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July 3, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:36
Supreme Court SLAMS LGBT Tyranny, DESTROYS Biden’s Student Loan Bailout
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Well, there were two major Supreme Court decisions that came down on Friday.
One of them was on religious freedom.
The other one was on Joe Biden's decision to get rid of student loans, essentially to bail out all student loans in the United States.
So, both decisions came down the right direction.
The Supreme Court, which again, this is the big victory for Donald Trump, the lasting victory that Donald Trump is going to have had from his presidency, whether or not he becomes president again, that's another issue, but The big victory he's going to have had from his presidency is the remolding and reshaping of the Supreme Court.
He got three picks on the Supreme Court, and all three of them seem to have been victories on behalf of conservative jurisprudence and originalism.
This opinion was written by Neil Gorsuch, who was one of Donald Trump's appointments.
He was actually his first appointment to the Supreme Court.
And that particular case went 6-3.
It was the six conservatives versus the three liberals on the court.
And this opinion concerned the question of whether a religious website designer could be forced to essentially create a website on behalf of a same-sex wedding.
Now, you may say to yourself, this sounds exactly like the Masterpiece Cake Shop case.
The Masterpiece Cake Shop case was a case in which there was a guy who was asked to bake a cake for a gay wedding, and he decided he didn't want to do that, and the Supreme Court said that's artistic expression.
The question was, how broadly would that apply?
To what level of services would that apply?
Because they're essentially Two issues in American law that are in conflict right now.
One is the so-called Public Accommodations Law.
That comes from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I've suggested before that the Public Accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act are wrong-headed.
I actually think that they are an overstep in terms of constitutionality.
They essentially say that if you act in business, then you quote-unquote cannot discriminate.
And that was written for good reason.
It was originally written in order to make sure that, for example, black people could stay at hotels and people who operate at hotels couldn't bar black people from hotels.
So you understand exactly where it came from.
The motivations are good.
The problem is it's overbroad because it also allows the government now to dictate exactly who you must do business with.
So the Public Accommodations Law of the Civil Rights Act is on the one hand.
On the other hand is freedom of association and freedom of speech.
Let's say that, for example, you weren't a public accommodation in the same way.
It wasn't a hotel that was open to everyone.
Let's say that you were a bed and breakfast.
Did the same thing apply?
Well, the Supreme Court has said in the past that it did apply.
So, these two things come into deep and abiding conflict when you are talking not really about issues of race, but issues of activity.
So, same-sex marriage is, in fact, an activity.
So, there's a difference in the law between discrimination against quote-unquote gay people and discrimination against activities done by gay people.
Those are not quite the same thing.
So, for example, if somebody came into your business, and you live in a state that has a strong anti-discrimination law, like the state of Colorado, somebody walks into your business, and they say, I want to buy a donut.
And you say, are you gay or are you straight?
That's a violation of anti-discrimination law in the state of Colorado.
If, however, the person comes in and says, I want you to bake me a cake, and I want a giant rainbow flag, and a huge slogan on it that says, love is love, and you say no, well that would actually be speech.
Right, no longer is this quote-unquote doing business or making a service that is available to everyone, simply available to gay people.
Now you are asking for specific messages to be parroted.
So in this particular case, which was about a website designer creating a same-sex marriage website, the question was, does this look more like the donut provider who is just refusing to sell donuts to gay people, or does it look more like the person who's being asked to put slogans across the cake?
Now, in my world, you know, in the world of the original Constitution, without the revolution that was the Civil Rights Act, with regard to public accommodation, the Civil Rights Act is exactly right in barring segregation, barring illegal discrimination by government actors.
Where the Civil Rights Act, in my opinion, goes too far, and this is sort of the libertarian view, is in dictating how you must operate your private business.
It seems to me that the federal government doesn't actually have the power over that, constitutionally speaking.
But, put that to the side.
What this case really was about was whether this looks more like the donut shop provider who won't sell the donut to the gay guy or whether this looks more like a bakery that refuses to bake a cake with a gay rights slogan on it.
And this is really important stuff because if you're a religious person, you're not just religious in your church.
You're not just religious in your home.
You're religious in how you practice your business.
Cases like this come up all the time, where people want their messages purveyed by business providers, and business providers do in fact have a right to say, I don't wish to purvey that message.
Or do they?
That was the question of this case.
So the majority is written by Justice Gorsuch, and it's worth going through it, because Essentially, what's been happening over the past several years under Justice Gorsuch's jurisprudence is what has been called the Utah Compromise.
The Utah Compromise suggests that there will be broad anti-discrimination laws that will apply to nearly everyone.
You can't discriminate against somebody on the basis of their status as, for example, a gay person or as a woman, as a Jew, right?
You can't do any of that.
But there are carve-outs for religious people who say that certain activities that these people do are in conflict with their own religious practice.
That's what Gorsuch is attempting to do right here.
So Gorsuch begins the opinion saying, like many states, Colorado has a law forbidding businesses from engaging in discrimination when they sell goods and services to the public.
Laws along these lines have done much to secure the civil rights of all Americans.
But in this particular case, Colorado does not just seek to ensure the sale of goods or services on equal terms.
It seeks to use its law to compel an individual to create speech she does not believe.
The question we face is whether that course violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.
So this would seem like a pretty clear-cut case, right?
