4091 America's Rising Judicial Tyranny | Daniel Horowitz and Stefan Molyneux
While many celebrate President Donald Trump's nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and his continued judicial appointments as a huge positive, the left is winning the war related to America's courts. Daniel Horowitz joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the ongoing constitutional crisis, judicial tyranny, recent disturbing court rulings and ways to reclaim stolen power from the courts.Daniel Horowitz is Senior Editor at Conservative Review and the author of “Stolen Sovereignty: How to Stop Unelected Judges from Transforming America.”Book: http://www.fdrurl.com/stolen-sovereigntyWebsite: http://www.conservativereview.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/rmconservativeYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux here with Daniel Horowitz.
He is a senior editor at Conservative Review and the author of Stolen Sovereignty, How to Stop Unelected Judges from Transforming America.
The website is conservativereview.com and twitter.com forward slash rm.
Conservative. Daniel, thanks for taking the time today.
Great to be with you. Hopefully I could put you in a better mood and you could put me in a better mood.
Let's find out, shall we?
Now, let's start with the big picture, which is the relationship between Congress and the government and the courts and the Constitution as envisioned at the start of things in the origin story of the modern pseudo-republic.
How was it supposed to work?
And where is it drifting to now?
Or where has it drifted to now?
Obviously, in any democratic republic, all of the power has to reside either directly or indirectly from the people.
The people have to decide political issues.
I mean, you don't take a political issue to court.
You take it to a legislature.
When you have an individual dispute, a civil claim or a criminal case under the law, you take it to a court and you adjudicate that.
What we have going on in our society now is we adjudicate political cases.
So I could say, look, I have a right to your property.
I have a right to force you to service my gay wedding.
I have the right as a Somali or Yemeni foreign national to come to America and get welfare and then have a kid and vote in our elections or have that child vote in American elections.
Everything is justicable. That was actually a line delivered by one of Israel's former Supreme Court justices.
Everything is justicable.
So we've gone from Alexander Hamilton's vision of the courts having neither force nor will over the political direction of a country to the point where everything is justicable.
And I mean everything. Well, and that moves.
One of the chilling things about that is not only does it turn judges into activists, but it also feels like it moves the power to influence legality in America away from the common people and towards those well-versed in the arcania of legislative process, which generally tends to be a little bit less Joe the plumber and more Raul the adjudicator.
And so it feels like it's just moving all of the political process up to an elite, which was kind of the opposite of the intention.
It's kind of interesting.
A lot of my friends are in a good mood these days.
They're saying, Daniel, don't you see how many judges Trump is appointing?
And when I try to explain to him, among many other factors that a lot of the people that he's replacing are good people because it's only the good ones retiring.
For the most part, I mean, some do die.
But they regard Trump as Hitler, literally.
I mean in the legal profession, if you're an 85-year-old liberal judge, you are not retiring unless you come out of that building in a coffin.
So we're not really swinging any of the major circuits.
But there's something more fundamental, and it gets to your point.
They control the entirety of the legal profession.
They control the at-bats at the courts, the precedent in terms of what gets standing and what doesn't get standing.
They've already created enough nuclear jurisprudence from the last 50 years to destroy this country seven times over, even if you didn't advance it any further.
And that's why, Stefana, as we speak today, right now, The Justice Department is forced to defend in the Ninth Circuit, where all arguments are taking place right now, whether Trump is allowed to follow immigration law,
whether he is allowed to discontinue Obama's amnesty, which was likely the most illegal act ever committed by a president in modern era, because it was something that wasn't just I mean try to conjure up any analogy of something as radical.
Let's say a president said, all right, I'm unilaterally going to implement a 10% tax cut for American workers.
Allow Americans to take some of their Social Security payroll tax funds and divert it into private accounts.
Everyone would go nuts. But that wouldn't be nearly as radical because at least it's for people that are Americans and have a right to be here.
Here you're creating work permits and Social Security cards, speaking of Social Security, for people that cannot be here according to law, and yet now the left has the ability to take anything they want To any lower court that they shop around, and they could tie up the most absurd cases for a year or two.
I mean, it's already been 15 months, and Trump cannot fully protect America's sovereignty and follow longstanding statute that 120 years of uninterrupted case law says is fully within his power.
Because even when the Supreme Court's on our side, They allow the lower courts to do their thing.
They won't take up the appeal.
And this is where we're at.
This is why I believe, as you all know, this is the biggest threat to Republican governance in America.
But I think you're seeing this growing trend all over the globe.
In Canada, you're seeing it in Europe, where the left cheats.
They cannot win at the ballot box or even when they try very hard and they fail.
