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March 20, 2024 - Doug Collins Podcast
28:50
Free Speech has a date at the Supreme Court
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, welcome to Midweek.
You made it.
It's Wednesday.
We've got a lot to discuss here today on the podcast.
I want to go over a couple things.
I told you on the Monday podcast that I was going to talk to you a little bit about Fonnie Willis, where the court day stayed.
Hopefully we'll find out.
I haven't found any new information here, but we'll get some where we're standing and then how it's going to play out possibly this week.
Also, we're going to discuss some Supreme Court cases from this week.
Some decisions have been handed down.
And then just the discussion of the border, again, is just an overwhelming problem.
So right after the break, we're going to jump into those issues right here on the Doug Collins Podcast.
We're glad to have you with us.
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Okay, let's start off with the border and how it is amazing to me in this season that the Democratic Party is just basically determined to not deal with the border.
They're just not.
They're not going to touch it.
They're just going to basically pander around it.
You remember on the podcast, I was one who was saying that Biden, I thought, would do something before the Before the State of the Union, he did nothing.
He went down there, didn't do a whole lot, didn't say anything.
Then you had the Lake and Riley issue here in Georgia.
And again, nothing.
You had the Haitian now issue of coming into the country.
And just complete breakdown in the country of Haiti with all of their problems.
Now we're seeing Florida is seeing more and more of this coming through either by ship, which we can handle a lot easier out on the open water, or they're coming through Mexico and coming up into the country.
And I mean, you've had jails opened up down there.
You've had people coming everywhere.
These are not Good times for the people of Haiti, and we pray that they will find peace down there in these gangs that have taken over.
But it's spilling over to much more than just Haiti.
We're seeing this spill out into other places and other areas and coming into the United States.
So there's something for us to watch out.
But again, I don't get the lack of attention to the border.
But now we're getting an even further discussion About this in that the Pentagon is basically reporting over a thousand drone flights over the border.
Now, a lot can be done or said about these.
Done is probably not the right word because we see it happening all the time without some motivated action by this White House or the Department of Homeland Security.
But the question is, what is this leading up to?
These drones are coming over our border.
They're basically mapping out paths and they're seeing from a security issue You know, where the Border Patrol agents are, where they're not.
This is becoming more and more sophisticated organization.
Brandon Judd, head of the Border Patrol Union and others, you know, point this out all the time that right now, the cartels control the border.
They control it by, they have overwhelmed the Mexican side of the border and government.
They're no longer, Mexico's no longer really actively trying to help as they were under Donald Trump.
This is why I see this becoming You know, such an issue as we sort of roll into November.
And I think one of the issues that the last month will be dominated with and really the heartless response of the Biden administration to what has happened in the border.
And you're also seeing it, frankly, in the bigger cities where now they're having to deal with it, where at one point they didn't have to deal with it in the way because you have The southern governors, the border state governors, sending immigrants to the cities and saying, look, we don't have enough.
We can't deal with this.
You're going to have to deal with it.
And it's causing these cities to now, liberal cities who come to be sanctuary cities and, oh, we're so about the immigrant.
And God forbid they call them illegal immigrants, which they are, illegal migrants, but they call them undocumented workers.
And you see the political correctness in this all over the place.
But now they're saying, well, look, we don't have enough money for our own kids in schools.
We don't have money for our police system.
You see what's happening in New York City where Kathy Hochul actually sent the National Guard into the subways.
And we still saw a shooting on the subways just the other day.
So it's getting bad.
You're seeing it over in the AOC's district in which they're selling wares on the side of the road like you would see in a third world country.
So they're actually seeing it.
That's why...
Democrats, I think, privately behind the scenes realize that the blame Republican strategy here is not working, especially when they had the House and the Senate and the presidency for two years, and then trying to blame it all on the Republicans in the third year is just not working.
And it's going to be an issue coming forward.
But if you have drones crossing your border, and at what point do we not consider this an attack on the sovereignty of this nation?
Not in the sense that, you know, we have one of the most generous legal immigration programs in the country.
We put almost a million people into our citizenship roles every year through The legal process.
No other country in the world admits that many people and makes them citizens.
There's only a few countries in the world that actually have the process of what we call birthright citizenship, in which you're born here, you become a citizen.
That's why a lot of pregnant folks come across the border, because they know the minute that they can get here that that child will be an American citizen.
It is a rarity.
Don't talk to me about the high intellectual states in Europe and everywhere else.
They don't have this.
You're not just a German citizen because you're born there.
Or a Swedish citizen, or a French citizen, or a British citizen.
You're not.
We, again, I wish that the press would just report it straight up.
Just say, hey, look, this is what's coming across the border.
Here's the issues that we have in America.
Here's the immigration policies that have worked.