Why should the government be able to force you to parrot a message that you don't actually believe?
Why should the government be able to do that?
And the answer the Supreme Court gave is the government isn't able to do that.
And not just because of religious objections.
Because of free speech itself.
So the Masterpiece Cake Shop case is about violation of religious freedom.
What Justice Gorsuch is saying, this doesn't just violate religious freedom, it violates free speech.
There are two separate clauses in the First Amendment.
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the speech.
And also, Congress shall not abridge freedom of the exercise of religion, right?
These are separate...
But, but important aspects of the First Amendment.
This falling under free speech is a broader latitude than mere religious exemption.
We'll get to more on this decision in just one second.
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Okay, so back to the majority opinion.
So one of the points the majority makes here is that the plaintiff in this particular case, the website designer, is quote, willing to work with all people regardless of classification such as race, creed, sexual orientation, and gender.
And she will gladly create custom graphics and websites for clients of any sexual orientation.
But that's not what was being asked of her.
It wasn't make a wedding website for this gay guy.
It was make a gay wedding website.
It is Steve marrying Bob, and they want a website celebrating their gay marriage.
That's not quite the same thing as Steve saying, I'm paying for my sister's wedding website, for example.
Or, we ourselves have a business that caters to weddings, and we want you to make that business website.
Not the same thing.
Under Colorado's logics, says Gorsuch, he points out that Colorado protests this.
Colorado believes they should be able to cram down on all residents of the state of Colorado their preferred messaging about same-sex marriage, which is unbelievably dangerous.
Because once you believe that, then basically all religious people are under fire everywhere they do business in public life.
Under Colorado's logic, says the Supreme Court, the government may compel anyone who speaks for pay on a given topic to accept all commissions on that same topic, no matter the underlying message, if the topic somehow implicates a customer's statutorily protected trait.
Taken seriously, that principle would allow the government to force all manner of artists, speechwriters, and others whose services involve speech to speak what they do not believe on pain of penalty.
The government could require an unwilling Muslim movie director to make a film with a Zionist message, or an atheist muralist to accept a commission celebrating evangelical zeal, so long as they would make films or murals for other members of the public with different messages.
Equally, the government could force a male website designer married to another man to design websites for an organization that advocates against same-sex marriage.
And this, of course, is true.
As soon as the government says that they can now compel certain types of speech, that means that they can compel all types of speech.
Okay, so we'll get to the dissent in a minute, which is truly an awful dissent by Sonia Sotomayor, who is a horrible justice.
She proclaimed when she was appointed that she was a wise Latina justice, which, again, affirmative action attributes being added to your Supreme Court description is never very good for your reputation.
Neither are bad dissents.
But the majority opinion in this case takes aim directly at Sotomayor's dissent.
They say, quote, it is difficult to read the dissent and conclude we're looking at the same case.
Much of it focuses on the evolution of public accommodations laws
and the strides gay Americans have made towards securing equal justice under law.
And no doubt there's much to applaud here, but none of this answers the question we face today.
Can I state for someone who provides her own expressive services
to abandon her conscience and speak its preferred message instead?
When the dissent finally gets around to that question more than halfway into its opinion,
it reimagines the facts of this case from top to bottom.
The dissent claims that Colorado wishes to regulate Ms.
Smith's conduct, not her speech.
Forget Colorado's stipulation that Ms.
Smith's activities are, in fact, expressive, which means that they are, in fact, speech.
The dissent chides us for deciding a pre-enforcement challenge, but it ignores the Tenth Circuit's finding that Ms.
Smith faced a credible threat of sanctions unless she conforms her views to the state's.
All despite the 10th Circuit finding that Colorado intends to force Ms.
Smith to convey a message she does not believe, with the very purpose of eliminating ideas that differ from its own.
Nor, says Gorsuch, does the dissent's reimagination end there.
It claims that, for the first time in its history, the court, quote, grants a business open to the public a right to refuse to serve members of protected class.
Never mind that we do no such thing, and that Colorado itself has stipulated that Ms.
Smith will work with all people regardless of sexual orientation.
Never mind, too, that it is the dissent that would have this court do something truly novel by allowing a government to coerce an individual to speak contrary to her beliefs on a significant issue of personal conviction, all in order to eliminate ideas that differ from its own.
Now, to be fair, there's confusion that arises when it comes to LGBT issues.
Why?
Well, because that's a question of self-identity.
How would you even know if somebody walked into your business and they were gay unless they told you they were gay?
I mean, that is literally the only way that you would know.
Or, in fact, they asked you to do a message for gay marriage.
Or they explained to you that they were married to another person of the same sex.
There are a lot of people who have various characteristics who are gay.
The gay community is, in fact, not quite as stereotypical as TV would make it out to be.
Which means that very often, quote-unquote, discrimination against a gay person is not in fact discrimination against gay person, it is discrimination against behavior that is conducted by a person who happens to be gay.
That is not the same thing at all.
And that's the point the court is making.
This is, by the way, a major distinction that has never been properly drawn in the law, but needs to be drawn in the law.
The gay rights movement has claimed they're the new civil rights movement.
These are absolutely disparate movements.
They are not alike in any way, shape, or form.
The black civil rights movement was about the idea that you have an immutable characteristic that is not behaviorally based.
You're a race.
It has nothing to do with your behavior.
It has nothing to do with your feelings.