They win anyway because they implement their agenda in the courts.
So now the American courts are saying that everything Obama implemented, whether it's transgenderism in the military, whether it's numerous environmental regulations that violate the law, whether it's his amnesty, whether it's funding for teen pregnancy programs, whether it's the contraception mandate, everything is now the law of the land.
And Trump has to submit before the court a sufficient reason to countermand those policies.
I mean, this is a kill shot on our country.
Well, it's so wild if you just look at the travel ban.
He's had to water it down a whole number of times.
He's had to go hat in hand on bended knee to beg the judiciary to implement what he has, as far as I understand it, the perfect legal right to do.
And so when you're swimming against the current, it's like trying to jump up a waterfall with concrete shoes on.
But for Obama, when he just passed executive orders, which I don't think are pretty lawful, it simply becomes the fixed and almost irrevocable law of the land.
So if you're swimming with the country, with the current of leftism, man, you've got a jetpack on.
But if you're swimming against it, it seems almost impossible to make headway.
That's what's very scary.
There used to be one generation lag time.
Between the point at which the Democrats would posit a political argument for something revolutionary to when they created a legal mandate to say you must do that.
You have to do it.
It takes about 20, 30 years.
Now that lag time is about a couple of months.
They say, I believe this shouldn't be.
Therefore, it must be.
And they just take the ball away and they cheat.
And that's the thing now.
They believe in open borders.
It's a radical, very dangerous thing.
I mean you saw it during the 90s.
You had Congresswoman Barbara Jordan was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
She believed in sovereignty.
Bill Clinton touted her work at a State of the Union address.
They don't believe in that anymore.
But now they're saying the law, their version of it, demands that you must do that.
And you made a very important point.
A lot of people are touting the upcoming decisions should come out any week from the Supreme Court on the travel ban.
And likely, Trump's going to win 5-4.
Now, the problem is, it's like saying, hey, Stefan, everyone in your family needs to get a sex change operation.
Let me take you to court. And Well, the court says, look, maybe three or four people might have to see.
The other four don't.
And like, man, that's a victory.
None of this should even be subject to litigation.
We're losing 50 other immigration cases.
And even this case, Roberts and Kennedy are going to parse it out.
So they already won 80%.
They destroyed 80% of what's called the plenary power doctrine that the political branches control immigration outright and say, well, this is enough.
Like you said, this is just the third version.
It's not a ban.
It's extra vetting for a handful of countries that literally don't have information.
Chad was one of them that offered more information, and he took them off.
There's nothing left to it.
So you have five justices saying, yeah, that's about enough.
Then what happens is the remaining 20% is kind of like a football game.
You have first and goal from the One yard line, except the Democrats don't have four downs.
They have an unlimited number of tries.
They go back to the same Ninth Circuit, Fourth Circuit, do their stuff, and they're continuously creating new rights.
By the way, I'm sure you saw this.
Neil Gorsuch, who is the big hero of the right, he issued an opinion that is very dangerous ramifications in this entire sphere of work that They're now applying what the left has been trying to do for decades, constitutional norms to foreign nationals.
Now, not just in terms of their property and life, but as it relates to an immigration case.
You now have due process rights, and you know what due process is.
It's not 1789 due process.
It's 2018 due process to litigate against your deportation or your right to come here.
We're done. I mean, once you have that, we have about a million criminal aliens in this country.
Now that Gorsuch issued that opinion, it's not just some sort of narrow, arcane thing dealing with a crime of violence.
The Supreme Court just remanded 15 more cases back, criminal aliens.
These are bad dudes.
We're not talking about your cleaning lady here that the left always talks about.
I mean, these are people committing robbery, burglary, often sexual crimes as well, certainly identity fraud.
They now could spend 10, 15 years litigating, sometimes winning, maybe sometimes they'll lose.
But could you imagine having to litigate every single deportation?
We're done. There's nothing left.
Well, it's an astonishing thing because to me, the analogy is if you have a business and you have an employee and you've entered into your contract with the employee, then your employee has certain rights and you have certain rights.
And if there's differences of opinion about a bonus or something like that, then you can litigate and so on.
But if it's a shoplifter in your store, that person doesn't have the right to litigate against you for whatever.
Hey man, you don't have the stuff I came in here to steal.
I'm taking you to court for something or other.
They're there illegally in your store.
They're doing illegal things, so there's shoplifting, so you just get them out of your store.
But the idea that there's all of this big, messy, complex litigation when you've got someone shoplifting in your store, it really destroys the entire concept of private property.
And here, it destroys the concept of citizenship because you're applying basically constitutional norms to people who aren't even citizens and they're there illegally.
