Sean breaks down fresh Supreme Court arguments over West Virginia and Idaho bans on transgender athletes in women's sports, including exchanges with Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Katanji Brown-Jackson, and Sam Alito. Alliance Defending Freedoms Kristen Wagoner and collegiate runner Mary-Kate Marshall join to discuss how the cases affect female competitors and the intent of Title IX. He plays key moments from the courtroom, including questions to attorney Kathleen Hartnett about defining sex and equal protection. Later, Sean examines congressional stock trading and Nancy Pelosi's reported returns with House Administration Chairman Brian Stile, who outlines a bill to bar members from buying individual stocks and discusses blind trusts. The hour also tracks developing stories on Iran, immigration, and other headlines while taking listener calls.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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So the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday involving two cases with transgender athletes in women's sports.
One report out, and I brought this up with Riley Gaines on television last night, has over 890 instances that they've chronicled in one study that shows that female athletes, that women in sports, you know, lost medals and championships because of biological men playing women's sports.
And she said, no, no, no, it's much higher than that.
She says that's only the cases that are reported.
The arguments went forward.
It's always hard, and I put this caveat out there to interpret Supreme Court justices, comments, questions that they make, but I think it's certainly worth playing some of it for you.
Some people were a little surprised, for example, by Justice Amy Coney Barrett's comments referring to biological boys as trans girls.
This is what she said.
There are no six-year-olds in the state to whom the statute applies because there are no school-sponsored.
That's why it was a hypothetical.
Okay, right.
Yes, it would be the normal intermediate scrutiny analysis.
And are we saying it applies only to six-year-olds or to everybody across the board?
Well, I'm just trying to give you a hypothetical.
I mean, yours is driven by testosterone levels and differences in athletic capability.
So I'm asking you, what if you try to take that out of the equation and you're just drawing the line based on biological sex and saying that trans girls can't be on the girls' team in an age group that's pre-pubescent?
All right.
So she's just trying to get to the heart of the argument.
I don't interpret it the way some others have.
Justice Katanji Brown Jackson is actually suggesting it's not important to even define what a woman is.
If it's talking about Title IX, women's sports, yes, it is.
Listen.
You have the overarching classification.
You know, everybody has to be play on the team that is the same as their sex at birth.
But then you have a gender identity definition that is operating within that, meaning a distinction, meaning that for cisgender girls, they can play consistent with their gender identity.
For transgender girls, they can't.
This is really just about the definition of who we accept that you can separate boys and girls, and we are now looking at the definition of a girl, and we're saying only people who were girl assigned at birth qualify.
Okay.
And I'm not exactly sure, you know, how that's relevant, but put that aside for a second.
Sam Alito pressed the lawyer for a trans athlete, Kathleen Hartnett, on the definition of a woman.
This got interesting.
Listen.
And what is that definition for equal protection purposes?
What does it mean to be a boy or a girl or a man or a woman?
Sorry, I misunderstood your question.
I think that the underlying enactment, whatever it was, the policy, the law, we'd have to have an understanding of how the state or the government was understanding that term to figure out whether or not someone was excluded.
We do not have a definition for the court, and we don't take issue with the, we're not disputing the definition here.
What we're saying is that the way it applies in practice is to exclude birth sex males categorically from women's teams and that there's a subset of those birth sex males where it doesn't make sense to do so according to the state's own interest.
Okay, now it gets more interesting when Justice Alito asked Hartnett how a court can determine discrimination on basis of sex without knowing what sex means for equal protection purposes.
I don't think any of these justices ever thought that this case would be before them, but we got two cases here.
Listen.
How can a court determine whether there's discrimination on the basis of sex without knowing what sex means for equal protection purposes?
I think here we just know we basically know that the that they've identified pursuant to their own statute.
Lindsay qualifies as a birth sex male, and she's being excluded categorically from the women's teams as the statute.
So we're taking the statute's definitions as we find them and we don't dispute them.
We're just trying to figure out do they create an equal protection problem.
All right.
Now in both these cases, now we're looking at West Virginia and Idaho.
