, of course, is very, very silly.
Here is Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, saying that, you know, we can't move on because that's not going to bring unity.
Yes, apparently only unity can be achieved by trying to lump every Republican in with the January 6th rioters, which is really what, from a PR level, from a comms level, communications level, that's what this trial is really all about.
It's not about Trump.
Trump is a background figure almost in this trial at this point.
Here is Chuck Schumer saying, hypocritically, that it's not going to bring unity to move beyond the trial.
Listen, I don't think that unity is the highest value.
I really don't.
But if your case is that in order for us to achieve unity, we have to push forward with an impeachment that half the country doesn't support, that's a weird way to achieve unity.
Here is Chuck Schumer.
Those who say let's move on, that brings unity, are false.
When you had such a serious invasion of the Capitol, Insighted by a president.
When you have such a serious charge, sweeping it under the rug will not bring unity.
It will keep the store open.
Okay, so here is my favorite part of the constitutional argument being made by Democrats.
So, one of the things they are now considering is blatantly unconstitutional.
If the impeachment trial fails, one of the things that they are currently considering is the possibility of invoking the 14th Amendment.
Which could be done by pure majority vote to bar Trump from running for office ever again.
They included that in the impeachment charge itself, but Trump did not quote-unquote engage in insurrection.
from holding office if they have quote unquote engaged in insurrection.
They included that in the impeachment charge itself, but Trump did not quote unquote engage in insurrection.
He left office as provided by law on January 20th with no sort of official support.
To bar him from office at this point would be pretty obviously a constitutional bill of attainder as Ed Morrissey writes over at Hot Air.
Nothing in the language of the 14th Amendment confers authority on Congress to do anything except waive a particular prohibition.
It prohibits people who have committed certain crimes from holding federal office.
Nothing in this denies these people from having due process in a court of law to make that determination of guilt in the first place, because the fact of the matter remains that you have to have due process of law in order to punish somebody this way.
Congress is not a court in any mode other than impeachment.
Democrats know it, by the way.
The fact is, Democrats know this, but they don't really care.
Steve Cohen is a Democrat from Tennessee, and he said, I know there's some concern about it being a bill of attainder.
I'm not concerned about that, because what he did was horrific.
This is the way the Democrats tend to think.
I don't really care about the constitutionality argument.
Two things can be true at once, as very often is true.
It can be constitutional to hold an impeachment trial after a person has left office.
Also, the people who are arguing that cannot care very much about the Constitution.
That can certainly be a possibility.
Okay, in just a second, we're going to get to the actual argument being made by Democrats, and that is the incitement argument.
We'll get to why that falls short as well in just one second.
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Alrighty, so the Democrats actually started laying out their impeachment case yesterday.
Not just the constitutional case, the impeachment case.
That's really what Trump's lawyer was referring to earlier.
Castor was referring to the idea that, I thought this trial was supposed to be separated into the constitutional argument and then the content argument.
Democrats know this is a PR ploy, basically.
So they led off the bat with this 13-minute video.
effectively edited that showed Trump speaking and juxtaposed it with footage from the Capitol riot.
Here's a little bit of what that sounded like.
We're gonna walk down.
We're gonna walk down to the Capitol.
We are going to the Capitol, where our problems are.
It's that direction.
Fight like hell.
And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
Okay, well, there's only one problem with this particular video.
And again, the juxtaposition is ugly.
What happened on January 6th was really, really ugly.
But the Democrats have to make the argument that Trump foreseeably incited a riot at the Capitol building, an unprecedented event in American history.
Right, so here's the thing with things being unprecedented.
Usually, they're not super foreseeable.
The part of this that made it foreseeable, in fact, was the fact that the FBI apparently was keeping tabs on people who were openly talking about storming the Capitol building in days prior, which means the January 6th events weren't the spurring event.
You can make the argument that Trump's overall argument was ginning people up.
That's true.
But you cannot make the argument, I think, in all good conscience, that Trump's January 6th speech itself incited the riot.
I mean, the man did say, peacefully and patriotically march to the Capitol building, right?
That is what he said.
Okay, I have to say, this is pretty amazing.
Newsweek fact-checked this.
It just shows you again how corrupt the fact-checkers are.
They did a fact-check.
Did Trump say to peacefully and patriotically march to the Capitol?
Fact-check.
Mostly true.
Mostly true.
That's literally a direct quote of what he said.
But that never appeared in that Democratic video.
Instead, they just showed Trump saying, fight like hell and all this.
I mean, that is typical ramped up political rhetoric.
Democrats have said that sort of stuff from time immemorial.
So have Republicans.
Fighting politically is not the same thing as go invade the Capitol building and hit a bunch of police officers with polls.