And that is horrendous on every conceivable level.
It's a kill shot on this country.
A lot of my colleagues Don't realize this.
I mean, I always joke around. You have a conservative movement in America to tell us that that substance on your leg is not a urine.
It's just water. We should really enjoy it.
Gorsuch was just brilliant.
We have all these regulations and these vague laws.
We're not dealing with the pond or drainage ditch in your farm and the government regulating it.
It's like you said. The analogy is If someone breaks into my home as an illegal immigrant or if I invite them in but then they start raiding the refrigerator, being rude, doing stuff I don't like, here's the dichotomy.
I don't have the right to beat the guy up and lock him up in the attic and definitely never to be heard from again.
That's what Mexico does.
But what you do have the right to do, incontrovertibly, unquestionably, It's push the guy out.
You could say goodbye.
I don't want you here.
That's the difference. They're saying, well, they have the right to know definitively ahead of time every single category of crime with a very precise degree of specificity what will be a deportable offense.
Well, no, you don't.
Again, they have due process rights if you want to lock them up for the rest of their life.
You want to execute them. You want to take away their property.
But to say goodbye, that's not a punishment.
That's an extension of my sovereignty.
It's not a matter – Gorsuch was saying in oral arguments, well, you see, a lot of people would be willing to be locked up in jail for six months rather than be deported for the rest of their lives.
That's immaterial.
You don't look at it from the alien's vantage point.
You look at it from the sovereign nation's standpoint.
And this is what is so scary.
Look, the left has always believed in socialism for many generations.
But they understood that you had to have a country through which to have that socialism.
And now there's no foundation.
And this scares me to death because this is the linchpin.
This environment that they create, the magnet that you could come here, automatically get accepted on the soil, automatically assert credible fear, automatically get released Pending some sort of court case where they'll never show up.
That magnet is not just for poor migrants that bankrupt the country, attenuate the culture, I would argue.
That's the magnet for drugs.
And I don't mean marijuana. I mean what they call the opioid crisis.
Notice they give it a medical healthcare term.
It's not a healthcare term.
It's not a healthcare crisis.
It's all illicit heroin, fentanyl, now fentanyl-laced cocaine.
Killing probably over 70,000 people last year.
Which is more than one Vietnam a year.
Yeah, it's more than one Vietnam a year.
It's more than twice the number of people in America killed by car accidents.
You have MS-13, which even the media recognizes is running rampant.
They don't connect the dots of when that happened with DACA on 2013 to 2015 border surge and all that.
And then you know what else you have?
Hezbollah. It is the biggest mystery to me how if some sort of jihadi that has no Air Force, no ICBMs, no nothing, dances around in a circle in a Yemeni or Somalian desert with an AK-47 and we say, oh my gosh, we have to get involved in some tribal civil war.
But when you have Hezbollah on our border, you could take that to the bank.
They're working with the drug cartels in Mexico, Los Zetas in particular.
Just the last couple weeks, I don't know if you've seen the reports, there's been hundreds of Bangladeshis and Syrians crossing in the Laredo sector.
The Laredo sector is not the busiest, but that's the sector controlled by Los Zetas, which is the cartel with established ties with Hezbollah, if you remember in 2011.
Hezbollah and the Quds Force, the Iranian IRGC, they were going to recruit Zetas members who aren't just in Mexico.
They have operators in America to assassinate the Saudi ambassador.
That's how close they are.
You're empowering them with certainly the money and the drug trade.
But what did the Zetas offer Hezbollah in return for the weapons and access to some of the drug smuggling markets in West Africa?
It's the human smuggling.
What are they bringing over?
They're operatives.
So foreign policy, as you all know, begins with homeland security.
It's all about homeland security.
Yet our foreign policy is focused on everything but that.
Everything but that. I will tell you there are more Hezbollah operatives in Latin America than in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.
That's how prolific they are.
And one more thing. And this is a threat to both the U.S. and Canada, depending on how tough we are.
If we're tough, then it's a bigger threat to Canada.
Venezuela. Venezuela, a lot of people think, oh, it's a Latin American country.
Venezuela is this close to becoming an Islamic state.
The vice president, Tariq al-Ayasami, is a Syrian Druze individual.
The president, Maduro, is Hispanic, but he's a Chavez guy.
They are so close with Iran, not just on a statecraft level, but demographically.
There are 350,000 individuals of Syrian-Lebanese descent.
A lot of people don't realize this, the diaspora that they have in Latin America.
The 350,000 that hold some level of power in Venezuela.
There's now 900,000 refugees pouring into Colombia, Brazil, and there are signs that they're heading north.
