Debate Forces Corporate Media to Admit Biden Impairment After Months of Lies; SCOTUS, Including Justice Jackson, Overturns Excessive Jan. 6 Prosecutions
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
First Presidential Debate (6:10)
Obvious Decline (11:40)
SCOTUS Overturns Jan 6 Excesses (58:50)
Outro (1:19:35)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the last 24 hours in American political life were among the strangest and, if I'm being honest, the most entertaining as any that I can remember.
Joe Biden, Crawled or rather unsteadily shuffled onto a debate stage in Atlanta and then proceeded to fulfill every fear and nightmare that Democratic Party operatives and American voters have been harboring about him from the minute he opened his mouth and repeatedly coughed Until he finally faded out in his closing remarks with a string of barely coherent phrases.
Biden not only looked exactly like the cognitively impaired and fragile old man that Americans have perceived him to be, but he was actually worse.
A caricature of an escaped patient from a nursing home who managed to put on a tie and wander aimlessly and by accident wandered into that hall without having any idea where he was or why he was there.
By far the most extraordinary, and again, entertaining, part of the evening was that all of the on-air personalities and liberal media outlets who had been aggressively insisting for months, oh, that there was nothing wrong with Biden at all, that voters only believed that there was something wrong with him because of the big bad right-wing disinformation machine battling videos, which they called cheap fakes, a brand new term they invented, all had to admit
At once that Biden was, in fact, everything they had been angrily insisting he was not.
The panic in their eyes and on their faces was palpable and drove them, in unison, like the herd animals they are, to do a complete 180 reversal of everything they had been saying for months and even years to protect Joe Biden.
And they even had to go so far as to plot openly how they could force him out of the race and replace him with a more formidable challenger to Donald Trump.
Yes, our neutral and nonpartisan press corps spent the evening acting like what they are, DNC operatives, to find the best path for defeating Trump.
Now, right after the debate, I streamed a 30-minute analysis of my reaction for our local subscribers.
And earlier today, we made it all available, fully available to our entire audience here on Rumble and YouTube.
And I don't want to repeat all of that tonight.
It was sort of my immediate impressions immediately after the debate without having a lot of time to analyze and process things.
But I do want to analyze what happened over the last 24 hours, including how they are all changing their tunes yet again.
Now that Obama and other party leaders have made clear that Biden isn't going anywhere, there's no way he will voluntarily drop out of the race because there are few events really that have torn down the masks that our media usually wear quite as abruptly and violently as last night's debate and the fallout from it.
Then, the Supreme Court has been issuing a series of very consequential rulings.
Over the last week alone, they shielded the Biden censorship regime from review in a decision we covered extensively last night.
Today, they overruled the longstanding Chevron doctrine that had vested massive power in the government's administrative agencies, returning instead that power back to Congress and then the courts.
And today, they also ruled the theory that was invented out of nowhere by prosecutors To convert nonviolent January 6th defendants into felons, the court ruled that that theory that courts have been approving and prosecutors have been using is actually legally baseless, thus making it far more difficult to convict many of those defendants, including former President Trump, for felonies under this theory, and it could actually jeopardize the prosecution of many.
Now, this is an issue we have covered extensively.
and have been pointing out that this theory has no foundation in legal precedent.
And for that reason, and because the breakdown of the court's voting block, like in other cases this week, was very interesting, we want to report on exactly what happened in this case and examine its significant implications.
Now, before we get to all of that, a few program notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
I have really spent the last 24 hours trying to decide what I think are the three most entertaining features or events or parts of the last 24 hours of American political life, which in so many ways is unique.
It is something that we've never really seen before because the extent of Joe Biden's disastrous performance is unprecedented in American political life.
You've had candidates before who have turned in poor or inadequate debate performances, but nothing in the category, in the universe of what Joe Biden did last night.
And it's very difficult to pick the three funniest or most revealing, entertainingly revealing moments because there really are so many of them.
The exchange that they had about who was the better golfer when Joe Biden claimed to have a six handicap, and that was the one time that Trump wasn't pretending to be offended and outraged, but was genuinely and earnestly enraged that Biden would claim to be a six handicap, and they bickered over that, and then it ended with Trump saying, Joe, I've seen your golf swing.
You don't have to try and convince me.
There's all kinds of moments like that.
There are those moments where Joe Biden just, in mid-sentence, just his brain went off.
And he just started grasping around for words and just kind of floating away mid-sentence.
It was extremely uncomfortable to watch.
But at the same time, you knew that the people in media who had been spending months and years vehemently denying what everyone knew was true, namely that there was cognitive impairment of a very significant kind plaguing Joe Biden.
And they weren't just denying that, they were attacking and maligning anyone who said it.
As being part of the right-wing disinformation machine, you knew that they were watching and were watching in horror and were going to have to deal with it in some way.
But if I had to pick the one thing that actually made me laugh the most, it was when halfway through the debate, when every Democrat, every liberal, officeholder, politician, pundit, activist, journalist, were all admitting That this was a debacle of unprecedented proportions.
All of a sudden, halfway into the debate, multiple media outlets started running to social media and announcing a breaking news story.
And they were using sirens.
And they said, Joe Biden has a cold tonight, according to sources familiar with the matter.
So out of nowhere, just halfway through the debate, they all started to say, oh, Joe Biden has a cold.
That's why he's doing so poorly.
And obviously if Joe Biden had a cold that's something you would announce beforehand.
It's not something that would just, obviously the Biden people started calling every media outlet that they control and saying oh we want to tell you the scoop Joe Biden has a cold and they all ran out of nowhere in the middle of the debate to say break in Joe Biden has a cold.
I think the second funniest thing that I saw was after the debate when Joe Biden led Joe Biden to a debate after event.
She was speaking for him because he had just proven that he is incapable of speaking for himself.
And she tried to encourage him, tried to make him feel good by saying, Joe, you answered every one of those questions!
And he kind of had this grin on his face.
And honestly, I really do remember it was many years ago when one of my kids had failed a test and was very upset.
They were very young.
And I remember sitting down with him and trying to give them encouragement.
And that was one of the things I said was, look, you answered every question.
So you tried so hard.
You answered every question.
And you could just see how the people around Joe Biden treat him.
You know, they use that sing-songy voice that you use for like an old but addled grandparent to try and keep them happy, to try and encourage them, to try to keep them distracted.
And just watching that was truly amazing.
And then the, I think, funniest aspect of all was watching all of these media people who are about to show you who have spent A year or five years angrily denying that Joe Biden had anything wrong with him due to his advanced age, sit there in nausea and horror and disgust as they all had to grapple with the fact that there was no way to hide it any longer.