You are black, whether you feel black or whether you don't feel black.
Whether you quote-unquote act black or whether you don't act black, obviously.
In fact, there is no such thing as quote-unquote acting black, other than stereotypes.
That is not the same thing when it comes to issues of sexual orientation, which is about interior feeling, it is about behavior in the real world, and that is why putting LGBT as members of a quote-unquote protected class under anti-discrimination law starts to get into very dicey activity as far as forcing other people to accept a behavior, not an actual objective state of the world that is visible to everyone else.
It's not quite the same thing.
The opinion says, in some places the dissent gets so turned around the facts of the case it opens fire on its own position.
For instance, while stressing that a Colorado company cannot refuse the full and equal enjoyment of its services based on a customer's protected status, the dissent assures us that a company selling creative services to the public does have the right to decide what messages to include or not to include.
But if that's actually true then what exactly are we debating?
Finally, the dissent comes out and says what it really means.
And this is the key point.
This is how the left would have it if they ran the world here.
Once Ms.
Smith offers some speech, Colorado would require her to create and sell speech notwithstanding her sincere objection to doing so.
And the dissent would force her to comply with that demand.
Even as it does so, however, the dissent refuses to acknowledge where its reasoning leads.
Perhaps the dissent finds these possibilities untroubling because it trusts state governments to coerce only enlightened speech.
But if that's the calculation, it is a dangerous one indeed.
That's an excellent opinion.
Obviously, I wish that it went even further, but it goes pretty far in at least guaranteeing the ability of religious people to act out their religion in their daily life, which of course is necessary.
And not just religious people, anybody, to act out their principles in their daily life.
Somebody went after me on Twitter for all this.
They said, well, how would you feel if somebody rejected you because you went in there and you wanted some sort of Jewish message written on a cake?
And I said, I'd feel pretty good because that would be America.
And then I just walk across the street to a kosher bakery where they would do exactly what I wanted them to do.
In just one second, we'll get to Sonia Sotomayor's dissent.
She's an awful justice and she proves it with her dissent first.
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Now we get to Sonia Sotomayor's dissent.
So remember, we were this close to having a left-wing Supreme Court that would absolutely greenlight the shutting down of rights in states across the nation.
So Sonia Sotomayor says this, quote, today, the court for the first time in its history
grants a business open to the public, a constitutional right to refuse to serve members
of a protected class.
Okay, so first of all, that is just a lie.
Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the cases that followed hard upon, that basically overwrote the Constitution in favor of certain provisions like public accommodations and the Civil Rights Act, the reality of the world is that for most of American history, it was no shoes, no shirt, no service.
And up to and including ugly discrimination none of us would like.
Now you can say that stuff is ugly and it should be banned by cities or it should be banned by states.
You can say all of that stuff.
But the reality is that American law did not only not prohibit that sort of stuff, American law guaranteed your right to freedom of association throughout all of that, understanding and believing, I think correctly, that if there was a business that discriminates against black people, a business will open across the street that does not discriminate against black people and it will out-compete the business that discriminates against black people.
This, by the way, is actually the story of the early civil rights movement.
If you look at, like, 1960, the Woolworth counter sit-ins, those were not legislatively crammed down desegregation.
That was people sitting at the counter, and this becoming such a public relations issue for Woolworths that they had to desegregate their lunch counters.
In any case, Sonia Sotomayor goes on because she's wrong, obviously.
Specifically, the court holds that the First Amendment exempts a website design company from a state law that prohibits the company from denying wedding websites to same-sex couples if the company chooses to sell those websites to the public.
And then we get into the Salon.com, Slate.com pitch meeting for Sonia Sotomayor.
This is how you know the difference, by the way, between the intelligent justices on the court and the ones who are not particularly smart.
The ones who are unintelligent write opinions that sound like they are direct from the Letters to the editor page of Jacobin Magazine.
The ones who are actually smart, like Elena Kagan.
She's wrong a lot, but she's smart.
Elena Kagan's dissent in the Biden student loan case, for example, is actually a smartly written opinion.
I think she's wrong, but it's a smartly written opinion.
Sotomayor's dissent here is just a disaster area.
She says, quote, Around the country, there has been a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for gender and sexual minorities.
New forms of inclusion have been met with reactionary exclusion.
This is heartbreaking.
Sadly, it is also familiar.
Now, if you're wondering at this point, what does the Supreme Court have to do with any of this?
You're right to be wondering that because, really, it doesn't.
There are lots of social movements all around the country constantly.
That's not the job of the Supreme Court to weigh in and greenlight certain social movements while shutting down others.
In fact, that's explicitly not the purpose of the Supreme Court.
But, it is to Sonia Sotomayor and her friends on the left.
When the civil rights and women's rights movement sought equality in public life, some public establishments refused.
Some even claimed, based on sincere religious beliefs, constitutional rights to discriminate.
The brave justices who once sat on this court decisively rejected those claims.
Now the court faces a similar test.
A business open to the public seeks to deny gay and lesbian customers the full and equal enjoyment of its services based on the owner's religious belief that same-sex marriages are false.
Now, again, you could read just directly in that sentence that this isn't about the quote-unquote sexual orientation of the people who are coming into the business.
It's about the particular business request they are making.
If they had asked, presumably, for some sort of quick website fix, then the Business owner would have provided it, but that's not what they were asking for.