That is not the same thing in any way, shape or form.
So basically what Democrats are attempting to do at this point is simply ramp up the emotional rhetoric.
That makes sense, again, for a PR trial, which this basically is.
David Cicilline, a Democrat, I believe he's from Louisiana, he was saying that January 6th was a national tragedy and Trump incited it.
This is their argument.
This was a national tragedy.
a disaster for America's standing in the world.
And President Trump is singularly responsible for inciting it.
As we will prove, the attack on the Capitol was not solely the work of extremists lurking in the shadows.
Indeed, does anyone in this chamber honestly believe that but for the conduct of President Trump, Okay, so here is the thing.
The standard that Ciceline is using right there, he says, does anyone believe that but for Trump's activity, that wouldn't have occurred?
The but for standard of causation is very rarely used in law.
Because the reality is, but for many things, this wouldn't have occurred.
But for Trump losing the election, this wouldn't have occurred.
But for universal mail-in balloting, this wouldn't have occurred.
Are those things responsible for the riot?
No.
The answer, of course, is no.
So Democrats are really not making a legal case.
They're really not making even a particularly convincing, I would say, political case.
But they are making an emotionally laden one.
And that, of course, is the entire point here.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so the case that is being made by Democrats over and over and over again is that it is Trump's violent rhetoric that drove what happened on January 6th, that he is responsible for incitement.
That is the argument that continually is made here.
And the media, of course, are backing this one to the hills.
And the media love this argument.
So CNN's Anderson Cooper, from a network that routinely made excuses for violence during the actual Black Lives Matter riots of the summer.
They had people like Chris Cuomo getting on air and talking about how it was just like the Boston Tea Party to burn down your local Walmart.
Anderson Cooper, it's like, you know, Trump supporters can't claim they love law and order.
Well, what if I hate what happened on January 6th?
Can I still claim I love Law & Order?
Because I do hate what happened on January 6th.
I thought that it was an act of evil.
But apparently, according to Anderson Cooper, unless you are willing to say that Trump is responsible for incitement of the riot, and people are deprived of their agency, and him saying peacefully and patriotically march on the Capitol, and then a riot ensuing, that those two things are so directly linked that he must be impeached.
If you're unwilling to vote how Anderson Cooper wants you to vote, in other words, this means you can't say you love Law & Order anymore.
The former president of the United States cannot claim to be a law and order president.
When you have the crowds chanting, kill the blue, you saw the hurling insults and fists and objects and the American flag and a hockey stick at officers, as you said, gouging out an eye.
An officer lost three fingers.
You know, one officer was killed, two others have died by suicide.
Any claim by them that they are lovers of law and order, it rings hollow, certainly after seeing that.
Okay, who is they?
Is it like everybody who doesn't, the 44% of Americans, 40% of Americans, who think that Trump is not directly responsible for what happened during the January 6th Capitol riots, which again, were unprecedented in American history.
When everybody watched with their jaw to the floor, it's because that hasn't happened before.
So saying that this was completely foreseeable by Trump is a stretch.
It is also true that you see from the Democrats over and over, they keep saying, new evidence is gonna drop and it's gonna show you just how involved the White House was.
Okay, anytime.
Like seriously, this is an impeachment trial, anytime.
They've been saying for weeks that Republican members of Congress were complicit in the attack.
They've been saying that members of Congress were scoping the hallways for the Capitol rioters.
I mean, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez accused Ted Cruz of being an accomplice to attempted murder.
Like, any time you guys want to show this evidence, it would be fan-freaking-tastic.
Because you know what convinces me?
Not your ramped-up rhetoric.
What convinces me, actually, is the evidence.
So let's see the evidence.
If Trump was planning the January 6th riots, then...
Let's see it.
And him tweeting out that it's gonna get wild on January 6th.
Okay, everybody tweets that it's gonna, like seriously, a lot of people tweet things like, it's going to get wild at my rally.
They don't mean that we are going to go storm the Capitol building and attack police officers as a general rule.
And when it comes to Trump's tweets and him tweeting wild things, we're supposed to believe that that is what is directly responsible for a bunch of nuts and evil people storming the Capitol building of the United States?
But again, this is the goal here.
And the standard that is being used here essentially is, if a bad thing happened, and it did, And the people who did the bad thing credit Trump, then we have to take them super duper seriously.
This is what Philip Bump at the Washington Post is arguing, quote, Over and over and over, arrested rioters say what spurred them?
Trump.
And Philip Bump says, It's been a month since an armed mob stormed the U.S.
Capitol to try to prevent Congress from counting the electoral votes cast after the 2020 presidential election.