Now, the interesting part of this whole issue of cognitive impairment is that polls have been showing for quite a long time that The American people have no doubt that Joe Biden is cognitively impaired.
And the reason for it is because they've all had the experience of dealing with an elderly loved one as they decline in their sunset years.
And there's nothing these media people can tell them to convince them not to believe what they're seeing with their own eyes on an issue that they trust their own judgment on.
More than anybody else's, as they should because they've gone through it in their life.
So, just to give you an extent...
Of how vast is the public opinion?
We've shown you before polling data that shows that a gigantic percentage more believe that Biden is addled by age than Trump is, including Democrats, Independents, and Conservatives.
But here was a segment that happened on MSNBC today that revealed just how vast this difference is.
And this was before the debate.
This was before last night's debate.
How would it happen?
Who would be able to fill the spot?
We go to Steve Kornacki, because there are some indications with numbers to answer those questions.
Yeah, I mean, a couple ways of looking at it, Chris.
First of all, the backdrop for that performance Joe Biden gave last night and the reaction you're getting from Democrats.
Look at it this way.
Back in the 2020 campaign, from our NBC poll, we asked folks, who is better when it comes to having the necessary mental and physical health to be president?
And there's basically a wash.
41 said Biden, 40 said Trump.
All right, so it doesn't have the most important part of the video where he then shows how those percentages have changed up until this year where it's something like 65% of people believe that Biden doesn't have the necessary mental and physical health to be president and something like 34% or 40% believe that about Trump.
So the gap has grown enormously as people have watched Joe Biden over the next, the last four years.
That's the next column, which would have shown had we had it, that in 2024, this gap has exploded.
Now, I think one of the most important parts is why are the American people in every poll have said that they know that Joe Biden is cognitively impaired and not capable of doing the job as president.
The media, it is important to remember, has very aggressively and angrily insisted that not only is there nothing wrong with Biden, but that the reason Americans believe that there's something wrong with Biden is only because right-wing operatives and other Manipulators of videos have tried to deceive Americans into believing it.
So here, for example, is the Washington Post.
This was from just a week ago, or two weeks ago, June 14th.
This was when there were videos of Biden's trip to Europe that were circulating, and that fundraiser that he did with President Obama, where you could see that he was distracted.
He didn't know where he was.
He didn't know where he was supposed to be.
He had to be led around.
And the media decided to unite and claim that these videos were manipulated to try and make it look as if Biden was suffering from confusion when in fact he's as sharp as ever.
Here was just one example from the Washington Post.
There you see the headline, quote, cheap fake.
This is a new word they invented.
They can't claim the video is fake.
They can't claim that it was doctored.
They can't claim it was manipulated because it was the exact video that showed what Joe Biden was doing.
So they invented a new word, cheap fake.
Kind of like what they did with disinformation, or misinformation, then malinformation.
And they said, cheap fake Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead.
Quote, the Republican National Committee post a clipped video, then the New York Post, the Telegraph, and other pro-Trump outlets follow suit with the same depressing, with the same deceptive framing.
So just two weeks ago, the media was insisting, That the only reason Joe Biden looked in any way to be impaired is because right-wing liars were clipping videos in a deceitful way to make it appear as though this very robust, focused, energetic, and present leader was something that he wasn't, which is confused, disoriented, and cognitively declining very rapidly.
Here's a supercut of just a few minutes, a couple minutes of media figures who have been insisting over the last year that there's nothing wrong with Joe Biden, that they know personally that in private and when no one's looking, but also in public, he's as sharp as he has ever been.
He is a very alert.
This is what they were saying in the months and weeks heading into the humiliation last night.
Just get a little bit of taste of this.
Start your tape right now because I'm about to tell you the truth.
And F you if you can't handle the truth.
This version of Biden is the best Biden ever.
In fact, I think he's better than he's ever been.
President Biden has a photographic memory.
His understanding and mastery of a complicated geopolitical situation is remarkable.
He is sharp, intensely probing, and detail-oriented and focused.
Jackie, are you here?
Where's Jackie?
I didn't think she was going to be here.
I was sitting, you know, two feet from him across the table and he was, you know, intense.
Had trouble walking sometimes?
Yeah, so did FDR.
He wanted GD war.
But he's totally focused.
He's very sharp.
They say he's sharp in meetings and so on.
Very lucid, very well informed.
Biden is state lead.
He comes with gravitas.
There hasn't been, as far as I know, a single claim that Biden made a mistake.
Ageism is an issue.
Americans have a rich history of holding people's physical characteristics against them.
OK, you could ask African-Americans.
He's older.
That doesn't mean that he is unfit.
And there's a lot of ageism there.
Now, this age attack, this obsession by the right.
Joe Biden may not be able to speak for himself the way that he used to.
They want to think to take on government if we get out of line, which they're talking again about.
And that's him lying around.
I think people should be speaking up for Joe Biden.
Americans and reporters in the media are just judging him by his physical appearance and it's horribly unfair.
Not only, and by the way, Van Jones was in that clip, insisting that it was an outrageous attack to suggest that Biden was anything other than an alert and engaged leader.
And then that same Than Jones went on CNN last night right after the debate ended and he was basically on the verge of tears saying, I love Joe Biden.
I love the guy.
I love the guy.
And it pains me to watch him this way.
He needs to, he needs to drop out of the race.
None of us want to see him this way.
I mean, they spent, this isn't from four years ago or six years ago.
This is from this year.
And they even went so far, of course, on NBC to try and claim that Joe Biden was the victim of some kind of ugly prejudice akin to racism because people were condemning him based on his physical appearance.
You just see the propaganda and they read from the same script.
They all sound exactly alike because they're getting their orders from the same place.
These are herd animals.
And they all were running in one direction.
And suddenly last night, they all stopped and ran in exactly the opposite direction, together reading from the same script as well.
They were getting their words from all their Democratic sources who were telling them, we need to get Joe Biden out of this race.
We're panicking.
And they were just reading from their phones and repeating it all together.
There's not a single note of dissent ever from this crowd.
They say the same things over and over without the slightest regard for whether it's true.
Now let me just show you a couple of the most extreme examples.
Earlier this month, at the very beginning of this month, the Wall Street Journal published a very deeply reported article.
That detailed how, in private meetings, contrary to what Democrats were claiming, Biden often faded out.
He would speak and ramble in such a low voice that no one could understand what he was saying.
Basically, they were describing exactly the Joe Biden we saw last night at the debates.
And this wasn't the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, this was the Wall Street Journal reporting team.
And so many of the Democratic Party on-air personalities were so enraged by the fact that the Wall Street Journal reported this that they couldn't even contain their anger.
And again, this is only two weeks ago, three weeks ago.
Listen to what Joe Scarborough and that crew that he has there on that morning show that Biden loves and watches every morning.