So think about the policies now.
Trump was regarded as this evil right-winger, and it worked.
Border crossings trickled to almost nothing last April, the lowest level since 1979.
Now they're surging back to 2015 levels.
If you have this incentive to come, you're going to have that Venezuela come over, and it is literally the North American Syria in every sense of the word.
The demographics are similar.
You're going to have this rush at the border.
I just – I don't understand this, especially with Iran in the news.
Why we're not focusing on where Iran – if I'm Iran, this is my play.
This is where they get us.
Because keep in mind the Islamists study our politics very closely, and they're aware that immigration is untouchable.
Anything that's wrapped up in the immigration agenda is untouchable.
And again, this is not just conjecture.
These Middle Easterners are called SIAs, special interest aliens.
They are coming over. No one cares.
And now even if we wanted to do something about it, the courts will say, Hey, screw you.
There's nothing you can do. They have a right to a hearing and bond hearings as well.
Release them. Never to be heard from again.
Well, I mean, the astounding thing as well, Daniel, is this caravan that was moving through Mexico, that Mexico let move through the country, which is an astonishing feat of non-sovereignty, or really a weaponization of migration against the United States, and in particular against the United States economy, if not culture, as you point out.
But letting this caravan through, and everybody knows it's coming, they can track it, they know exactly where it is, it gets to the border, and what happens?
I'm shocked. Even I'm shocked.
We wanted to use the caravan to raise awareness of the broader problem.
None of us ever thought they'd come in.
We knew it was just a political stunt.
Of course they're not going to let them in.
But just to inform people that you understand it's not just a few hundred people.
Every month now, there's 50,000 interdicted that they catch, likely another 50 to 100,000 they don't catch per month of all sorts of people from just innocuously impoverished to Hezbollah operatives, other terrorists, MS-13, drug smugglers, you name it.
Amazingly, after Trump says he's not going to let them in, they let them in, and then now they're continuing catch and release, at least for a certain Let's be very clear.
This is an invasion.
You don't have to let anyone in.
Even under the most liberal reading of the laws, even if you're forced to process them, which you're not, you could process them in the Mexico City Embassy.
You don't have to let them in on your shores.
Here's what's so dangerous about that, that a lot of people don't recognize.
Let's say Trump gets his wall.
It doesn't matter now.
If you're going to continue your policy of opening up the doors at the points of entry, they'll just come to the points of entry.
I mean that's the lesson of the caravan that they could – this is not just you're caught sneaking in or something where you figure, all right, I'll have a wall and block that.
If they could come to the point of entry and they have attorneys now representing them in the Southern District of California, all sorts of litigation going on now.
We're done. And it's something that has just been mystifying about the Trump administration, that it's almost like there's five different administrations.
The Department of Justice will say one thing, DHS will do another thing.
I don't get it.
Well, it has been, I think, frustrating for a lot of people in America when...
How criminality and drugs, and in particular, immigration was the big issue, like it was in England or in the UK for Brexit.
How little progress is being made?
And the initial shock of the numbers going down, I mean, I knew that that was simply, well, they're going to do something, so let's hold off and wait and see.
And then once they find out that nothing has been done, then all the people who've been waiting, you get an increase, you get a surge across the border.
A lot of people are really frustrated at the lack of progress, but Without seeing what the judges are doing and what the legal system is doing, I think it's hard to comprehend.
I genuinely think that Trump wants to do what he promised to do in the run-up to the election in 2016, but he's being blocked.
And what are you supposed to do?
You can't go full Pinochet, so what are you supposed to do with these kinds of activist judges?
You know, so the trajectory has definitely been better than this time last year.
I mean, I think the personnel has been better.
It's very slow. It's taking a long time.
The problem is, I mean, he often doesn't pay attention to details.
I could tell he clearly is frustrated with the caravan, but I feel there's not enough people in his ear telling him to make the right plays and making the right play calls.
One of the things that frustrates me, and I know this is a little different issue, but it ties in very closely.
Drugs, MS-13, Sanctuary Cities, Hezbollah at the Border, There's another sphere to this on a domestic level.
They call it criminal justice reform.
I don't know if you've been following this, but to me it's one of the most shocking trends.
When I was growing up, every single Republican was tough on crime and even half the Democrats were.
You couldn't be caught dead being weak on it.
Now, I'm the last man standing.
I am the last man I know of Working with members of Congress, do you understand what this legislation does?
It's what we used to call the Willie Horton, if you remember the George H.W. Bush ad against Michael Dukakis, letting out dangerous people, the Willie Horton agenda.