The riotous mob was largely made up of supporters of President Donald Trump, who called on his base to come to Washington on January 6th for a wild protest of election results he'd spent months trying to discredit.
That morning, he encouraged those who had made the trip to fight for their country and to march for the Capitol.
They did.
It's worth putting a fine point on two things.
The first is that the effects of the day's violence are still tangible.
Second, its proximate cause is no less murky.
Hours before the impeachment trial began in the Senate on Tuesday, federal law enforcement officers in Georgia arrested Benjamin Torrey, one of those accused of breaching the Capitol that day.
Like so many others who have already been arrested, Torrey left a wide trail on social media pointing to his participation in the day's events.
Tory's only most recent person to be arrested, but he may not be by the time you read this.
Nearly every day since January 6th, law enforcement officials have arrested someone allegedly involved in storming the Capitol.
By the way, this is a quick note.
The entire media ran with the blatantly stupid line that law enforcement was biased against black people because they weren't arresting people for the Capitol riot.
They've been arresting people every single day for the Capitol riot.
They were understaffed at the time, which was the entire problem.
But, says Philip Bump over at the Washington Post, from those who have already been arrested, we hear a consistent refrain, they were there to support Trump, or in their view, there at his behest.
Okay, so I have a question.
The congressional baseball shooter literally quoted Bernie Sanders while shooting people.
If he said I'm here because I believe this is what Bernie would have wanted me to do, does that mean that we would have to charge Bernie Sanders with incitement or see him as an accomplice to attempted murder?
I don't think so.
During the Black Lives Matter riots, if you had asked Black Lives Matter rioters why you were doing this, they would articulate the exact same arguments made by people like Nicole Hannah-Jones over at the New York Times.
Who, by the way, tweeted that she was very excited that people were calling the riots the 1619 riots.
Is she responsible for the... I don't think she's responsible for the riots.
I think she's responsible for all the stupid crap that comes out of her mouth and pen, but I don't think that she's responsible for the riots.
Using the argument that people who committed criminal acts cite this person as the inspiration for those criminal acts does not mean that a rational mind would say that the activity of politically Ramping up the rhetoric, politically being inflammatory the way that Trump often is, or even politically saying things that are not true, as I think Trump was doing during the post-election cycle.
That that is responsible for people doing something unprecedented in American history.
And here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
People on the left know this.
They know this.
Right?
This is why they are very much afraid of the argument that is being made by people on the right, which is, you guys, you use rhetoric like this all the time.
So to take an example, Jimmy Kimmel, obviously a supporter of conviction, impeachment, and loading Trump onto a trebuchet and launching him into space.
Jimmy Kimmel, a great moral arbiter, Pope Kimmel over here.
He says that when Trump was using this sort of language, then he should have known that there were people who would have gone and done this because you can't expect people to understand hyperbole.
Here was Jimmy Kimmel.
His lawyers are saying he's not responsible because people should have known he was using hyperbole when he told them to fight like hell.
And then they ran down the street.
The guy in the Viking costume and the lady with the words Camp Auschwitz printed on her XXXL sweatshirt should know what hyperbole is.
Okay, but that's the entire point.
Now you're making my point.
So we are going to judge whether somebody was using hyperbole or not by nut cases?
That's how we're going to judge this?
So when Bernie Sanders... I cite this case because this was a case where people were actually shot and somebody was nearly murdered.
Okay, so that's a case where actual violence ensued.
If that shooter was shouting, this is for healthcare, right after Bernie Sanders had suggested repeatedly and openly that Republicans' healthcare plan was for you to die, That is a hyperbolic statement, is it not?
That Republicans' healthcare plan was for you to die?
That was not a true statement.
It's hyperbole.
The vast majority of rational human beings understand that that is political hyperbole.
But according to Jimmy Kimmel's argument, we can now say that Bernie Sanders should have known that it would impact nut cases in such a way that they would probably go and shoot other fellow members of Congress.
That's not the way any of this works.
We don't judge whether rhetoric is responsible for activity by taking people who are the nuttiest among us and then saying, well, we should have known that those nuts were going to go do something terrible.
If we use the nuttiest and their behavior as the standard for what we can and cannot say, there's gonna be very little we can and cannot say because it turns out that people who do evil, crazy things very often do not need an excuse to do evil or crazy things and or misinterpret things on a regular basis because they are evil and crazy.
So Jimmy Kimmel knows this.
You know who else knows this?
Yamiche Alcindor over at PBS.
So Yamiche Alcindor, who is not a journalist, right?
She's a pseudo-journalist.
She's an activist.
She says, you know, when Republicans cite rhetoric from like Maxine Waters and Kamala Harris, you know, there wasn't a storming of the Capitol after Maxine Waters and Kamala Harris spoke.