Watch what they were saying just three weeks ago about that Wall Street Journal report.
My meetings with the President over the past year, Willie, and talked to Mike and Meek about it, and I said in real time, the guy, the guy, see both those guys right there?
I've spent time with both of those guys privately.
I've spent time with Biden and Trump privately.
I've spent time with every House Speaker over the past 30 years and Joe Biden, I'm not just It's just not close.
If you want to talk about international affairs, if you want to talk about how to get bipartisan legislation, Joe Biden is light years ahead of all of them.
Joe Biden is light years ahead when it comes to complex foreign policy, complex economic and domestic policy.
He's light years ahead of every single House speaker over the last 30 years with whom Joe Biden has spent his time.
John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy, Mike Johnson, going all the way back 30 years.
Every single one of those House leaders, according to Joe Scarborough, just two and a half weeks ago, didn't have even a fraction of the capacity to be in charge to understand complicated information the way that Joe Biden does, the way that Joe Biden can.
This went on like this.
And the fact that the Wall Street Journal knew these quotes were out there, that editors, I'm not looking at the reporter.
People always blame the reporter.
There are a line of editors behind every story that's done.
The editors saw that Kevin McCarthy had a habit of saying one thing in public, lying in public, and then privately telling his aides just the opposite.
That Biden was sharp, that he was cogent, that he was substantive, and in the same meeting that Kevin McCarthy is now telling the Wall Street Journal Biden was out of it?
He went out and he told reporters after the meeting that the meeting was both the best yet.
We're making progress and I'm going to be talking.
There's that photo of Joe Biden in his Ray-Bans just to show the point of how tough and strong and energetic of a leader he is.
And there you see on the screen, Wall Street Journal relies on former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to criticize Biden's acuity.
They were rolling out every stop to try and discredit and maul the Wall Street Journal for daring to suggest that Joe Biden behaves exactly the way that he behaved last night, and he does it all the time in private meetings where they're there to discuss policy.
Joe Biden, every day, very professional, very smart, very tough.
I just, I don't even know what to say.
I really don't even know what to say here.
Well, let's begin with the fact that Joe Biden is 81 years old.
Donald Trump, by the way, will be 78 next week, so he's not much younger.
So yes, does he move a little slower and speak a little softer than he did 15 years ago when he was vice president, as former Speaker McCarthy says in the piece?
Sure does.
Yeah.
I think most 81-year-olds do, or most people are different than they were 15 years ago.
This does have the feeling of Trump acolytes laundering their attacks through a reputable, prestigious news organization in The Wall Street Journal.
This was Trump acolytes making stuff up and then laundering their lies through The Wall Street Journal to imply that Joe Biden wasn't what he really is, which is a very mentally astute Leader that dominates rooms that he's in, understands complexities better than men half his age.
In fact, better than every House Speaker of the last 30 years.
He's in a different universe, they said.
Street Journal.
Also, the point about notes, as Richard Haass would tell you, presidents use notes in meetings.
That's not unusual.
They might have a sheet, they might have a card in front of them with some points that they want to make.
I would also point out Donald Trump has a person who follows him with a printer to print things out for him so he can have hard copies so he can read his notes and facts and lies often that he rattles off.
And then the other point to make is, will the Wall Street Journal have a piece About Donald Trump and his mental acuity.
All you have to do is watch the 90 minutes of that Fox News interview over the weekend.
I mean, this is really North Korean style propaganda.
I know that's a cliche, but they spent, you know, close to five minutes just there alone expressing indignation that anyone would question Joe Biden's mental state.
That was June 9th.
So, two weeks ago, a little more than two weeks ago.
This morning, after that presidential debate, the very same program, Morning Joe, composed of the very same people that you just watched, went on the air and said exactly the opposite.
Because they could no longer lie.
The evidence was too glaring, even for people this shameless to continue to lie.
Look at what the funeral that they held for Joe Biden's candidacy looked like this morning on that show.
I think his presidency has been an unqualified success.
If, however, you believe, as do I, And as do so many people who watch this program and who fear just how dark of a place a second Donald Trump term will take America.
Then I think it's critical that we ask the same questions.
about this man I love, respect, and whose public service in saving this country from Donald Trump over the last three and a half years I honor and always will.
I think we have to ask the same questions.
By the way, it is hard to overstate how many of these people in media last night and this morning and through today when forced to admit just to save the last message of their credibility that Joe Biden is actually suffering from a serious it is hard to overstate how many of these people in media last He
Even though they were saying two weeks ago that it was outrageous even to suggest that, it's hard to overstate how many of them began by saying, I love Joe Biden very deeply.
He's a good friend of mine.
I love the guy.
And that's why it pains me to have to say this.
Tom Friedman started his article that way in the New York Times, calling on Biden to drop out of the race.
So many CNN people said it.
Here you see Joe Scarborough saying it.
It was all over the place.
You're not supposed to be friends with, let alone deeply love on a personal level, a politician whom you're supposed to be adversarially covering.
That is not the healthy and correct relationship between a journalist on the one hand and the most powerful politician in the country on the other.
But this is just one of the reasons why the media in our country is so hated and disrespected and distrusted.
Because people understand that they have completely abdicated what they always claimed was their responsibility, their function, and they have a completely different function instead.
Let's hear the rest of this week by the very same person who just two weeks ago was saying you are a right-wing liar if you even questioned Joe Biden's mental capability, that he was in a different universe.
Inability right now than everybody else in Washington.
Let's listen to the rest.
Of him, that we have asked of Donald Trump since 2016, and that is, if he were CEO, and he turned in a performance like that, would any corporation in America, any Fortune 500 corporation in America, keep him on as CEO?
If this were Donald Trump, time and time again, we talked about the Goldwater.
Where is the Barry Goldwater?
To walk over and tell Richard Nixon it was over.
To tell Donald Trump it was over.
And now the question is, do Democrats need to do the same thing of Joe Biden?
These are hard questions.
But the fact is, friends, failure is just not an option.
In 2024, failure is not an option.
So who I love, who I respect, who I revere for their work and their duty to service over their lifetime really is not relevant.
It's not relevant for any of us.
It's not relevant for Democratic leaders.
It's not relevant for anyone.
The question is, Can we know Joe Biden can govern?
And again, I'll debate that issue with anyone and I will win.
I will destroy anybody that wants to debate Joe Biden's record over the past three and a half years.
He can run the White House, he can run the country effectively, despite the barrage of lies that constantly come at him, like Donald Trump's lies last night.
But can he run for president in 2024?
Donald Trump lied over and over and over and over again.
And Joe Biden couldn't respond to any of those lies.
You know, maybe this is naive of me to say, but when I see this, I genuinely do not understand.