They were asking for a website that explicitly endorsed a message.
The business argues, and a majority of the court agrees, that because the business offers services that are customized and expressive, the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment shields the business from a generally applicable law that prohibits discrimination in the sale of publicly available goods and services.
That is wrong.
Profoundly wrong.
Sonia Sotomayor continues, The legal duty of a business open to the public to serve the public without unjust discrimination is deeply rooted in our history.
I mean, first of all, given the fact that you guys believe that American history is replete with racism, I'd like to see the evidence on this one.
But, continuing, the true power of this principle, however, lies in its capacity to evolve as society comes to understand more forms of unjust discrimination and, hence, to include more persons as full and equal members of the public.
So, by the way, we should point out here that Neil Gorsuch and Bostock suggested the Civil Rights Act applied to, quote-unquote, transgender status.
So this means that according to the leftist minority on the Supreme Court, the dissent, If a person walked into your business and demanded that you put a trans flag on the cake, you would have to do it.
This is according to Sonia Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson.
They would have it that if you, a person who writes speeches for a living, gets a call from a trans activist, you have to take the call and you have to write the speech because you are a publicly available business.
There is no limit on this sort of power.
This is all Orwellian kind of stuff, but this is what the left would like.
Quote, LGBT people have existed for all of human history.
Now we just get the rote kind of GLAAD talk from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
LGBT people have existed for all of human history.
And as sure as they have existed, others have sought to deny their existence and to exclude them from public life.
Those who would subordinate LGBT people have often done so with the backing of the law.
For most of American history, there were laws criminalizing same-sex intimacy.
Wait a second.
I thought a second ago you said the public accommodations or public accommodations law has been widespread throughout America.
Anyway, a social system of discrimination created an environment.
This part is amazing, by the way.
This is absolutely amazing.
In fact, you know what?
I'm going to get to the most amazing part of this insane opinion, this dissent from Sotomayor in just one second, because it truly is wild.
I mean, it's just complete misstatement of facts.
It is lies piled on lies.
Here we go.
In one second.
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This part of the Sonia Sotomayor dissent is absolutely insane.
So she's talking, of course, in glowing terms about the gay rights movement and the LGBT movement.
And what does this have to do with the case at hand?
Nobody knows.
It's just a way for her to sound off on what she agrees with.
Quote, A social system of discrimination created an environment in which LGBT people were unsafe.
Who could forget the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard?
Matthew was targeted by two men, tortured, tied to a buck fence, and left to die for who he was.
Okay, so first of all, that's probably not true.
There are excellent books and excellent documentaries about Matthew Shepard, and the most plausible conclusion is that Matthew Shepard was actually likely an alleged meth dealer who went crossways with some of his clients and then got murdered for his trouble.
I mean, so she's citing just... If you think, by the way, that that's an exception, is that she's citing a bad situation?
A bad, bad, bad pattern here?
How about this one?
Or the Pulse nightclub!
The second deadliest mass shooting in US history.
The Pulse...
Nightclub Massacre had nothing to do with anti-gay targeting by right-wing religious groups.
It was a Muslim terrorist who shot up the Pulse nightclub.
So she's not even citing proper cases.
Now again, she's citing statistics that just don't exist.
people with transgender persons particularly vulnerable to attack. Now again, she is she's
citing statistics that just don't exist. The idea that transgender people are routinely
killed in the United States is not true whatsoever. But she continues, LGBT people do not seek
All they seek is to exist in public.
Well, I mean, what they actually seek is to make you mirror all of their preferences, which is why they demand that you use their pronouns.
It's why they demand that you fly their flag at the White House.
It's why they demand that you post a gay rights flag in your profile.
It's why they demand that you use your own pronouns.
I mean, that... No, that's not true.
But, again, the basic notion here is that Sonia Sotomayor does not like the perspective that is being put forward by the plaintiff.
Therefore, the plaintiff is wrong and should be forced by the law to do exactly what Sonia Sotomayor wants.
Another example might help to illustrate the point.
A professional photographer is generally free to choose her subjects.
She can make a living taking photos of flowers or celebrities.
The state does not regulate that choice.
If the photographer opens a portrait photography business to the public, however,
the business may not deny to any person because of race, sex, national origin,
or other protected characteristic, the full and equal enjoyment of whatever services the
business chooses to offer.
That is so even though the portrait photography services are customized and expressive.
If the business offers school photos, it may not deny those services to multiracial children because the owner does not want to create any speech indicating that interracial couples are acceptable.
Again, interracial couples are not the same thing as a man and a man.
That is not the same thing.
And again, all this involves is a category error by identifying behavior and then including that behavior alongside immutable characteristic.
But, says Sonia Sotomayor, concluding, quote, The unattractive lesson of the majority remains this.
What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours.
The lesson of the history of public accommodations laws is altogether different.
It is that in a free and democratic society, there can be no social case.
So I just want to ask what the converse of that is.
She says that the unattractive lesson of the majority opinion is what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours.
Would the opposite be what is yours and mine and what is mine is yours?
Because I'm pretty sure that's not the American creed.
The notion that you have a right to my services, the belief system that what is mine is owed to you, is deeply un-American and deeply unfree.
That, of course, is what the left would like.
Okay, so they lost in that particular case.