Here's the immigration policies that haven't worked.
And let the American people understand that the lax immigration policies of the Biden administration have caused the serious security breach of this country.
Don't also, the Biden administration, please quit talking about, like the vice president said just the other day, and AOC has said and several others have said that we need to redo our immigration laws and focus on pathways to citizenship and other things.
The minute the cartels hear AOC saying, we just need to do pathways to citizenship, It's like the money machine comes on with them because the cartel is controlling the border.
The cartels are saying, now I've got an easy way to convince people to go across the border.
Hey, they're going to implement some kind of a pathway to citizenship.
And if you don't get there soon enough, you'll get left out.
People are going to crowd the borders even more if that's the way it's left out there.
And again, we don't see that much about it.
I wanted to bring it up here just as a reminder that I think at the end of the day, the issues not of the grand themes of Joe Biden and the threat to democracy that Donald Trump is and the grand vision of a world in which government is making everybody's lives better.
It's not a specific theme that is winnable in November, especially when you have people who are still suffering from 20% inflation.
They're still suffering from higher...
Young people are at their lowest rate in 40 years of affordability for their first house.
You have credit card debt...
Unpayment is up at 39%.
There's just so many things out there that is really struggling in this economy.
And then you see immigration issues like this, and you see where we're giving illegal immigrants money, we're giving them benefits, and you're not even seeing that with some of the American citizens who are here that are not getting those kind of benefits.
So just keep that in mind as we move forward here.
Next issue, again, part of that attack on Donald Trump, they don't want to deal with the issues of their records or what Joe Biden's done, so they resort to lawfare.
In other words, going after him.
And we've seen this over and over and over again in New York, this absolutely bogus case in which they now have a $400-plus million verdict, which is unheard of.
It's unprecedented, especially if you have to get a bond to then appeal it.
On issues that Donald Trump inflated his worth numbers.
I'm not going to go back over this in depth, but this is what you see when you have district attorneys or attorneys generals, in this case, Letitia James in New York, wanting to do one thing, go after a certain person without dealing with the real problems in their job.
Then you've got Jack Smith.
You've got Fonnie Willis down here in Georgia.
The Fonnie Willis, the Georgia case, which I had even said on this podcast, had been the quietest of the cases.
It was the one that was just moving along.
No real drama about the case.
You know, after the mug shots were taken, you even had three or four, I can't remember which, three or four actually went ahead and pled out of that case.
And it was just marching along until all of a sudden Fonnie Willis Decides that she is going to exercise her power as DA, and this is important to remember, because I'm not sure why else you would have thought, privileged enough to do this.
Fannie Willis tried to interject into Nathan Wade's divorce case and have their proceedings, uh, Sealed and that her involvement basically to be left out and said that the ex-wife was only doing this to damage her criminal case and acting in a criminal manner.
Now, this is key.
When you have a district attorney who uses the position she's in, and again, if it was just Fannie Willis, the Private citizen?
Might be a different story, but when she's Fannie Willis, DA of Fulton County, going into Cobb County, a neighboring county, and says, look, what you're doing is illegal, and I will, you know, basically, I'm implying that you continue at this, that I will use the Legal system to enforce my desire that these not become public and that you quit trying to subpoena me or get me to testify.
That's where you draw the line of the public gain.
Now, the case came out last week.
McAfee actually said Fannie can stay if Nathan Wade left or they can all just get out of it.
Nathan Wade chose to leave.
Fannie Willis is staying, at least for the moment.
But basically, it has been a disasterless two or three months for Fannie Willis.
She talks about keeping money in her home.
She talks about spending money, paying back expenses with all cash.
Really never shows where the cash came from.
I am now in agreement with what's happening in the Georgia Senate with the subpoenas and the issues that are going forward investigating.
Fannie Willis, it would be interesting to me if the Attorney General of the State of Georgia, Chris Carr, actually would find a way or look into a way to start looking into this because just her own verbal testimony gave rise to questions such as she took the money from her campaign account after it closed, not disclosing trips, not disclosing gifts.
Even McAfee in his own decision says, I can't tell you if there was a benefit or not, because he was not in a position of investigating this.
He was having to take the conflicting testimonies of several people and then come up with what he hoped, what I think was a splitting of the baby, so to speak, from a Solomonic time, but made nobody happy and the child died.
And I think that's the part that's coming across here with Fonnie Willis.
The arrogance that, you know, he wrote in there, the odor of mendacity, basically the odor of untruthfulness, the odor of a lie.
I mean, think about this.
This is the second time Fonny Willis has been slapped down or popped at, however you want to use the term.
In a judicial decision about her handling of this case.
The first one dealt with Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones and the fact that she was politically active in trying to defeat Burt Jones, holding a fundraiser for Burt's opponent while investigating.