I mean, I cannot comprehend.
I really cannot.
I'm not saying this to make a point.
How it is that someone can go on television before a camera two weeks ago And rant and rave at anybody who would dare suggest that there was something addled about Joe Biden.
And call everyone who suggested it a liar and swear up and down that you've never seen anybody as in command and in control and physically and mentally adept as Joe Biden.
And you create this whole emotional melodrama in defense of Joe Biden's mental acuity attacking anyone who's, and then just two weeks later, not two months, not two years, two weeks later, you go right before that same camera and with just as much melodrama.
You sit there and say it's time for a Democrat who has the authority and stature that Barry Goldwater had to tell Richard Nixon it was time for him to leave to go over to the White House and tell Joe Biden, look, it's over.
You need to pull out of this race because you are not mentally capable of running a campaign and withstanding its rigors.
Without at least acknowledging that you had spent months swearing up and down That he was perfect mentally.
And that the only people questioning this were liars and smear artists and right-wing monsters who believe in deceit.
How is it that you don't at least acknowledge that?
You're talking to the same audience who watched you do this over months.
And you can at least say, look, I guess I was wrong when I swore to you up and down many, many times that Joe Biden was in a different universe than every other younger politician.
I'm now here to say I got that totally wrong and I apologize to the people that I called liars for saying over the last several months what I am now saying because I'm forced to.
These people are completely shameless.
And when it becomes clear, as it pretty much already is, that Joe Biden's not going anywhere There's no possibility that Joe Biden is going to voluntarily give up the power and the title that he spent his entire life chasing.
And when you see senior Democratic leaders like Barack Obama and Steny Hoyer and Hakeem Jeffries come out and circle the wagons around Biden and say, okay, he had one bad debate, but he is our leader.
It becomes totally clear that he's not going anywhere.
You're going to see how fast these people are going to go back.
And they're going to be saying in about three days, you know what?
It was one bad debate.
Who cares?
In the scheme of things, given how great Joe Biden is and what a menace Donald Trump is, that debate didn't matter.
This is one debate.
You don't throw a guy overboard for one night.
You're going to hear all of that very, very shortly.
Let me just give you another example of just What inveterate liars they are, how they're willing to just say whatever they need to in the moment, and they have no qualms about completely changing it a couple months later when it suits them.
Here is Paul Krugman in the New York Times.
This is February of 2024, so about three or four months ago, in a column entitled, Why I Am Now Deeply Worried for America.
And this is why he's deeply worried.
He says, quote, Many voters think the president's age is an issue, but there's perception and there's reality.
As anyone who has recently spent time with Joe Biden, and I have, can tell you, he is in full possession of his faculties, completely lucid and with excellent grasp of detail.
Of course, most voters don't get to see him up close, and it's on Biden's team to address that.
And yes, he speaks slowly and quietly and a bit slowly, although this is in part because of his lifetime struggle with a stutter that nobody ever noticed until about four years ago when his brain started melting.
He even went so far as to blame the stutter that nobody ever saw when Joe Biden was in public life the last 50 years.
He's in command of the facts.
He is completely on.
And I know that because I'm with him, says Paul Krugman, and I despair for the country that people doubt that because a bunch of right-wing liars have convinced them of lies.
Here's the very same Paul Krugman today after watching that debate.
The headline is, the best president of my adult life needs to withdraw.
The guy with the great engagement with detail and the perfect lucidity and the attention now he needs to withdraw.
Quote, Joe Biden has done an excellent job as president.
In fact, I consider him the best president of my adult life.
Based on his policy record, he should be an overwhelming favorite for reelection, but he isn't.
And on Thursday night, he failed to rise to the occasion when it really mattered.
Given where we are, I must very reluctantly join the chorus.
And that's what they are.
They're a chorus, a herd, asking Biden to voluntarily step aside with emphasis on the voluntary aspect.
Maybe some Biden loyalists will consider this a betrayal, given how much I have supported his policies, and I fear that we need to recognize reality.
Reality is now that Joe Biden isn't capable of doing the job, whereas three months ago, He accused anyone who doubted that of living in a fantasy world and anyone who was in reality understood that nobody was more engaged and lucid than Joe Biden.
Again, just a willingness to completely reverse what he was saying was such vehemence a very short time ago.
Just to give you a couple of other examples of how the people who have been defending Joe Biden vehemently Did a 180 last night and this morning.
Let's look at Chuck Todd on NBC News, which needless to say, is a channel devoted almost entirely to defending Joe Biden.
You know, one of the things was, would either candidate look like the caricature that the other campaign has been trying to paint of him?
And at the end of the day, Joe Biden looks like the caricature that conservative media has been painting.
And there were no clips tonight, right?
This was, you saw it before your eyes.
Look, I don't want to just tell you what I think here.
Tom, I've been talking to a lot of leaders in the Democratic Party, electeds, coalition leaders.
There's a full on panic about this performance.
Not like, oh, this is recoverable.
It is more of a, OK, he's got to step aside.
There's a lot of that chatter.
This is this is about as bad of a performance in order to that Biden could have delivered.
Alright, and here was CNN, in fact, hosted by that same person, Casey Hunt, who had cut off the Trump campaign spokesperson earlier this week, a segment that we covered, when she had this meltdown because the Trump campaign was daring to question her colleagues.
Here she's interviewing Alex Thompson of Axios and just listen to the extent of what he's saying.
And again, they're all saying the same thing because they're all hearing from the same people.
And they're all just repeating the same words in unison.
Listen to this.
Alex Thompson, I know you are incredibly wired in with the Biden team.
We saw those surrogates.
It took them a minute to get out there onto the floor last night, but when they did, they came out trying to project this message of strength.
Is it going to work?
Well, listen, I've covered the Biden White House now for three and a half years, and as someone that's reported on his age quite a few times, I can tell you that the White House's response every single time it has come up for three and a half years has been to deflect, to gaslight, to not tell the truth, not just to reporters, not just to other Democrats, but even at times to themselves about the president's limitations at his age.
There's a reason why he has not done as many interviews or press conferences as any president in decades.
There's a reason he does not do events almost ever before 10 a.m.
and is rarely on camera after 6 p.m.
And the reason is because he has limitations.
He is 81 years old.
But the problem was they were not forthright with other Democrats.
They weren't at times forthright with themselves.
And that is why Democrats are in full freak out mode because what they saw is finally what they have been obscuring.
Alex.
He's a journalist who, I have to say on this issue and others, has been more honest.
He's been noting this and complaining about this for a while.
But think about what he's saying.
It wasn't just the White House that concealed this and hid this and gaslit and lied about it.