Here she was making this case.
The Trump team, as you've reported, also is going to be bringing out this video, trying to say, here are what Democrats said.
Here's why they're just like President Trump.
But I think the thing that's going to be so obvious is going to be that there wasn't a storming of the Capitol after Maxine Waters or Senator Harris, then-Senator Harris, had fiery speeches.
Senator Harris literally tweeted out support for rioters in the middle of the riot.
Senator Harris tweeted out a link to a bail fund for people who'd been arresting for looting and rioting in Minneapolis.
So, yeah, that does have something to do with the violence.
In fact, it has more directly to do with the violence than what Trump said on January 6th.
So Democrats know that this argument is not a winning argument.
They just understand that if they show the video of January 6th over and over and over again, that people are justifiably upset about January 6th, and they hope to link all Republicans to it.
That is the purpose of this entire exercise.
That's the purpose of this entire exercise.
They tried to do this yesterday with Mike Lee, and full disclosure, Senator Lee is a friend of mine.
I think that he's maybe the most honest guy in Congress, and he was making the case that when it comes to Democrats, he's not even talking about Trump here, he says Democrats say inflammatory stuff all the time, and we don't, We don't pretend that the inflammatory rhetoric used by Democrats is responsible for incitement.
Everybody gets a mulligan, right?
That's what he was saying.
He was talking about Democrats.
The media immediately took this and suggested that what he meant is that Trump should get a mulligan for his rhetoric, which is not what he was saying in the first place.
In any case, here was Senator Lee.
These are outgrowths of the same natural impulse that exist from time to time among anyone in this business and in many other businesses.
Look, everyone makes mistakes, everyone's entitled to a mulligan once in a while and I would hope I would expect that each of those individuals would take a mulligan on each of those statements, because in each instance, they're making it deeply personal.
They're ceasing to make it about policy.
Instead, they're talking about getting up in people's faces and making individuals feel perfectly uncomfortable.
And that's not helpful.
Okay, so there he's explicitly referencing Maxine Waters and Alexander Ocasio-Cortez.
And he's giving the standard that I think most rational people give, which is people use inflammatory rhetoric in politics all the time.
It is bad.
It does not mean that you're responsible for incitement necessary that you should be removed from office.
Here's the thing.
The Biden administration does this too.
Jen Psaki was specifically asked whether Democrats using incendiary rhetoric was different from Trump.
And she dodged the question, of course.
The former president's lawyers argue, based on the briefs that they have filed, that some Democrats have used incendiary rhetoric.
How does the White House view that as any different?
Look, Joe Biden is the president.
He's not a pundit.
He's not going to opine on the back-and-forth arguments, nor is he watching them, that are taking place in the Senate.
Mm-hmm.
So yeah, we're gonna skip right over that one.
Which makes perfect sense, right?
Of course they're gonna skip over that one, because that is not an argument that Democrats even want to deal with.
There were widespread riots that resulted in $2 billion in damage.
They were the most damaging riots in American history.
And they happened this summer.
And there were Democrats actively cheering it on.
They don't want this argument.
This is why they tried to disappear it off the front pages in real time.
This is why they lied to you in the media, suggesting that these were quote-unquote mostly peaceful protests.
And they were mostly peaceful in the sense that the vast majority of protests did not result in massive property damage.
But that is no standard for whether a movement is peaceful or not.
Most of the stuff lots of movements do is peaceful.
And then there's, you know, the part where they're not so peaceful.
But Democrats don't want to talk about any of that because then, of course, we get into very uncomfortable territory.
So understand what this impeachment trial is and what it is not.
It is really not.
There are some members of Congress who I think are honestly trying to determine whether Trump did something impeachable.
And then there are Democrats who are really just attempting to make political hay out of one of the most vile events in American politics of my lifetime on January 6th.
And I'm not talking about Trump's speech.
I'm talking about the actual storming of the Capitol building.
And by the way, the reaction to that has also been extraordinarily bad.
I mean, the reaction, which is lockdown DC under essentially military occupation all the way until March and spend half a billion dollars doing it.
The reaction, which is knock parlor off the internet and tell all the social media companies to clamp down on traffic to sites that you don't like.
The reaction, which is free speech itself should be put under attack.
That does no credit to Democrats at all.
It's pretty astonishing stuff, in fact.
Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to the stuff that's actually happening in Politics That Matters.
You know, like the policy that's happening while everybody is distracted over here with the impeachment trial?
That makes no difference, because Trump's been out of office, and they're not going to convict him, nor are they gonna ban him from running in the future.
Nor, by the way, have I seen him have any inclination to run in the future at this point.
There's actual stuff going on with the other hand.
Okay, we're gonna get to that in just one second.