Now, again, conflict of interest abound here.
The judge said, look, this doesn't look good.
This is wrong.
How could you have done this?
In fact, said you can't prosecute Burt Jones.
And so that case has been over at the Prosecuting Attorney's Council, Mr. Skandalakis over there, and they've not been able to find a DA to take it or a private lawyer to take that case.
So right now, that part is on hold.
Burt Jones is continuing as Lieutenant Governor.
And Fannie Willis, for all of her wisdom as a DA, got taken off the case on that one.
Now, you have the second one, in which in this one, Judge McFee.
Actually said the same thing.
He all but said there is lying going on here.
And when you look at the lying going on here, it's between three lawyers in particular.
You have a friend of Fonnie Willis who said that it happened, the affair was going strong before she ever appointed him as professional prosecutor.
Fonnie Willis denies that.
Nathan Wade denies that.
Of course, why would they not deny it?
There's a lot to be gained there from them not admitting it.
But this is the problem.
And in Fonnie Wilson's own testimony, she said that one person's testimony can prove truth.
Well, what about her roommate?
What about her lifelong friend who says this happened earlier?
Is her ability to testify to truth that she actually witnessed and saw not truth?
Was Fonnie basically calling, as she did to the attorneys that day, that her former best friend is a liar?
I think Judge McAfee saw it differently.
If you read their opinion, Judge McAfee said, one of you are lying.
Either the former law partner of Nathan Wade, Nathan Wade, or Fannie Wills, or you're all lying.
I just can't prove it, and I can't show where you didn't get a gain, and I'm not sure how to bring this into an issue because of actual wrongdoing as opposed to the appearance of wrongdoing.
In many ways, to me, this looked like an opinion written for an appellate court.
In other words, for it to be appealed.
And folks from Jonathan Turley, Alan Dershowitz on now, Have said that this is something that is not good for Fonny Willis.
It's not good as they go forward probably in appeals here.
Nathan Wade's already resigned.
Fonny Willis has accepted that resignation.
So now it's going to be a matter of will the judge allow a certificate for immediate review of the case or interlocutory to get this to the appellate court while the rest of this case is stayed.
Either way, this is months away from happening.
In the Fulton County courtroom.
But it just feeds this narrative that this is lawfare using the law to go after one person.
And it is the reason that Trump's numbers are not affected by it, why him and Joe Biden are still neck and neck.
There's just so many things here that...
You can point to that people are just tired of saying, if they can do this to him, how much more could they do to me?
And I think that's the case that has been coming forward as we go.
So that's the latest on the Fonny case.
We'll see how that goes.
It's still amazing to me that you had three or four actually pled out on this case.
What are they thinking right now?
A long way to go, especially when you get into jury selection, if there is a trial.
I mean, how many people have not heard about Not only what they talked about Trump for ages, but what Fonny Willis and the 20,000 text messages and everything else had just put a pall on this case.
That odor of mendacity, as McAfee talked about, but the problem was he didn't use anything to get rid of the odor.
In fact, if anything, he made it worse.
Last point I want to point out to today is there's two cases really before the Supreme Court that I want to focus on dealing in social media.
The first one, and you may not have seen this, but be careful.
These are rights and interesting that the court is now diving into in areas that we've not seen them dive into before.
And this one is, can a government official be sued under the First Amendment for blocking critics on social media.
Now, there's two cases, two from California and Michigan, in which the district courts disagree.
Basically, the Ninth District Court in California The Michigan said that they could block cases and the Michigan said that they could not.
The court in a unanimous decision on both cases said that there's a new standard for determining if a public officials acted in the governmental capacity when blocking critics on social media, a test to be applied in the lawsuits accusing them of violating the First Amendment.
The First Amendment protections for free speech generally constrain government actors, not private individuals.
Under this test that the courts are sending back to the lower courts, the officials are considered to have been engaged in governmental action if they had actual authority to speak on behalf of the state on a particular matter and purported to exercise that authority in the relevant post.
This is going to be an interesting wording here.
If this is the test, I mean, can you see the problem in that test?
I mean, if you're not, don't worry.
I'm a lawyer, and I had to sit there and look at it.
Let's see what they're saying is, and I'm wondering if this is how tightly they're going to frame this.
This will, of course, be appealed again.
Actual authority to speak on behalf of the state on a particular matter.
So the question is, in this case, you had two...
You had two city councilmen.
One was a city manager.
In the California case, it was two public school board trustees in the city of Poway.
And then in Port Huron, Michigan, you had a Resident appealed after law court had took him out on dealing with one of the city clerks.
The interesting part here is how far the city manager, Freed, in the Michigan case, blocked Mr. Lenke from his public Facebook page.
That's important to remember.
It's a government Facebook page.