That was one big victory on behalf of constitutional conservatism on Friday.
The other one that came down late on Friday was an opinion striking down, again by a 6-3 vote, Joe Biden's attempt to cram down a student loan bailout.
So he does not have authority under the law in the United States to simply declare the student loan subsidized by the federal government.
You don't have to pay those back.
If Congress had chosen to give that authority to the executive branch, they could have done so.
They clearly did not.
That is the opinion written by Justice Roberts in this particular case.
And the case is really quite simple.
He says, quote, the secretary, the secretary of education, may issue waivers or modifications
only as may be necessary to ensure that recipients of student financial assistance under Title
4 of the Education Act or affected individuals are not placed in a worse position financially
in relation to that financial assistance because of their status as affected individuals.
So in other words, there is an emergency provision of the Education Act that basically said that if
there's a war and the people who are affected by that war or there's a terrorist attack and
you can't pay your bill because of a terrorist attack, then the secretary has the ability to
to issue waivers or modifications as necessary.
During the first year of the pandemic, the Department's Office of General Counsel issued a memorandum concluding the Secretary does not have the statutory authority to provide a blanket or mass cancellation, compromise, discharge, or forgiveness of student loan principal balances.
And then Biden took office and he flipped that.
The Secretary of Education asserts that the so-called HEROES Act grants him the authority to cancel $430 billion of student loan principal.
It does not, says the court.
We hold today the act allows the Secretary to quote-unquote waive or modify existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite the statute from the ground up.
The Secretary's plan has modified the cited provisions only in the same sense the French Revolution modified the status of the French nobility.
It has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely.
The Secretary has not truly waived or modified the provisions in the Education Act authorizing specific and limited forgiveness of student loans.
Those provisions remain safely intact in the U.S.
Code, where they continue to operate in full force.
What the Secretary has actually done is draft a new section of the Education Act from scratch by waiving provisions root and branch and then filling the empty space with radically new tax.
So in other words, they just rewrote the law.
So as I say, Elena Kagan's dissent in this particular case is not convincing, but it is much smarter than the dissents by Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown-Jackson in the Affirmative Action case and the Religious Freedom case, respectively.
Those dissents are just disaster areas that are straight from the op-ed page of a college newspaper.
Kagan's dissent is, um, wrong, but at least somewhat interesting.
First, she suggests that states did not actually have the standing to sue under this particular case.
So standing is the issue that I can't— Like, let's say you get hit by a car.
I can't sue the person who hit you with the car.
I don't have standing.
I wasn't the one damaged.
So one of the questions was, if student loans are bailed out, who exactly is damaged?
The court held that states can sue because there are, in fact, bodies inside the states established by statutory law in the states that help to collect on all of these payments.
And then the state makes money from that.
And therefore they have standing.
Kagan says that she doesn't believe that's true, that these agencies are established as separate agencies, so really they don't have standing.
It's an interesting argument.
I don't think it's persuasive, but it's an interesting argument at least.
Then she suggests the statute provides the secretary with broad authority to give emergency relief to student loan borrowers, including by altering usual discharge rules.
What the secretary did fits comfortably within that delegation, but the court forbids him to proceed.
Congress delegates to agencies often and broadly, and it usually does so for sound reasons.
Because agencies have expertise Congress lacks.
Because times and circumstances change, and agencies are better able to keep up and respond.
because Congress knows that if it had to do everything, many desirable and even necessary things wouldn't get done.
In wielding the major question sword, last term in this one,
the court overrules these legislative decisions.
So basically she is suggesting that Congress delegated all this power to the executive branch.
Now, what she says there is really overbroad.
It basically says that Congress could theoretically just create a law saying,
make good rules and send it to the executive branch and let all the executive branch agencies fill it in.
That obviously would be absurd.
But at least she attempts to make a legal case unlike her colleagues on the Supreme Court,
just to prove that not all leftists are equally foolish when it comes to their writing of the law.
Okay, so two big decisions go against Joe Biden.
That followed hard on Thursday's big decision that went against Joe Biden over affirmative action, striking down affirmative action as an element with regard to college admissions.
Joe Biden has reacted as you would expect him to.
He has mumbled from his face hole incoherently.
So here's Joe Biden suggesting that the court misinterpreted the Constitution, which is weird because literally a day ago, Joe Biden was suggesting that the Declaration of Independence is the Constitution.
They're the same thing.
He actually quoted the declaration and called it the Constitution.
I think the court misinterpreted the Constitution.
Oh, is that what you think?
Is that what you think?
And then he was asked a great question.
So a Fox News reporter asked Joe Biden, question, why did you sign an executive order waiving student loans when you knew full well you could not?
Again, internal papers in the government show that, I mean, Joe Biden himself had said, I don't have the power to simply overturn student loans, and then he went ahead and did it.
In the same way that Barack Obama once suggested he had no power to unilaterally make immigration law, and then he just did it.
So Joe Biden was asked by Fox, why are you promising people things that you obviously couldn't deliver?
The question was whether or not if I would do even more than was requested.
What I did I thought was appropriate and was able to be done and would get done.
I didn't give Boris false hope, but the Republicans snatched away the hope that they were given, and it's real.
I can win elections this way.
If Joe Biden thinks this is an effective electoral strategy, maybe it is.
Then you can see the future here.
I issue an executive order.
the court, who are justices, who are not elected.