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Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to the stuff that's actually happening in American policy because it's being unrolled while the media are distracted with whatever they are distracted with.
Namely, everything but covering the Biden administration.
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All righty, so meanwhile, as this impeachment trial continues and reaches its preordained end, because it's very obvious which way this is going, Joe Biden continues to do stuff that if Donald Trump did it and when he did it was considered the worst stuff that has ever happened.
So, let's just take a quick example.
The Biden administration has now asked for resignations from every Trump-appointed U.S.
attorney.
So remember that time that Trump did this with Preet Bharara?
The New York AG, or the New York DA, rather.
Remember this?
And it was like the biggest deal in the world.
How dare he fire the holdovers from the last administration?
Joe Biden does it, and it's like, well, isn't that nice?
That's pretty great.
Like, it's totally fine now.
Here's the Washington Post reporting that Biden administration on Tuesday asked the remaining U.S.
attorneys appointed by President Trump and confirmed by the Senate to submit their resignations, sparing only two federal prosecutors who are conducting politically sensitive probes, including of President Biden's son, according to a DOJ news release and officials.
The resignations won't take effect immediately.
The U.S.
attorneys were told on a conference call they would be allowed to stay until February 28th and transition out.
People familiar with the matter said.
The move generated some criticism from both sides of the political aisle.
Illinois' two Democratic senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, said in a joint statement they were disappointed they were not consulted before the administration asked for the resignation of U.S.
Attorney John Lausch, whose office has been pursuing a corruption case that has raised questions about a powerful state's Democratic lawmaker.
The senators say, while the president has the right to remove U.S.
attorneys, there's precedent for U.S.
attorneys in the Northern District of Illinois to remain in office to conclude sensitive investigations.
Some conservatives question the move's timing, which came just as impeachment proceedings against Trump began.
Ian Pryor, a former Justice Department spokesman in the Trump administration, who now tracks moves in the Biden Justice Department, noted that when Jeff Sessions did this, everybody went crazy.
He said the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, has the absolute right to request resignations of incumbent U.S.
attorneys.
What will be frustrating to conservatives is that Democrats, pearl-clutching columnists, and cable news pundits tried to spin it as a threat to democracy when Trump did it, but now will say all is well since it's Biden sending the pink slips.
That, of course, is absolutely true.
Meanwhile...
Joe Biden continues to use COVID as an excuse to do a bunch of stupid crap.
COVID relief does not need to be $1.9 trillion, nor does it need to include things like a $15 minimum wage, hundreds of billions of dollars dedicated to bailing out blue states from their own crappy pension deals.
It doesn't need to include any of that stuff.
It doesn't need to include billions more in funding for schools that are not open, right?
That stuff does not need to happen.
And yet, Joe Biden is basically using COVID as an excuse to do all of this, because every crisis is an opportunity.
The reality is we are now in the homestretch when it comes to COVID.
The vaccinations are rolling out.
Americans can smell it.
Americans can see it.
Americans can see that everyone above the age of 65 who wants to get the vaccine is going to have the vaccine, and that's going to happen in fairly short order.
And people who are below the age of 65 are going to have access to the vaccine before the summer.
And yet Democrats continue to trot out the idea that we are going to be in a mode of COVID crisis all the way until essentially Thanksgiving.
Hey, that's nuts.
That is crazy.
Team Biden is now trying to drive this crisis to epic proportions, even though we are now really clearly on the downslope of COVID infections and of COVID deaths and vaccinations are taking place at record rates.
According to the Daily Beast, top members of President Joe Biden's COVID response team are warning internally the U.S.
may not reach herd immunity until Thanksgiving or the start of winter.
In an interview with CBS News this week, Biden hinted at some of these concerns, saying it would be very difficult to reach herd immunity much before the end of the summer with the current daily rate of approximately 1.3 million vaccine doses.
Other top officials working on the federal government's COVID-19 response say they are uneasy about vaccine supply long-term and the impact on herd immunity.
Okay, so here's the thing about herd immunity when it comes to vaccines.
Okay, for the people who have already had the vaccine, If you have, say, the Pfizer vaccine, you have well over 90% immunity to the virus, just by rates, okay?
The second shot is providing you something like 95% immunity.
What I mean by that is 95% shot that if you are exposed to the virus, you don't get infected with it, and if you are, the amount of damage that the virus does to you is extraordinarily minimal once you have these shots, right, by percentages.
Then there's the question of people who can't get the shot.
Now, here's the thing.
When it comes to people who can't get the shot, we're really talking essentially about a couple of groups of people.
People who have a pre-existing condition, let's say that they have some sort of leukemia or something, that it would endanger their life to have the shot, although this is being given to people who have cancer right now, so I don't know the impact on people who have leukemia.