They wouldn't have been able to get away with it if all these people in the media who pretend to be reporters and journalists and to have no partisan allegiance, et cetera, hadn't been there every step of the way, aggressively defending the Biden administration and attacking anybody who raised these questions.
You know, even Chuck Todd said, look, this Joe Biden looked like the caricature that the right wing media had been depicting about him.
Because it wasn't a caricature.
It was the reality.
And finally, Joe Biden was there.
He wasn't at the State of the Union address where he could read from a teleprompter or at a campaign rally.
Today, where he reads from a teleprompter, he was in the middle of a debate, no notes allowed.
He couldn't bring in any notes.
He couldn't talk to his campaign staff.
And that's the real Joe Biden.
And that is the thing that they have been lying about for months and years.
Here's the New York Times editorial board.
New York Times itself, speaking on behalf of the full paper, they just released their editorial.
There you see their view, quote, to serve his country, President Biden should leave the race.
Now, they're kind of appealing here, as you've heard many times, Joe Scarborough do, and Paul Krugman and others, to this sort of like sense of selfless patriotism.
What has Joe Biden ever done in his life that would lead anyone to believe that he would voluntarily release the stranglehold on this power and on this title and office that he has spent his entire adult life seeking?
Joe Biden first ran for the presidency in 1988.
That's 35 years ago, more than 35 years ago.
That's how long he has been desperate to be president.
He was elected to the Senate in the early 1970s when he was 29 years old.
You don't think if you're elected to the Senate when you're 29 you immediately start thinking about how to be president?
And so finally he gets hold of this power and this honor and this prestige.
That he's been chasing a whole life?
When has Joe Biden ever shown that he's a selfless, honorable person willing to sacrifice for the good of some greater cause?
Never!
They've created this fairy tale in their mind.
In fact, in 1988, when he first ran, he was one of the front runners to win the Democratic nomination.
And yet he was forced out of the race because he got caught As a pathological liar constantly fabricating lies about his own life as well as plagiarizing.
Something that Joe Biden continues to this very day to do.
He lies constantly about his life.
And yet the media in their head has made this narrative, oh Joe Biden is a decent honest man, and they've repeated it enough times so that they actually believe it.
Whereas the reality is, Joe Biden has never been that, and he is not that, and there's almost no chance that he will voluntarily get out of this race.
None.
Here, from the New York Times op-ed page, filled with, I believe, every single person who works there, harbors an intense hatred for Donald Trump.
Every last one of them.
They have Republicans, Democrats, Liberals, Conservatives, whatever.
They all have in common that they hate Donald Trump.
And yet, here you see the group think they're... Here's one op-ed.
Kamala Harris could win this election, let her.
That's from Lydia Pilgrim.
Joe Biden is a good and decent man and a good president.
He must bow out of the race.
Thomas Friedman.
Is Biden too old?
America got its answer.
Three opinion writers weigh in on the first presidential debate.
Here is the, all of the op-ed writers who work for the New York Times, and they were asked, did Trump win or Biden win?
And every one of them said Trump won, except for Jamil Bowie and Lydia, uh, what is her name?
Lydia, uh, Palgreen, who refused to name a winner.
Everybody else at the New York Times had to admit that Joe Biden won.
You see this immense turnaround.
And again, it's all because they only do things together.
Here, just by the way, is Nancy Pelosi, for good measure.
Back in February of 2024, she went on CNN with Anderson Cooper.
And they were giggling and laughing about the idea that anyone would think Joe Biden is not capable of doing the job, given how they both know him and understand what a great leader he is.
Do you think that is the avenue that President Biden should go down on this?
Sort of poking fun at, I mean, his age is his age.
His age is his age, yes.
I'll tell you this, though.
I've worked with the President for a long time, especially closely as Speaker when he was President, and now since then.
And he knows.
I mean, he's always on the ball.
He knows these issues.
He knows the legislation.
He helped write some of it.
He campaigned on it.
He remembers it.
Anyone who would think that they're at some advantage because of his age thinks that at their peril because he's very sharp.
You know, there are, look, I'm sure you hear this from Democrats all the time, there are Democrats, a lot of Democrats who have concerns, though, about his age, about his mental fitness.
How much of, you know, him stumbling over words or for, you know, saying Mexico instead of Egypt?
What do you say to people about their concerns?
Well, I think that people do make mistakes.
I think his age is one thing, that's an objective fact.
His making a mistake from time to time, we all do that.
When the former ex-president defeated President Trump, made a mistake about one thing or another, he would make the same mistake seven times.
It wasn't a slip of the tongue, it was a complete Going down a path of something that wasn't even true intentionally or otherwise.
So I think that, again, age is an objective fact.
As I say, it's all relative.
He's younger than I am, so what do I have to say about his age?
But he is, again, knowledgeable, wise.
And after the football game yesterday, which I was sad.
I'm proud of the San Francisco 49ers.
I didn't want to bring it up with you, but since you brought it up.
But I mean, I brought it up is because at the end of the game, you saw experience prevail.
We have a new fresh team.
Wait till next year.
We're getting all ready for it.
But you saw experience prevail at the end.
Experience is so important.
So Joe Biden has a vision.
He has knowledge.
He has a strategic thinker.
This is a very sharp president.
In terms of his public.
I mean, isn't it amazing the ability that these people have cultivated from being in Washington their whole lives, the ability that they have to just lie without the slightest flinching?
He is...
As an American, you are subjected to an avalanche of deceit and propaganda and outright lies from the people who we've just looked at.
Nancy Pelosi and Joe Scarborough and Paul Krugman and all of those Democrats we showed you.
They know they're lying.
They've been around Joe Biden.
They saw many, many times what the whole country saw last night on the stage.
And yet they have no problem with going on and assuring you of the opposite.
Now, I just want to note that the same exact thing happened four years ago.
And I wrote about it when I was at The Intercept.
The very first people who started spreading Whispers and concerns that Joe Biden, because of his age, was no longer mentally capable of running a campaign and becoming president was not Trump supporters or Bernie Sanders supporters.
It was these mainstream Democratic Party operatives who in 2018 and 2019 openly talked about how Joe Biden wasn't there anymore because they were worried that he would get the nomination Simply because he was around Obama for eight years as his vice president, being the best known, he would just kind of stumble into the nomination.
And they were worried that he would lose the election because he was incapable of withstanding the rigors of a campaign.
Now, fortunately for Joe Biden, because of COVID, he barely ever had to come out of his basement.
They barely had to do anything in 2020 physically.
And so he was just able to stay at home and none of that got exposed.
But once Joe Biden got the nomination, the same exact people, the same exact Democratic operatives who had been saying Joe Biden is mentally impaired immediately turned around when he was the nominee and started saying it's immoral to raise any questions about his fitness.