The ADF, the Alliance Defending Freedom, served as co-counsel with both West Virginia and Idaho defending these states and their ban on transgender athletes competing in women's sports.
The CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom and president is Kristen Wagonier, who joins us.
Also joining us is Mary Kate Marshall.
Now, Mary Kate invested like any young athlete, female athlete in this case.
You know, if you want to be a D1 athlete, you got to work awfully hard.
I know, because both my kids were D1 athletes.
All right.
But she invested years in becoming, you know, the great runner that she is, felt a thrill when she finished a race that was swept away when she and teammates were displaced by a male athlete during her first college cross-country race.
She also raced against a biological male and lost.
Anyway, welcome both of you to the program.
Thanks for being with us.
Kristen, let me start with you.
How did you feel oral arguments went yesterday?
I mean, it gets into a rather, it just, I don't think I ever heard a case quite like this, to be honest.
I would agree.
You know, we've had a number of cases, about 20 before the court in the last 10 years.
And I have to say that that was probably the first argument that I have been a part of that I came away exceptionally disturbed.
But it wasn't about the outcome because I feel confident that we're going to win.
It was the fact that we had to be there and that I didn't hear more about the girls affected.
You know, Mary Kate is actually a party in the case, and there was so much focus on the boys, the boys who are identifying as the girls and their right to be able to take the girls' spots, and that that might be okay.
The other thing I would say is it was apparent from the argument yesterday that the ACOU is running away as fast as they can from the arguments that they've made in the lower courts and around the nation.
And I think that was also a very positive development.
You know, Mary Kate, let me get to your story.
And I've gone into great specificity and detail with Riley Gaines and her story.
Riley Gaines would get up at 4 in the morning and go swimming before school.
Then she'd swim after school.
And she did this for years and years and years in her life.
And in the case with Leah Thompson, she even tied in that race.
And then they decided, you know, not to give both of them the number one prize, the gold medal, whatever the prize was at the time.
And I mean, and she found it devastating.
And she said it was beyond traumatic to be in a locker room with biological men.
I don't know if people really appreciate how hard you have to work to get, you know, to be a top athlete like you are.
Yeah, people don't realize that the years of work that comes with running and sports, it starts in high school, you know, developing our bodies, getting to the point where we can be competitive.
And then to bring in a male and have to race against him, it's demoralizing.
I mean, scholarships help women succeed in life, and that's that's how I got to the point where I'm in.
And so to put a male into a race and make us compete against them, it definitely takes away the integrity of women's sports.
You were quoted in one article as saying that you felt different about losing to a male than losing to another woman, and that when you lost to a man, you said you felt completely different.
You said it's defeating because no matter how hard you would try, hard work and effort didn't matter.
And, you know, Caitlin Jenner, who I've interviewed many times in the past, said that it doesn't matter what testosterone levels are when somebody's at the collegiate level or when they're older and they're playing that high-level competitive sport.
It matters at puberty.
And even in those cases, now, explain the feelings that you had because you experienced this yourself.
How many times did this happen to you?
For me, I raced against a male twice.
Some of my other teammates raced against him more.
One of my teammates was actually pushed off the podium by this male athlete.
And, you know, we spend hours together.
So to see our hard work just flushed down the drain by a male athlete who clearly, clearly has biological differences than women, yeah, it's demoralizing.
I mean, what is that saying to women and girls out there who have dreams out there that can just be crushed because a man wants to run with the girls?
You know, Title IX has been around for a long time, Kristen, and it basically allows the same number of scholarships for men and women.
And it's been widely viewed as fair.
And I think this, if people are that, I guess if they're that passionate about this, shouldn't they really be championing a whole different category of athletic, collegiate athletics or athletics in general?
You know, I think that's the fairest way at best, although I think the actual answer is that men should compete in the men's category, no matter how they identify, because gender identity is irrelevant to what's happening on the athletic field.
All that matters are the biological differences between men and women.
And there's no amount of testosterone suppressants or puberty blockers that take away that advantage.
The science shows it, but we also know from our own eyes what we see.
In the case here, West Virginia, there was a male athlete who said he was bent on puberty blockers, never went through puberty, and yet displaced 420-some girls 1,100 times and took 57 medals away from those girls.