The two groups of people I know it is not safe for at this point, or it has not been deemed safe for, are pregnant women and children.
Children are not vulnerable to the disease.
Kids are not experiencing serious damage from the disease, as a general rule.
The number of children who have died from this disease is, I believe, still in double digits in the United States, out of literally tens of millions of people who have had it.
When it comes to pregnant women, they're now doing trials on whether pregnant women will be able to have the vaccine.
Beyond that, if the idea is we're supposed to lock down the entire society forever because there are a few vulnerable people who cannot have the vaccine, that's not going to happen.
Realistically speaking, it's not going to happen.
And you're not going to be able to encourage a bunch of young, healthy people to have the vaccine if that comes along with the idea that you still have to socially distance and wear a mask until every single person in the country has had the vaccine.
And we're going to lock this thing down.
It is now February.
It's it's February 10th.
We're going to lock this thing down until next November.
Are you insane?
Are you crazy?
And yet that is what Biden is pushing.
And one of the reasons that Team Biden is pushing all of this instead of a transition back to regular life, which is what things are.
I mean, frankly, that is what is already happening in places like Florida to Florida's credit.
And it should get better and better as vaccines roll out.
There is a there's another purpose here.
OK, the other purpose here is to give an excuse for why you need to pour money into the system, why you need to restructure systems of power.
Covid is an opportunity, according to people like Joe Biden.
He's admitting that here is Joe Biden admitting that Covid is an opportunity.
As you know, I've met for a long time with my Republican colleagues.
I've been exchanging correspondence with them and telephone calls as well to see if there's any way we can follow up beyond where we are.
I'm meeting with the members of the House and the Senate as well.
And I think we're in a position to think big and move big and move in a direction that can be not only Get the economy back on its feet, but we have to get people well before we get people on their feet.
Okay, so again, we're just going to continue to pour money into the system and the more we can drive up the feeling of crisis, the more we will be able to use that as an excuse to push forward horrible, horrible policy.
And by the way, this is horrible policy.
Okay, that $1.9 trillion package that Biden wants to sign into law would include things like a boost to the minimum wage, Of $15 an hour by 2025.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, he's trying to do this right now via reconciliation.
It would cut employment by 1.4 million jobs in 2025 and increase the budget deficit by $54 billion over the next 10 years.
It would lift 900,000 Americans out of poverty.
It would put 1.4 million Americans just that year out of a job.
And this is considered good policy by the Democrats.
Really well done here.
All because of COVID.
Of course, it really has nothing to do with COVID at this point.
What this really has to do with is a bunch of pre-existing democratic priorities, and now they have an excuse to push that stuff forward.
This is the party of science speaking here.
It's pretty incredible.
Okay, meanwhile, the party of science continues to push forward with a bunch of other nonsense as well.
So, Jen Psaki continues to make the case that we are going to push toward opening classrooms.
But then, she was asked specifically, what do you mean by opening classrooms?
You know, when you say that you want classrooms open in 100 days, what exactly would your standard for open be?
Because is it open if you have the classrooms open one day a week?
What percentage of classrooms would have to be open in order for you to deem the classrooms open?
Here was Jen Psaki, White House Press Secretary, explaining.
His goal that he set is to have the majority of schools, so more than 50%, open by day 100 of his presidency.
And that means some teaching in classrooms.
So at least one day a week, hopefully it's more.
And obviously it is as much as is safe in each school and local district.
When you say some teaching, you didn't use the same majority qualifier there.
You just have to have some teaching in school, some teachers in school, not the majority of teachers in school and the majority of classrooms.
Well, teaching at least one day a week in the majority of schools by day 100.
By day 100?
In-person teaching.
In-person teaching, yes.
In-person teaching one day a week in some schools, 50% of schools, by day 100?
There are a couple of problems with this.
One, the data suggests that for young kids, the transmissibility is not high, and there is no additional risk to teachers, vis-a-vis the general public, from being in school with young children.
That's problem number one.
This is completely anti-science.
Like, completely anti-science.
They're just doing this at the behest of the teachers unions.
Let's be perfectly frank about this.
It is perfectly obvious what is happening.
This is about the teachers unions.
Perry Stein of the Washington Post.
She says the DC Teachers Union and AFT President Randy Weingarten have now called on Washington DC to close entire schools for cleaning for at least 24 hours if one COVID case is detected.
And kids who are grouped in cohorts must quarantine for 14 days if a case is detected.
Okay, like for...
Everyone in the class has to quarantine for 14 days if a case is detected?
Even if they test negative?
They don't have to quarantine for like three and then test negative?
Okay, this is crazy towns.