And that was the article I wrote there.
You see the headline in March of 2020.
It's the Democrats and their media who impugned Biden's cognitive fitness.
Now they feign outrage.
Concerned about the former vice president's cognitive decline came from his supporters, not from Trump or Sanders.
So let me just give you a few little excerpts.
Here is Andrea Mitchell.
This is in June of 2019, five years ago.
And you can compare the Biden of 2020 and those debates to the Biden of Last night, and you'll see how rapidly he's declined, but already back in 2019, the Andrea Mitchells of the world, the people who have been in Washington forever, who are on the side of the Democrats, were openly speaking about Biden to suggest that there was something wrong with him.
Listen to what she said.
This was right before the Democratic Party primary debate.
Listen to what she said.
This is the first debate.
And look, he has been a skilled debater.
We saw him with Sarah Palin.
We've seen him in the past.
The question is, does he still have his stuff?
Spinady.
Yeah, and is he, how sharp is he?
Does the Joe Biden tonight, is he the same Joe Biden who could respond with one word to a younger... You know, you're raising the question by the question.
A younger Brian Williams.
You're raising the question.
So there's Chris Matthew Chuckling saying, you're pretending to ask a question but you're actually answering it.
We all know Joe Biden has slowed down significantly and doesn't have anywhere near the capabilities that he once did.
In fact, so open was this attack on Joe Biden that Democratic Party candidates on the stage with him Mocked him and openly talked about how he was clearly in serious cognitive decline, practically senile.
Here was an exchange that Joaquin Castro had with Joe Biden, and Joaquin Castro has been a core member of the Democratic Party establishment for years.
He wasn't some outlier figure like, you know, Marianne Williamson up on the stage.
I mean, he's a hardcore Democrat.
And watch what he was willing to do to Joe Biden.
This is 2019.
They do not have to buy in.
You just said that.
You just said that two minutes ago.
You just said two minutes ago that they would have to buy in.
You said they would have to buy in.
Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?
Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago?
I mean, I can't believe that you said two minutes ago that they had to buy in, and now you're saying they don't have to buy in.
You're forgetting that!
I mean, that was not subtle.
Here was Cory Booker, who was also on the stage, and also very explicitly raised exactly the same sort of attack on Joe Biden.
Again, this is five years ago.
There are definitely moments where you listen to Joe Biden and you just wonder.
I think that we are at a tough point right now because there's a lot of people who are concerned about Joe Biden's ability to carry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling.
And I think that Castro has some really legitimate concerns about, can he be someone in a long, grueling campaign that can get the ball over the line?
And he has every right to call that out.
I mean, these were the people, not Trump supporters, not Sanders supporters, who first were constantly raising these concerns.
I could show you so many more.
And yet the minute it became apparent that Joe Biden would be the Democratic nominee and would run against Trump, the media all closed ranks again and said that anyone raising these issues is essentially an immoral scumbag.
Here was Ryan Lizza, who was at the New Yorker and Politico.
And he's showing here tweets from Senator supporters and Trump supporters who are Raising that issue about how Biden doesn't seem to really be mentally there.
And this is what he said, quote, part of the quote, cognitive decline campaign being spread by MAGA and Sanders Twitter is to deny any coordination.
The idea is that everyone is just now noticing that Biden misspeaks all the time, and they're suddenly alarmed by it.
He's been like this for decades.
That's how they closed ranks and were lying back in 2019.
Here from the Washington Monthly in March of 2020, an article entitled, the disinformation campaign being launched against Joe Biden.
Quote, there is no data to support the allegation that he is in cognitive decline.
These people have been lying for years.
To cover for Joe Biden.
And the bill finally came due last night as they all got exposed for the absolute liars that they were.
But don't think that these people in the media have finally been willing to declare independence.
They were only saying all these things not because they have a conscience or worried about their own credibility.
Maybe that was part of it.
But they thought they were speaking for the people who they usually speak for, which are Democratic Party insiders, who were texting them all night and saying, this is a disaster.
We have to get Biden out of the race.
And yet Barack Obama appeared today to make very clear that none of that is going to happen.
Obama tweeted the following just a few hours ago, quote, Bad debate nights happen, trust me, I know.
But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.
Between someone who tells the truth, who knows right from wrong, and will give it to the American people straight, and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit.
Last night didn't change that.
And it's why so much is at stake in November.
So he's telling these media Servants, look, stop with this narrative about Biden having to get out of the race.
He's not going anywhere.
Here's the script that you're now going to use.
You're going to get back to work for the Democratic Party and for Joe Biden.
And you're going to say, yeah, he had a bad night, a bad debate night.
Many people have had one bad debate night.
But in the overall scheme, comparing Trump to Biden, none of this matters at all.
And I promise you, I guarantee you, by Monday, all of these media people are going to be back on message.
Once they realize that Joe Biden's not going anywhere, they're going to get back to work making sure Once they accept the reality that they're stuck with Joe Biden, that they're going to go back to doing everything they can to make sure that that debate night does not harm him and that he gets reelected and keep Trump out of office.
The problem for them is that nobody listens to them anymore.
Nobody trusts them.
They can speak all they want.
about how capable Biden is and nobody believed it before last night.
And especially after watching last night, certainly no one's going to believe it now, no matter how much they lie and propagandize and deceive.
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So it has been a really big wave for the Supreme Court, and we think it's very important to cover the Supreme Court, not just to explain what the outcome is so that people and we think it's very important to cover the Supreme Court, not just to explain what the outcome is so that people who are on the left or right judge the outcome simply based on the results, but to really give you an is doing.
We covered one decision that they issued earlier this week, which is the decision where they shielded the Biden administration from any sort of constitutional review.
And in that decision, Amy Coney Barrett And John Roberts joined with the three liberals.
It was Alito and Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas in the minority.
It was Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts who joined the three liberals for a 6-3 ruling that said the plaintiffs don't have standing there.
We covered that in depth the other night.
Also today they overturned, the court did, by six to three ruling with the six conservatives on one side.
The long-standing doctrine called the Chevron Doctrine, which basically though it sounds boring, Instructs courts to defer to the interpretations of congressional law, whatever agencies decide the law means.
And the court has said there's no reason for judges to give deference to say the EPA or the FBI or any other executive branch agency there to regulate It's not their job to interpret what Congress meant.
It's Congress's job to pass a clear law.
And if they don't, if there's ambiguity, then the courts are the place where those disputes should be determined.
It really has the effect of taking a lot of power away from the administrative state, the unelected administrative state, and handing it back to Congress and to some extent to the courts.
On July 1st, on Monday, the court will decide its last case, which is whether or not President Trump enjoys immunity from any kind of prosecution for acts undertaken as president that will obviously have a big impact.