Following critical posts concerning the COVID-19 pandemic, Freed account was also public.
It was a public Facebook page identifying him as a public figure.
In other words, he had the color of the government with him.
The federal judge ruled in favor of Freed in the 6th District Court as opposed to in the 9th District where the California case involved a Michelle O'Connor-Rackliffe and T.J. Zane elected trustees of the Poway School Board that blocked Christopher and Kimberly Garner, the parents of three students at the district schools, after the couple made hundreds of critical posts on issues, including race and school finances.
Zane and O'Connor-Rackliffe had public Facebook pages identifying them as government officials.
The parents sued in 2017. The federal court ruled that the parents' First Amendment rights were violated, and the San Francisco Based 9th District Court upheld it.
So what happens here, this is how you get to the Supreme Court.
Number one, the quickest way is to have an issue big enough that you have two district courts arguing over So the Supreme Court is going to have to deal in this case, and this is important in a first step of looking at the use of social media accounts by government officials.
And so if you look at the discussion here, this test that they put forward, it said that the test...
Do they have the actual authority to speak on behalf of the state on a particular matter?
Well, these two elected officials definitely have the power of the state, of the government, to speak on matters of education.
Now, is that going to be enough to say that they can't block others from being critical?
And...
The and, and this is the key, because there's no or here or a bit.
They have to have actual authority to speak on behalf of the state in a particular manner and purported to exercise that authority in the relevant post.
So the question is, does blocking, and this is what the lower court is going to have to say, is blocking the post a reflection of a government action keeping them from a public posting board?
The way they frame this is going to be tough.
I'll be honest with you.
Because they've got to show both that the authority was relevant to the ability that the elected officials had To block a specific issue in which they were under under their control.
Now anything taking with the school board that would seem to be answered the first part.
Yes, they have the ability to speak on those issues.
The second part was the purported exercise that ported to exercise that authority in the relevant post was it because they could speak.
into the issues of education that they felt now that they can't ban them or if they felt like they could ban them.
This is what the lower court is going to have to decide.
Another big case that is in the Supreme Court earlier this week was a Missouri case in which the Missouri and Louisiana sued Over the issue of government, the Biden administration in particular, trying to force, with persuasion, the big social media giants, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, the others, to take down viewpoints that they did not find Acceptable.
Now, to many of you out there, you're sitting back and you're saying, wait, that's a clear violation of the First Amendment.
Well, I think that's where it's going to be interesting is to say, in the government frame, the case is, what is persuasion and what is coercion?
And this one is going to be interesting for the justice to have to figure out.
Persuasion is, I'm persuading you to come around to my way of thinking.
Coercion says, you're going to come around to my way of thinking or there's going to be punishment attached.
In this case, and in the discovery that was done, you have emails sent from the White House to social media organizations asking that things be taken down.
There's no way they can deny that they're not acting in a governmental capacity.
The question will be, is that considered just persuasion like any of us could have the ability to do?
Or was this in a sense of coercion In which they were using the force of that White House email address to say, this is the president speaking, we need you to do this.
And that's going to be fascinating.
Now, in the oral arguments, it seemed to be mixed.
In fact, if anything, it did not seem as positive toward those who brought the suit in this case.
But now we'll just see.
I mean, this is getting more and more important, folks.
If you don't believe the social media aspect of this world is one of the problems that we're dealing with, then I don't really know how to help you.
And if government can take over and control social media even more than social media...
Sort of protects itself.
Then we've got a lot, lot, lot bigger problem than anything we can think of right now.
Because if the minute that the Internet and the minute that this work is put under the microscope and they find that they're censoring conservative voices, conservative attitudes, conservative videos, then that is government action and a clear violation of the First Amendment.
So it's going to be interesting to see if the, you know, I'm from the military.
A suggestion is an order.
If my superior said, why don't you start, you know, why don't you go get that report?
Or something to the effect of, I really would like to have that report.
Well, the question is, is that an order or is that a suggestion?
And the military would be more considered, hey, go do this for me.
Many occasions.
But in government, if you're getting it, if you're one of these organizations who's fought with, you know, administrations who fought with others, and you get an email from a White House address, About a situation in your system and about a post in particular, how does that weigh out?
Spring Court has got a lot left here.
This one won't be decided until the end of June.
The other one has been decided that I spoke of earlier about blocking has been decided already and sent back to the lower courts for decision.
But I encourage you, we're going to do a little bit more of this as time goes on.
I'm going to break down some more of these legal cases as we move toward June and the...
Ending of the Supreme Court session and term.
Be some interesting votes there.
I want you to be all caught up in that as we go forward.
But for now, that'll be it.
We've got a lot still going on, so just stick with us here on the podcast.
We've got Friday's Finest coming up on Friday.
Love to have you.
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