Okay, this is being run by the teachers' unions.
It has nothing to do with science.
Okay, so that's problem number one.
It has nothing to do with science.
The science suggests it is open, it is safe to open schools.
Okay, particularly for kids who are under the age of 10.
Okay, then there is the second problem, which is she says that her goal here is that within 100 days, 50% of the schools will be open.
With at least one day of teaching a week.
One problem.
As per the usual arrangement, the Biden administration is setting expectations so low that they are already being achieved.
Just like they said we want 100 million doses out within the first 100 days, and we were already doing a million doses a day.
So they were essentially lying about what was already happening.
Now they're doing the same thing with school reopenings.
Here is the reality.
Right now, about 40% of schools in the United States are open, and then when it comes to the hybrid model, meaning some in classrooms, some out of classroom, that's another 25% of schools.
So well over 60% of schools in the United States already meet the standard that she is saying 50% of schools should meet within 100 days.
Hey, those are the current stats.
The current stats suggest we are already there.
And yet there she is saying, look at the amazing progress we are going to make.
So basically, I guess they're going to have to close more schools in order to achieve this particular purpose.
They're actually going to have to close schools in order to get back to 50% because we are over 60% last time I checked from the currently available statistics.
So this has nothing to do with science.
This is all about alarmism and serving the purposes of the teachers' unions.
Speaking of serving purposes that have nothing to do with the interests of students, so Jen Psaki was specifically asked about trans girls competing in high school sports.
Again, the Biden administration is just getting more and more radical, and we're supposed to pretend they're moderate because Trump.
Sure, Trump's been out of office for a while here.
Sure, he's not the president, but Trump.
But Trump is gonna be the rallying call of the media and the Democratic Party.
For the rest of this administration.
That's not rare.
Obama did it with Bush.
Now it's gonna be but Trump.
So, it might be kind of a problem that the federal government of the United States is now essentially mandating that biological boys race against biological girls.
And that biological boys be allowed to go into locker rooms with biological girls so long as they say they are female.
I mean, that's kind of a problem, just on a logical level.
It also happens to violate girls' rights.
Girls do have a right not to have to compete with boys.
Girls do have a right to be private from biological boys.
That seems like the same people who declared it a right to privacy to kill a baby in her womb say that it is not a right to privacy for a 16-year-old girl not to want to be gazed upon by a biological male in the locker room.
The right to privacy just doesn't apply there.
In any case, Jen Psaki was asked this question and she reverts to type, which is, she is just going to say bumper stickers.
Bumper stickers are the way that we avoid all problems in this country right now.
Does the president have a message for local school officials on dealing with these kind of disputes that are already starting to arise?
I would just say that the president's belief is that trans rights are human rights, and that's why he signed that executive order.
And in terms of the determinations by universities and colleges, I would certainly defer to them.
Okay, I just have a question.
When she says trans rights are human rights, when you don't define that, I mean, it's just, this is the way that we avoid all political conversation in this country.
You ask, should this person, does this person actually have the rights to go into, like, a girl's locker room?
And you just say, trans rights are human rights.
You can fill in that trans with literally anything.
You just say anything.
So you say, for example, okay, does a gay couple have a right to be married inside a traditional church?
Do they have that right?
Not should the church marry them on a moral level.
I think every church has the ability to make that decision for themselves.
There's plenty of biblical, scriptural precedent for churches not participating in activities they believe to be sinful.
And by the way, that is the precedent of American history.
But if you're a Democrat, all you have to do is say something like, gay rights are human rights.
Because once you say our human rights, then that ends the argument.
There's no discussion to be had about balancing people's rights, the rights of freedom of religion, or the right to, a supposed right to respect, which doesn't actually exist.
It is very easy to avoid all conversation about the complexities and trade-offs of particular policy when you just say something like, blank rights are human rights.
Thank you for that bumper sticker slogan, Biden administration, as you pursue unprecedentedly radical policy.
Speaking of unprecedentedly radical policy, Joe Biden has now signed 52 executive orders and actions in his first 20 days in office.
According to Ian Hayworth over at the Daily Wire, By February 1st, Biden had signed an unprecedented 42 executive orders in just the first few days of his administration.
Those included executive orders which look to expand socialized medicine, provide taxpayer funding for foreign abortions, destroy American energy jobs, rejoin meaningless and counterproductive international agreements and organizations, further the promotion of ahistorical mischaracterizations of the United States, and call for transgender rights in school sports, to name a few.
Since the beginning of February, Biden has signed an additional nine executive orders and actions.
He continues to add to the list.
His running tally is currently at 52 executive orders and actions after 20 days in office.
So this is all exciting, exciting stuff.
But believe me, it's all moderation, guys.