So again, this is about sex because sex is what matters on the athletic field.
It's also what matters in the locker room.
The question is, you know, I don't think most people, even myself included, knew how widespread this has become.
And how many examples, how many have you been able to chronicle in terms of women competing with biological males that lose?
The one study I referred to, 890, Riley Gaines says it's way higher than that.
What numbers do you have?
Well, there are some reports that suggest, you know, girls have been displaced more than 10,000 times.
There are, you know, a number of different websites and those who are engaging in the data looking at it closely.
And, you know, even one girl pushed off the podium is too many.
As Justice Kavanaugh said yesterday, this is a zero-sum game.
I want to tell you about Adelaide Across, Sean.
She was on the track team in that West Virginia case, and that male athlete was a year behind her.
She was finishing in the top three spots.
And as you know, in track, there's a limited number of spots for competition.
There's a limited number of lanes you get to run in and a limited number of people that can compete and attract me.
He bumped her out altogether.
And then, of course, he sexually harassed her in the locker room itself, which would make no girl want to continue to be able to participate in athletics.
And there's so much that these young women, people like Mary Kate, how many hours a day would you train to get to the level you've gotten to, Mary Kate?
Yeah, I'd have to say seven days a week, at least five hours between my schoolwork, between going to the gym, between runs, between, you know, eating right and stretching and keeping my body where I need to compete at a high level.
Unbelievable.
I mean, the sacrifice is incalculable.
And you give up a lot of your childhood to do this, to be a D1 athlete, then a professional athlete if you get to that level.
Anyway, I agree with your assessment, Kristen Wagner.
I think that this is going to come out favorably, although I'd never like to interpret oral arguments, but I think I don't see any other outcome here.
Congratulations on the great work.
Mary Kate, we wish you all the best.
You sound like a great young woman and all success in your life.
I hope great things are in your future.
Thank you for having us.
You know, it's one of the more ironic things in the world.
I think one of the funniest things, but it's also sad simultaneously, is that there are people, every member of Congress, they have to file financial disclosure reports.
And that includes what money they invest in.
And if you look at Nancy Pelosi and her husband, they have one of the greatest return on investments in terms of stocks of anybody in the history of investing in the market.
Now, a lot of people might suspect that would be called insider trading, but the fact that there are, there's a website and groups of people that take these financial disclosure forms.
And whatever Nancy Pelosi invests in, they invest it because they figure, he's got information and a pretty darn good track record.
I forget, you know, like a 2,000% return, crazy numbers that nobody else gets in any traditional investment.
And I think that is very revealing in and of itself.
Now, if you take a trip down memory lane, Nancy Pelosi was confronted by 60 Minutes and Steve Croft at the time on the issue of these allegations that have gone on now for years of insider trading.
Listen.
To ask you why you and your husband back in March of 2008 accepted and participated in a very large IPO deal from Visa at a time there was major legislation affecting their credit card companies making its way through the house.
Did you consider that to be a conflict of interest?
I don't know what your point is of your question.
Is there some point that you want to make with that?
The fact is, your basic premise is a false one, and it's no use.
I don't understand.
Why is it false?
You participated in the IPO.
Well, I had no idea.
Speaker of the House.
Yeah, Speaker of the House.
And everyone gets these massive returns on investment.
And she just happens to invest in all the right stocks.
Had nothing to do with knowledge she has as the Speaker of the House and a member of Congress.
I mean, it's absolutely insane.
If you look at the actual numbers, I mean, it should take everybody's breath away.
It should be incredible.
Long-term returns over decades.
The portfolio soared estimates suggesting profits of over $130 million, a huge increase from initial holdings.
She has been outperforming the market.
Reports from 2023 and 2024 highlight returns significantly higher than the S ⁇ P. Some sources claiming gains of 54% to 70% in 2024 compared to the S ⁇ P's only 25%.
Why would you ever want to follow the market?
Anyway, Nancy Pelosi posted up to a staggering 16,930% return on investment, beat the market by 581%, and a bunch of big wins.
Anyway, Chairman Brian Stile of Wisconsin is on the committee for the House administration.