And obviously this is going to be the democratic plan from here on in with regard to a conservative Supreme Court.
I can win elections this way.
If Joe Biden thinks this is an effective electoral strategy, maybe it is, then you can see the future here.
I issue an executive order.
My executive order today, President Shapiro, this executive order says,
from the treasury of the United States, a check will be delivered to every household
in the United States with the amount of $10 million on deposit for each of you in your household.
And then, when it turns out that's wildly unconstitutional, I have no basis or authority to do it, I say, how dare the evil people who oppose me stop such things?
How dare they?
Again, this is a stupid game.
Joe Biden never had this authority.
He was lying when he said he had the authority.
Now he's going to apparently try to use the education department in order to not collect the funds.
He's going to suggest that they are going to actually just delay referring any defaulted loans for enforcement.
But of course, eventually they'll be forced to actually do what they are supposed to do under the law.
But all of this is leading up to another assault by the left on the Supreme Court itself.
The way that this works is when the left doesn't like the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court is an evil institution that must be overthrown.
When they do like the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court is the only institution that needs to exist.
We'll get to that momentarily first.
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Okay, so all of this, all these decisions, this of course is leading to a new spate of Democratic calls to basically destroy the Supreme Court.
Shock of shocks, the irrepressibly stupid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, congresswoman from Twitch, she is leading the way.
She suggested that it's the justices who are destroying the Supreme Court because they won't do what she wants!
Are you also saying that the justices' power should somehow be limited?
I truly do, and this is not a new development in history.
This is part of our system of checks and balances.
The courts, if they were to proceed without any check on their power, without any balance on their power, then we will start to see an undemocratic and frankly dangerous authoritarian expansion of power.
And the Supreme Court has not been receiving My favorite is when she forgets her lines in the middle of lines.
preserve their own legitimacy and in the process they themselves have been
destroying the legitimacy of the court which is profoundly dangerous for our
entire democracy.
My favorite is when she forgets her lines in the middle of lines. That's one of my favorites.
And she kind of pauses and then she remembers her lines and then she continues.
Yeah.
Guys, remember, what's profoundly dangerous to democracy is if you, a business owner, are allowed to actually run your business as you see fit.
That's anti-democracy.
Also, it's against democracy if you are not discriminated against in college admissions.
You must be discriminated against in college admissions, particularly if you're Asian.
If you're an Asian person, democracy means that you have to be discriminated against because you're not a black person.
Obviously, that's what democracy is.
Democracy also means that the President of the United States can, without any check or balance, simply wipe away half a trillion dollars in actual student loan debt.
Minimum.
That's what democracy means, of course.
And my favorite is when Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez also suggests that Clarence Thomas is being insulting.
He's being insulting to the brilliant, wonderful Katonji Brown-Jackson.
How could he?
It's so mean.
I mean, what Justice Clarence Thomas wrote there, I believe, is profoundly disrespectful.
I just think it was profoundly disrespectful to his colleague.
It includes sweeping assumptions about her worldview, whereas when you look at what the response was from Justice Katonji Brown, we saw that her dissent was grounded in fact.
It was grounded in the facts of the case.
It was not grounded in anything.
We read through a lot of that dissent last week.
It's so insulting that Clarence Thomas called her out for being completely full of crap.
But, again, it's all about creating a predicate for avoiding the law.
That's really what this is about.
Elizabeth Warren is openly calling for avoiding the law.
In fact, she's calling for packing the Supreme Court.
She put out a tweet saying, She's not an extremist.
She's a mainstream thinker who also advocated for modern monetary theory, which is the theory that you can spend endless amounts of money without inflation kicking in.
So that went amazing.
To rebalance this institution, we must expand it.
In the meantime, I'll keep fighting back against their damage to make sure we still deliver student debt relief, to protect abortion rights, to defend our freedoms, says Elizabeth Warren.
Well, she definitely needs to protect affirmative action since she got into some of her positions apparently as a fake native.
American speaking of people attempting to avoid the consequences of judicial decisions by simply ignoring the law Entire piece in the New York Times today titled with end of affirmative action a push for a new tool Adversity scores.
Oh goody goodies.
They're gonna try and find now the the workarounds that we talked about last week These these pathetic workarounds where they're like, so how disadvantaged are you and the person writes on there?
I say I'm black and it's like well, that's not a disadvantage Necessarily.
I mean, you actually have to explain why that would make you disadvantaged in some way.
I mean, maybe you're Clarence Thomas' kid.
You know, like, what are we talking about here?
In any case, The New York Times says, So first of all, here's my view on medical school.
How about mostly kids who score really well on the MCAT and are good at school get to go to medical school?
He said, so first of all, here's my view on medical school.
How about mostly kids who score really well on the MCAT and are good at school gets go to medical school?
Because those are the ones who actually should be doctors.
And I don't really care all that much about their backgrounds as much as I care about whether they're going
to kill me.
And that like...
When was the last time you asked the disadvantaged background of your pilot on a plane?
Or were you just mostly interested that they not crash it into the ground?
In his role at the medical school at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Henderson has tried to change that, developing an unorthodox tool to evaluate applicants, the Socioeconomic Disadvantage Scale, or SED.
The scale rates every applicant from 0 to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education.
Admissions decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays, and interviews.
Ooh!
Ah!