It is all moderation.
It is fine.
Because Joe Biden is doing it.
He can fire every single person who is appointed to a U.S.
attorney's office just the way Trump did.
And Trump was a radical trying to destroy the American way of life.
And Joe Biden is a moderate.
Joe Biden can sign more executive orders than all prior presidents of the last 40 years combined in his first month.
And that's okay, because after all, Joe Biden is a moderate.
If you just keep chanting, Joe Biden is a moderate, it's like Beetlejuice.
If you say it three times, he appears.
If you say Joe Biden is a moderate, Joe Biden appears, stumbles around a little while, says an incomprehensible sentence, and then falls over while signing an executive order.
And it's all fine.
It's all fine.
Because this is all moderate policy, right?
Like, for example, it's super moderate policy that the Biden administration has just dropped a Trump proposal to track Chinese influence in American schools.
According to Chuck Ross reporting over at the Daily Caller, The Biden administration quietly withdrew a rule proposed by the Trump administration that would have required American schools and universities to disclose their partnerships with Confucius Institutes, which some U.S.
officials allege are front groups for Chinese Communist Party propaganda.
The Trump administration submitted a proposed rule to the Department of Homeland Security on December 31, 2020.
It was entitled, Establishing Requirements for Student and Exchange Visitor Program Certified Schools.
to disclose agreements with Confucius Institutes and Classrooms.
In other words, we didn't want the Chinese government basically putting propaganda agents inside U.S.
schools.
Around 500 K-12 schools and 65 colleges in the U.S.
have partnerships with the Confucius Institute U.S.
Center, which is a U.S.-based affiliate of the Beijing-based Confucius Institute headquarters.
That institute is affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education.
The Daily Caller has previously reported that many of the directors are members of the CCP.
The Trump-era proposal was withdrawn from consideration January 26th.
There's no information as to why this happened.
The website does say that at any point in the review process for a proposed rule, an agency can withdraw the rule from review and choose not to move forward with it or to resubmit it after further consideration.
First of all, Republicans in Congress should immediately, immediately take this up as a piece of legislation and try to push Democrats to vote up or down on it.
Because the amount of kowtowing that's about to happen to the Chinese government is astonishing.
It is large scale and astonishing.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on August 13th, the Confucius Institute was quote, an entity controlled by the PRC that advances Beijing's global propaganda and malign influence campaign on US campuses and K through 12 classrooms.
But Biden is now walking back that rule, which is really excellent policy.
I mean, really, totally moderate.
Everything's moderate.
Speaking of moderate, the OMB nominee, so Joe Biden is nominating to the Office of Management and Budget Head, Neera Tanden.
Neera Tanden has a long history of really sort of bizarre and radical behavior on Twitter.
She spent a lot of time ripping people personally on Twitter.
But not only that, there was a big scandal for Neera Tanden.
She used to be at the Center for American Progress.
in which she overtly said the name of a woman who had apparently anonymously reported sexual harassment.
She said it in a meeting.
And people at the company were like, what are you doing right now?
So Neurotan and not particularly well liked on either side of the aisle, that's who he's decided to put forward for OMB.
Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma goes after OMB nominee yesterday in her hearing.
One statement that you made about people that have the personal religious convictions about contraception, like Little Sisters of the Poor and others, called them a successful political cudgel, helping isolate extreme advocates from the mainstream.
Thank you.
That one seems to cross a different line for me.
The context didn't seem to be about people that use religion as a cudgel.
It seemed to be that the personal beliefs of those individuals became the cudgel.
That's the part that threw me in that.
Okay, well, that's the sort of stuff that Neera Tanden routinely put out there.
Now, again, people are entitled to tweet whatever they want, but can we stop pretending that this is an administration staffed by moderates?
Joe Biden was not a moderate.
Joe Biden is not a moderate.
By personal sort of temperament, he may be more moderate because he is a bloviating blowhard who likes to talk a lot, but that doesn't mean that he is actually somebody who crosses the aisle on a regular basis.
He's a hard-nosed partisan.
He's been a hard-nosed partisan since he participated in the destruction of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.
I mean, there's nothing new here with Joe Biden.
The attempt to paint him as a moderate was a pure campaign ploy so that they could pretend there was going to be a return to normalcy.
Well, I guess there is a return to normalcy.
It's just the radicalism of the Democratic Party shielded by the media.
That's the normal.
That was always going to be the normal.
And it continues apace, even while the media focus their attention on an impeachment trial that is going absolutely nowhere.
Alrighty, we'll be back here today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Knowles Show.
He's going to be discussing a 116-year-old French nun who beat COVID.
You can hear more details about that particular story on Michael's show that is available right now.
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