And anyway, it's his first interview following the hearing that took place this week in Congress on congressional trading.
And he said, we're here today because no member of Congress, regardless of party or seniority, should be profiting off of insider information.
I mean, was she just lucky, Congressman, or is this, you know, the norm?
Well, no member, as you just read, should be able to profit off of insider information.
If you want to day trade, there's a place for that.
It's called Wall Street.
You shouldn't be allowed to trade stocks if you're coming to Capitol Hill.
The legislation we introduced, we passed out of my committee on the House Administration earlier today, bans members of Congress from being able to profit off of insider information.
It does a couple of things.
It says you can't go in and buy stocks when you're a member of Congress.
If you have stocks and you arrive, you can hold them.
You've got to provide seven days advance notice so that public can see exactly what's going on.
And it's got real teeth to it.
Because the answer is, at the end of the day, the American people deserve to know their member of Congress is not in Washington to profit themselves, that they're actually working for the American people.
Let me go to Yahoo Finance, and they wrote an article about this.
And the headline is Nancy Pelosi posted up a staggering 16,930% return on investment, beat the market by 581%.
And then it goes through her five biggest wins.
And the New York Post did an analysis of this.
And, you know, her and her husband had initially reported in 1987 a net worth of between $610,000 and $785,000.
Now it's over $133 million as of today.
And I mean, that is a staggering sum of money.
Nobody gets that kind of return.
What would you, I mean, what do you bet on healthcare, for example?
I can go through all the other, you know, examples of where she, Microsoft, another example.
Broadcom, another example, all have connections to government.
Nvidia is another one.
Google is another one.
I mean, is she just lucky or do you think that she had insider information?
Well, no member should be buying individual stocks in the first place, in my opinion.
Insider trading cases are incredibly hard to prove.
On occasion, you can get people and actually get them locked up and arrested.
That's happened to a member of Congress.
It's happened to other people in the public that people know.
But it's hard to actually prove for the Department of Justice.
That's why I think the legislation that we're moving forward today is so important.
It just simply comes in and says you can't buy stocks if you're an elected member of Congress.
If you do that, you prevent members of Congress from being even in the position in the first place where they could benefit themselves off of the insider information that's available on Capitol Hill.
Well, what about a blind trust?
Do you believe in them or no?
If you fully structure a blind trust, it can be done correctly.
Those are expensive, and a lot of members don't want to be in them.
And so if you're in a blind trust, that's a separate animal that can make sense if you do it correctly and you put the actual structure in place.
It's incredibly expensive.
If you're outside of a blind trust and you actually can see what you're buying and selling, you shouldn't be allowed to buy individual shares of stock.
I've never shared this publicly, but I'm going to share it with you now.
And I'm not sure why this has just become a little bit of a phenomenon in the last year, but there are very well-known, wealthy countries that have repeatedly reached out to me with the highest-ranking officials in these countries wanting to meet with me.
And my answer is always the same.
No.
I suspect that there is something nefarious behind their motives, and I always say no.
I'm not interested in their money.
I can't be bought.
And I just, I'm concerned.
Well, I will ask, what do you want to meet with me about?
Oh, no, we just want to talk.
Okay, that doesn't sound, it doesn't pass the smell test to me.
Does it pass the smell test to you?
No, and you see that all the time on Capitol Hill.
You have all sorts of people who are here trying to meet with members.
There's all sorts of information that's available.
There's a case where the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the lead up to the COVID pandemic, when information was becoming available on a confidential basis to members, and that individual called his broker and sold every single position except one.
He'd ultimately lose his job, rightfully so.
And this is where the answer is to clean this whole thing up, to begin the process of getting Washington and draining the swamp, is to come in and place a blanket prohibition against members from buying individual stocks once they get elected.
You see, look, I actually am old-fashioned.
I think if you decide to run for office, you are doing it.
It's an act of service.
Look, I fully understand that people have to maintain residences in D.C.
It's not cheap and in their home district.
I know a lot of members over the years that live in their offices as a means of saving money and being able to serve their communities.
And I admire them for that.
And I'm sure it's not fun living in your office.