Well, I mean, here's my real question.
How many of those diverse doctors are really, really good at their jobs?
Because it seems like I would really, really just want a good doctor.
Which is sort of the point of avoiding affirmative action, is that when you lower the standards, and when you artificially allow people into a particular club that requires merit, then you are lowering the standards.
That this actually ends with some pretty bad ramifications.
But!
It turns out that basically all the schools are now telling on themselves.
I mean, they're setting themselves all up for lawsuits.
So, for example, Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, he recently was caught on tape explaining how he avoids the law in the state of California that bars affirmative action.
What I mean by unstated affirmative action is, what if the college or university doesn't tell anybody, doesn't make any public statements?
I'll give you an example from our law school, but if ever I'm deposed I'm going to deny I said this to you.
When we do faculty hiring, we're quite conscious that diversity is important to us.
And we say diversity is important, it's fine to say that.
But I'm very careful when we have a Faculty Appointments Committee meeting.
Anytime somebody says, you know, we should really prefer this candidate over this candidate because this person would add diversity, don't say that.
You can think it.
You can vote it, but our discussions are not privileged, so don't ever articulate that that's what you're doing.
So, uh, just lie.
In other words, avoid the law.
Great.
Meanwhile, the Harvard president-elect, Claudine Gay, she basically says the same thing.
She says, yeah, yeah, we still need diversity.
And by diversity, she means ethnic diversity.
And we'll keep pursuing ethnic diversity, but we'll pretend that we're not.
So, uh, Asian students, sorry, you're still not getting in.
The Supreme Court's decision on college and university admissions will change how we pursue the educational benefits of diversity.
But our commitment to that work remains steadfast.
It's essential to who we are and the mission that we are here to advance.
For nearly nine years, Harvard vigorously defended our admissions process and our belief that we all benefit from learning, living, and working alongside people of different backgrounds and experiences.
We will comply with the Court's decision, but it does not change our values.
We continue to believe deeply that a thriving, diverse intellectual community is essential to academic excellence and critical to shaping the next generation of leaders.
Unless you politically disagree with us.
If you politically disagree with us, that's not diversity.
That's just you being bad.
So we should look, you know, really diverse in terms of like having a bunch of people of different colors, but not too many Asians.
And we should all think the same.
That is what diversity looks like.
So again, the courts are going to be busy in upcoming years.
I was talking to a college student Yesterday, actually, about the results of the affirmative action cases.
What I said is basically if you're in the Northeast, don't look for lots of change.
If you are in an area governed by a conservative circuit court of appeals, then look for policies to change rather radically at a lot of these colleges.
Again, the left does not sleep.
They'll continue to push forward.
The Supreme Court is Donald Trump's biggest accomplishment as President of the United States, without a doubt.
The fact that three Supreme Court justices were added during Trump's four years is a massive victory for constitutional conservatism, and we saw the fruits of that not only in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but in the death of affirmative action, the upholding of religious freedom, and the death of Joe Biden's garbage student loan bailout.
So all of that is good news for those of us who care about balance of power, as well as the actual Constitution as it stands.
Alrighty, meanwhile, I would be remiss if I did not comment on the situation over in France.
So, France has now arrested something like thousands and thousands of people.
On Friday night, they arrested a thousand more people.
Two of the country's top police unions are threatening a revolt unless Emmanuel Macron's government restores order after protests broke out over an officer's shooting of a teenager outside of Paris, according to dnyus.com.
Today, the police are in combat because we're at war.
Tomorrow, we'll enter resistance and the government should be aware of this, they said.
Apparently British travelers are now being warned not to visit France.
Why is all of this happening?
Well apparently there was a 17 year old young man who was killed by the police.
His name was Nahim.
He was presumably of North African descent, I believe.
And he was shot point-blank by a police officer.
He was pulled over for traffic offenses.
And then he continued to try to drive his car after he was told by the cops not to do so.
So remember that time that America is uniquely racist and terrible and George Floyd and $2 billion in property damage?
Well, France has the same issue over there.
Uh, except their issue is, in many ways, significantly worse, because it also cross-cuts not just in terms of race, it also cross-cuts in terms of religion, because a lot of the people who are rioting right now happen to be Muslim immigrants to the country.
Alright, time for a quick thing I like and then a very significant thing that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So, I've been re-watching the series Justified with Timothy Olyphant.
I never had spent a lot of time with it.
Spent time with, you know, maybe the first half of the first season.
It is a really well-written, entertaining show.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
Now just listen to me.
I'm Deputy U.S.
Marshal Ray Lynn Givens, and I'm offering salvation.
Talk to me.
Come on, face to face.
I'm not opening this door.
Then, as they say in the Bible, you're screwed.
It's a really fun show.
For those who like westerns, it is a modern western.
It stars one of my good friends, Nick Searcy.
World-famous actor, Nick Searcy.
And it's just wildly entertaining.
It's fun to watch on an episode-to-episode level.
One of the most entertaining shows in the history of modern TV.
And definitely worth the watch.
You can go check that out.
Justified.
Over on FX if you're looking for something to watch on this long holiday weekend.
Okay, time for a thing that I hate.
Well, I mean, I don't hate this apparently as much as Joe Biden hates his granddaughter.
That is my only takeaway from a New York Times article talking about the horrific relationship between Hunter and Joe Biden and a four-year-old girl in rural Arkansas.