My guess is they will either reject his theory or will send it back to the courts to further analyze certain things, but we'll see how that goes.
But they also today overturned the theory that prosecutors had been using in order to take non-violent January 6th protesters, and even some who use violence, and turn them into felons using an extremely distorted and stretched interpretation of a law that was passed back in 2000
After the Enron scandal, Paul Krugman was on the board of directors of that company Enron that turned out to be a gigantic fraud, the whole thing collapsed.
And in the wake of the collapse of that, of Enron, they realized that there was a loophole in the law that prevented them from prosecuting the accountants who helped Enron commit that fraud.
They prosecuted the CPA from Arthur Anderson, but they couldn't prosecute the individuals.
And so they enacted a law called Sarbanes-Oxley after the two members of Congress who sponsored it.
And all that law did was say that if you obstruct investigations or official proceedings, you can be guilty of a felony.
They had no intention for it to apply to political protest.
It was simply designed to prevent people from obstructing ongoing investigations.
After January 6th, the prosecutors who were covering these cases We're under a lot of pressure to put these January 6th defendants, including ones who used no violence, into prison for a long time.
In order to do that, they needed to concoct a theory as to why just entering Congress and protesting can somehow turn you into a felon.
And the theory that they used was this wildly expansive interpretation of Charbanes Oxley that the Supreme Court today rejected, which means that a lot of those prosecutions of January 6th defendants can be in jeopardy.
And the case that Jack Smith has brought against Donald Trump, charging him with felonies related to his conduct pertaining to January 6th, also in part used this theory that the Supreme Court today rejected.
The Wall Street Journal back in 2021 explained the following, quote, to prosecute January 6th Capitol rioters, the government tests a novel legal strategy.
As first trials approach, some defendants are challenging use of Sarbanes-Oxley Act to obtain felony convictions and stiff sentences.
The problem was these judges were too cowardly, too afraid to rule in favor of January 6th defendants.
So almost every judge on the lower court level accepted and approved the prosecutor's distortion of the law.
And I've been writing about this going back for many years.
Here is an article I wrote in Substack in 2021.
Where I was describing how Democrats had always pretended to be so pro-defendant, anti-prosecutor, believe in criminal justice reform, and yet when it comes to their political enemies, they're willing to relinquish every one of the claimed beliefs they have about the judicial system in order to ensure that their political enemies go into prison.
I talked a lot about how the prosecutor Michael Flynn, which almost every left liberal cheered Use a huge number of prosecutorial weapons and theories that anyone who considered them a criminal justice reform advocate had long opposed.
And of course, they didn't care.
They suddenly embraced it in order to put Michael Flynn in prison.
The same thing happened when cheering the conviction as felons of January 6th defendants under a theory of law that was obviously so distorted so stretched and dubious, and that had the potential in the future of turning any political protesters into felons, simply because they might have disrupted a proceeding in Congress.
And here's what I said in that article when describing specifically what the prosecutors were doing here.
Quote, the most protracted thirst for harsh criminal punishment from Democrats has been directed at those who participated in the protest-turned-riot at the Capitol on January 6th.
Of the more than 600 people charged with crimes in connection with that riot, only a minority are accused of using violence of any kind.
In other words, the majority of January 6th defendants are accused of non-violent crimes.
While few people object to prison terms for people who use violence as part of that riot, Even though many progressives do object to long prison terms for those who use violence as part of the 2020 Black Lives Protest movement, a large number of nonviolent protesters face serious felony charges and lengthy prison terms.
That nonviolent protesters should not be imprisoned is foundational to the criminal justice reform movement, yet it is nowhere to be found when it comes to the January 6th defendants, whose real crime is that they have the wrong ideology.
To charge nonviolent January 6th defendants with felony charges has been a serious challenge for federal prosecutors, since when is nonviolent trespassing a felony?
To convert it into one, the DOJ has invented a warp theory about what the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was intended to criminalize.
Insisting that the phrase obstruction of justice provision of that law intended to regulate Wall Street somehow applies to the January 6th certification vote at the Capitol.
And the irony was, in order to argue that, they had to depict the vote counting on January 6th not as a mere ministerial act, but as an official investigation that Congress was undertaking where they had the option to reject the vote totals or accept them, the exact theory that Donald Trump had used, as to why Mike Pence could reject the totals.
So it was always an extremely Warped in.
Stretch meaning we covered it as well earlier this year because an appellate court had finally looked at all these prosecutions and rejected the validity of this theory that the prosecutors had used to put a lot of January 6th defendants into prison as felons.
And here's part of what we reported back then in March.
U.S.
are rarely charged, and if they are, they're charged because they weren't engaged in violence.
And typically, non-violent political protesters in the U.S.
are rarely charged, and if they are, they're charged with misdemeanors, but not in the January 6th case.
And the way that this was done is so ironic.
We've been over this before.
I've written articles about it.
You can go and if you want to really dig into the legalities of what I'm describing here, you can do so.
But basically, there were laws that were enacted in the wake of the collapse of Enron, which was a gigantic energy company, Paul Krugman.
So we don't need that whole explanation again.
I just want to show you that this is something we've been covering for a long time because I have been always very alarmed That prosecutors are just able to invent new laws out of nowhere and everybody was fine with it because all they wanted to do is put January 6th defendants or protesters into prison for a long time without the slightest regard to whether they actually committed felonies.
They were seen as political prisoners, as people that you just wanted in prison at any cost.
And because judges were too afraid to rule in their favor, many of them went to prison for a long time as felons under a theory that never made any sense.
Here in March 1st of this year was the first glimmer that courts were finally willing to say that this is a theory that had no validity from the Washington Post.
Quote, appeals court ruling means that over a hundred January 6th rioters may be resentenced.
And then it goes on to explain what the court ruled.
Now, it was this ruling that went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court decided today by a 6-3 ruling that you cannot turn January 6th defendants and protesters into felons under this interpretation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that had been used over and over to throw these people in prison for a long time.
And the breakdown of the decision was very interesting.
The six justices voting to reject the prosecution theory were five conservatives, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Roberts, along with Katonji Brown Jackson, who joined the majority.
And she did so and then wrote a concurrent opinion, her own opinion, That was extraordinary in terms of just how straightforward it was in condemning what had been done to these defendants.
She has a long track record of being pro-defendant, and rather than suspending her values and judicial beliefs simply because she doesn't like the ideology of the defendant, she very commendably applied Her pro-defendant, anti-prosecutor ideology to these defendants as well, because she knew that allowing prosecutors to invent laws to put people in prison who don't belong there will endanger everybody.
On the other hand, the three justices who formed the dissent were Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Amy Coney Barrett.