However, many people do it for many, many years, and it's just too expensive.
Washington, D.C., you know, rentals are not particularly cheap.
And I respect that.
I don't think if you're in a position of service that you should in any way, shape, manner, or form, you know, be selling stocks based on information that you probably should keep private.
Being in Congress is a fiduciary duty.
You owe your duty to the American people to be working in their best interests.
And members who want to come in day trade stocks and utilize the information that's available to them on Capitol Hill to their own self-interest is the exact opposite of the trust that they need to have with the American people.
One of the reasons the American people get so fed up and frustrated with Congress is I think a lot of people that come to D.C. are here for their own self-interest.
One way that we can start to regain the trust of the American people is to prevent members of Congress from profiting off this insider information that's available, ban members of Congress from buying stock, and put restrictions in place so that they can't profit off of the insider information they have.
We got to get to a spot where Congress is beginning to regain the trust of the American people, and we've got to clean up Washington to do it.
You know, I really don't have a problem.
I mean, we do have a global economy.
I don't have a problem with people doing business with foreign countries, especially countries that are allies or countries that are transitioning to be allies of the United States.
I think the world is being transformed and reconfigured right before our eyes.
I think we see it with Venezuela.
I think we hopefully will see it with Iran.
We have certainly seen this with the Middle East.
And I was on the trip on Air Force One with the president when he went to Riyadh and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the UAE.
I was with him in Abu Dhabi.
And I think that that's all a good thing, all in the hopes of bringing peace in the region and eliminating Iran and eliminating Iranian hegemony in the region is going to be best for everybody overall.
However, if they're trying to gain influence with people in power, I think it's a bad idea.
You would agree with that.
No, absolutely.
You don't want people to be financially dependent on a foreign country where they have a self-benefit if a foreign country does well.
You want people, and this is why our legislation allows you to buy in to what we would call diversified funds, buy the whole S ⁇ P 500, right along with all the American people in every business in this country.
Well said.
That's fine.
We want you to be focused in on the United States doing well, not on any given foreign country.
Chairman Brian Style, Wisconsin, on the committee and the House Administration.
We appreciate your legislation and wish you the best with it.
We'll update people as it makes its way through Congress.
Thank you, sir.
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Now, we played earlier in the program the president encouraging the Iranian people to keep protesting and that help is on the way.
The president was asked specifically what the end game with Iran might be.
And let me play for you that answer.
Americans woke up this morning and they saw that you said help is on the way.
What do you mean by that?
Well, there's a lot of help on the way and in different forms, including economic help from our standpoint and not going to help Iran very much.
And, you know, we put Iran out of business with their nuclear capacity.
And this strong action you're talking about, what's the end game?
The endgame is to win.
I like winning.
How do you define that in Iran?
Well, let's define it in Venezuela.
Let's define it with al-Baghdadi.
He was wiped out.
Let's define it with Salome.
And let's define it in Iran, where he wiped out their Iran nuclear threat in a period of about 15 minutes once the B-2s got there.
And that was a complete obliteration.
Now, there is other reports, and we'll have a lot more when we get on the air tonight, Nine Eastern on Fox.
The one claiming the Iranian Minister of Defense and Deputy Commander of the Quds forces has fled the country.
That wouldn't surprise me.
Pentagon now is in the process of moving U.S. military personnel out of the Mideast, possible targets of Iran, if in fact the president does act.
So we're watching that very closely.
Some European officials are saying they think that there could be a strike against Iran within the next 24 hours.
The Islamic Republic TV came out with a video of Butler PA, and this time the bullet won't miss in Persian.
That's not going to go over well with President Trump.
Anyway, so we're watching.
We're monitoring.
We'll have full coverage of all of this tonight, Nine Eastern on the Fox News channel.
Please tune in.
Always set your DVR so you never, ever, ever miss an episode.
We'll get full reaction.
Ted Cruz.
Pam Bondi is on tonight.
Kristen Cinema is on tonight.
Sarah Carter, her first TV interview is Drug Czar.
She's going to join us tonight.
Clay Travis, Jonathan Turley, set your DVR, Nine Eastern on Fox.