Quote, there's a four year old girl in rural Arkansas who's learning to ride a camouflage pattern four wheeler
alongside her cousins. Some days she wears a bow in her hair.
On other days, she threads her long blonde ponytail through the back of a baseball cap.
When she's old enough, she'll learn to hunt like her mom did when she was young.
The girl is aware that her father is Hunter Biden and that her paternal grandfather is the President of the United States.
She speaks about both of them often, but she has not met them.
Her maternal grandfather, Rob Roberts, described her as whip-smart and funny.
I may not be the president, Mr. Roberts said in a text message using an acronym for the president, but he said he would do anything for his granddaughter.
He said she needs for nothing and never will.
The story surrounding the president's grandchild in Arkansas, who is not named in court papers, is a tale of two families, one of them powerful, one of them not.
But at its story, but at its core, the story is about money, corrosive politics, and what it means to have the Biden birthright.
Her parents ended a years-long court battle over child support on Thursday, agreeing that Biden, who has embarked on a second career as a painter, whose pieces have been offered for as much as half a million dollars each, would turn over a number of his paintings to his daughter in addition to providing a monthly support payment.
The little girl will select the paintings from Mr. Biden according to court documents.
Oh good, she gets absent daddy's finger paintings without the possibility of money laundering, so that's very exciting.
We worked it out amongst ourselves, said London Roberts, the girl's mother.
Hunter Biden did not respond to a request for comment in this article.
Though a trial plan for mid-July has now been averted, people on both sides fear the political toxicity surrounding the case will remain.
Both Hunter Biden, the privileged and troubled son of a president, and Ms.
Roberts, the daughter of a rural gunmaker, have allies whose actions have made the situation more politicized.
There's no evidence the White House is involved in those actions.
President Biden's public image is centered around his devotion to his family, including to Hunter, his only surviving son.
In strategy meetings in recent years, aides have been told the Bidens have six, not seven, grandchildren, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
The White House did not respond to questions about the case, in keeping with how officials have answered questions about the Biden family before.
So, just to point that out, that is the President of the United States literally disowning one of his own grandchildren because it is ugly for him and for his son.
London Roberts, 32, comes from a clan as tight-knit as the Bidens.
Her father is a red state gun manufacturer whose hunting buddies have included Donald Trump Jr.
and who taught her at a young age how to hunt turkeys and alligators.
She works for the family business, which sits on a winding country road dotted with pastures on the outskirts of Batesville.
In pride of her family, the 5'8 Miss Roberts graduated with honors from Southside High School in Batesville and played basketball for Arkansas State University.
After graduation, she moved to Washington to study forensic investigation at GWU.
She never completed the program.
Along the way, she met the son of a future president who is sliding into addiction and visiting Washington strip clubs.
In mid-2018, Roberts was working as a personal assistant to Biden, according to a person close to her and messages from a cache of Biden's files.
Their daughter was born later that year.
By then, Biden had stopped responding to Roberts' message, including one informing him of the child's birth date.
Shortly after their daughter was born in November 2018, he removed Roberts and the child from his health insurance.
He's a class act, Senator Biden.
What a nice guy.
He's just a troubled youth who's in his 50s.
She filed a lawsuit in May 2019.
DNA testing established Biden was the father of the child.
Ms.
Roberts said in an interview she'd grown used to the onslaught of scrutiny around the case.
Her public Instagram account tells its own story.
She says, I hope one day when you look back, you find yourself proud of who you are and where you came from.
And most importantly, who raised you.
She captioned a photo of them at the beach earlier this year.
Seen through one prism, the photos are a powerful public testament of love from mother to daughter.
Seen through another, they are exploitative, certainly from the perspective of Biden allies, who fear the images and the child are being weaponized against the Biden family.
Oh, now four-year-old illegitimate children are being weaponized against their fathers, who have ignored them, tried to cut off their actual medical payments, tried to cut off child support and end up in court.
Man, that terrible mom weaponizing the child that Hunter Biden sired.
Wow.
Horrible.
I had no recollection of our encounter, Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir.
That's how little connection I had with anyone.
I was a mess, but a mess I've taken responsibility for.
Uh, no.
No, you have not.
In fact, you attempted to downgrade and you succeeded in downgrading your child support payment from 20 grand a month to 5 grand a month.
President Biden has worked over the past half century to make his last name synonymous with family, values, and loyalty.
Really, has he?
The strength of his political persona, which emphasizes decency, family, and duty, was enough to defeat Trump the first time around.
He would need to keep it intact if Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024.
On a proclamation issued on Father's Day, Biden said his father had taught me, above all, But of course, there is a grandchild that he will not speak of.
Amazing, amazing solid stuff there from the New York Times.
Still trying to make the case that Hunter and Joe are the real victims in all of this.
whether he will publicly acknowledge her now that the child support case is settled.
Amazing, amazing solid stuff there from the New York Times.
Still trying to make the case that Hunter and Joe are the real victims in all of this.
Amazing stuff.
By the way, we are now finding out that the DOJ prosecutors who allegedly refused to charge Hunter Biden were donors to
Joe.
That is according to the Daily Caller.
We are also finding out that Hunter Biden's former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, he could have been asked to testify before a grand jury and he never was.
So obviously that looks like it's all on the up and up.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
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