And she wrote Amy Coney Barrett, the dissenting opinion, But in reality, she wasn't ruling against the January 6th defendant.
She is a pro-prosecutor judge.
And so her ruling as well was consistent with her longstanding theory about how to interpret laws, especially criminal laws, that are generally unfavorable to defendants.
So it was really an example where at least those two judges, Jackson and Barrett, Reach a conclusion legally that they knew would displease their political faction.
And I think when a judge does that...
Even if you don't like the result that it creates, that's actually commendable.
That's what you want from a judge.
That's what every judge swears when they're being confirmed before the Senate that they'll do.
Oh, we're just going to apply the law without the slightest regard for the political outcomes.
And very few judges do that.
And when judges do it, as they both did here, I think it's to be celebrated.
Let me just give you a slight taste of Why the court ruled the way it did.
In reality, it's a very technical ruling.
It's just a question of how to interpret this law and whether it should be read expansively to include behaviors like protesting the Congress on January 6th and the majority said that it couldn't be.
Here's what the majority opinion from Justice Roberts said.
Quote, to prove a violation of Section 1512C2, that's the provision of the Starbanes-Oxley Act, the government must establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or as we earlier explained, other things used in the proceeding or attempted to do so.
The judgment of the D.C.
Circuit is therefore vacated and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
On remand the DC court may assess the sufficiency of all these other charges.
So it was a very just straightforward statutory interpretation where they concluded that Sarbanes-Oxley could not be read to turn these people into felons.
The much more interesting opinion Listen to what she said here.
Justice Kanji Brown Jackson wrote in her Concurrence where she explains why she's joining the majority, the conservative majority and ruling in favor of the January 6th defendants.
Listen to what she said here.
I think this is such an important passage and I wish every liberal who respects and likes her would actually read this to understand what it means to apply a principle irrespective of the political outcome or the ideology of the people whose legal rights you're protecting.
This is what she wrote, quote, on January 6, 2021, an angry mob stormed the U.S.
Capitol seeking to prevent Congress from fulfilling its constitutional duty to certify the electoral votes in the 2020 election.
The peaceful transfer of power is a fundamental democratic norm and those who attempted to disrupt it in this way inflicted a deep wound on this nation.
So she's saying, like, I see January 6th the way liberals see it.
But then she goes on.
But today's case is not about the immorality of those acts.
Instead, the question before this court is far narrower.
What is the scope of the particular crime Congress has outlined in 18 U.S.C.
1512 C.2?
That's the law we've been talking about.
And then she went on to say this, quote, in the United States of America, and she's quoting a case here, quote, men are not subjected to criminal punishment because their conduct offends our patriotic emotions or thwarts a general purpose sought to be effected by specific commands which they have not obeyed.
Nor are they to be held guilty of offenses which the statutes have omitted, though by inadvertence, to define and condemn.
And she quotes a 1943 Supreme Court case there, and then she goes on.
Our commitment to equal justice and the rule of law requires the courts to faithfully apply criminal laws as written, even in periods of national crises, and even when the conduct alleged is indisputably abhorrent.
Notwithstanding the shocking circumstances involved in this case or the government's determination that they weren't prosecution, today this court's task is to determine what conduct is prescribed by the criminal statute that has been invoked as the basis for the obstruction charge at issue here.
I join in the court's opinion because I agree with the majority that this law does not reach all forms of obstructive conduct and is instead limited by the preceding list of criminal violations.
And as a result, she voted to apply this law in a much narrower way than the prosecutors of January 6th defendants had applied it.
Now, similarly, Amy Coney Barrett, who might have surprised a lot of people by voting in favor of a prosecutorial theory used against January 6th defendants, but in reality, she's a pro-prosecutor, generally judge, who often rules against defendants.
She did what you would expect her to do if she were ruling apolitically, which is she, just like Brown-Jackson gave a anti-prosecutor ruling, Judge Barrett gave a pro-prosecutor ruling.
And this is what she wrote.
It's a very technical and legal analysis, and that's it.
Quote, this court does not dispute that Congress's joint session qualifies as an official proceeding, that rioters delayed the proceeding, or even that the defendant's conduct, alleged conduct, which includes trespassing and a physical confrontation with law enforcement, was part of a successful effort to forcibly halt the certification of the election results.
Given these premises, The case that this defendant can be tried for, quote, obstructing, influenced, or impeding an official proceeding seems open and shut.
So why does the court hold otherwise?
Because it simply cannot believe that Congress meant what it said?
The law in question is a very broad provision, and admittedly, events like January 6th were not its targets.
Who could blame Congress for that failure of imagination?
But statutes often go further than the problem that inspired them, and under the rules of statutory interpretation, we stick to the text anyway.
So, I think the ruling is absolutely right.
I've been arguing this for many years, from the beginning, that this law provides no basis for prosecuting January 6th defendants as felons.
I am very glad the Supreme Court Concluded that way, that means a lot of January 6 felons are going to have their convictions subject to being overturned or reviewed.
It's going to make the prosecution of Donald Trump much more difficult since this is a theory that Jack Smith used, that the Supreme Court has now said is invalid.
But I also want to emphasize that although we generally celebrate when judges reach a outcome that we want, sometimes judges are willing to contravene an outcome that they may be politically sympathetic to because their legal reasoning leads them to that conclusion.
And that's what we should want in judges.
That's what we should celebrate in judges.
So I think Amy Coney Barrett is wrong here, but I think it's impressive that she's willing to apply the way she interprets criminal law to reach the conclusion that she reached, even though she's ruling against January 6th defendants.
And conversely, I think what Kataji Brown Jackson did in applying her longstanding interpretation of the criminal law to favor defendants and limit prosecutorial power, even though in this case it ended up protecting January 6th defendants, which even though in this case it ended up protecting January 6th defendants, which she made very clear are people she finds to have engaged in horrific I think that too is extremely commendable.
That is what we want from judges, even in the cases where we end up disagreeing with them.
So finally, I think it's so important that the courts have been willing three years later to set aside all the intense emotion around January 6th To abandon this idea that we should invent laws or fabricate laws or concoct new and exotic theories to justify putting people into prison because we don't like the politics or the political protest in which they engaged.
And every time the court engages in an act where they're just actually interpreting and applying the law, And not doing so because of the political outcomes, I think it's something that should be applauded.
And in this case, it will have a very significant and I think positive outcome in making clear to prosecutors that no matter how much you hate criminal defendants, no matter how unpopular in the country their cause might be, you do not have the freedom to fabricate or invent new laws on the spot simply to achieve the outcome of putting them in prison because you believe that's where they belong.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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Last night, in lieu of our standard after show, we streamed for our local subscribers 30 minutes of my reaction to that debate.
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