The Republicans and all the conservative libertarian money, the Koch, I call it our opioid crisis, the Koch addiction with a K, the Koch money, funding all these phony think tanks, pushing this Jailbreak agenda.
They wrap it up in terms of like an over-criminalization.
But you and I know none of the bills are addressing like the BS Martha Stewart type of over-criminalization crimes.
It's not about that.
It's about the punk heroin dealers who are tied in with the cartels and they do all sorts of other violent things.
On the day after Parkland, the day after Parkland, the Senate Judiciary Committee marked up a bill that retroactively releases thousands of gun felons Take the guns out of the law-abiding citizens, let the guns out of these people, and you know where this is headed.
The same way immigration and amnesty is headed, there's a parallel agenda in all the states to have felons vote.
That's where it is. So immediately you let them out, boom, you have the votes.
It's their voting bloc.
I also believe it's eventually their army.
This is your Antifa.
We had – they literally have conservatives paying for the rope to hang themselves with.
I mean the – it's brilliant because they don't have to take the backlash.
I live in suburban Baltimore, Maryland, not exactly a conservative bastion.
I could tell you I don't know a single person living in the suburbs that if you ask them, is our criminal justice system too lenient or too tough?
I can't think of a single person, Democrat or Republican, who would say, yeah, it's too tough.
I mean it's horrible here where I live.
Because the state, on the state level, they passed all these laws.
There's this bill that jailbreak Jared Kushner is introduced to retroactively cut off up to a third of the sentencing for all these people at a time when we have a drug crisis.
And again, these are heroin fentanyl dealers.
And Trump tweets out one morning, great victory, it passed the House Judiciary Committee.
Great victory for Jared.
If there's any issue where Trump was a voice of clarity, it was on this issue, on crime.
Not just immigration. A lot of people focus on immigration.
But those unfamiliar with what's going on in Washington don't understand this.
This is a universal goal of the right or fake right and the left to completely deracinate The four decades of tough on crime regime that Reagan started, this is – we are now at a point where you know that incarceration rates in America are down to 1996 levels per capita.
It's built on erroneous open data.
They talk about record incarceration.
That ship sailed 10, 12 years ago.
The criminal justice deformers have won out in all the states.
They're letting them out left and right, and incidentally, Crime in most metropolitan areas after going down for 23 years, the last two years, according to the FBI, violent crime has gone up.
This is nuts, but it's all related, this safety and security agenda.
And the courts, by the way, are very involved in this too.
They're invalidating statutes on that.
They're letting people go.
And by the way, I hear some of my colleagues say, you know, supposed conservatives, well, That's why we have judges.
We need to give them more discretion.
Enough of these mandatory sentencing.
Now, I'm not old enough to remember the 60s and 70s.
I wasn't around then. But I'm smart enough to know that that was the impetus for the Reagan agenda because the judges were letting them go.
Let me tell you something. The judges today make those judges look like Clarence Thomas and Justice Scalia.
I mean, everywhere I turn, I have our own side scoring points for the other team.
I just don't get it.
Even after Trump.
And it gets to Trump himself.
Part of the problem with Trump is he has really good instincts.
He does. He doesn't know the details.
Not enough good people around him.
And the broader party and movement is terrible.
Meaning Trump genuinely wants to do what conservatives want, but conservatives are the problem.
So if they tell him this is what they want, like, all right, well, this is what you want.
They don't even ask for it.
They're too busy. And part of the problem is we got the whole Stormy Daniels, Mueller, Russia thing going on.
And I'm not saying there's nothing important there.
The left trying to obviously – Do a decapitation strike on Trump with that.
But all of our forces are so involved in that, no one's even focused on this stuff.
Well, I mean, how can you have good people who are concentrated and energetic when they're constantly being dragged in front of Mueller's witch hunt and mounting legal bills and stress?
And I mean, then how do you get new people to come into your...
The whole point is to create this fiery moat to keep good people out of the administration.
It is... Absolutely horrendous.
And, of course, the thing with the Mueller as well is what it does to America's reputation overseas.
When they see what is essentially, to me, a judicial civil war against a duly elected president, everybody recognizes that America is at odds with itself, is at sixes and sevens, and it's being torn in two.
No, I mean, that's the problem.
And it ties into the whole philosophy we're talking about.
The powers that the branches of government respectively hold are completely denuded from them.
And then the powers that they don't hold are given to them, or new branches of government are created.
We have this fourth branch of government, special councils, all things like that.
This all just speaks to the point how the left has thought of everything.
They've done this for decades.
So we think we win an election and suddenly we start dancing in the end zone as if we have the ball.
No, you don't have the ball. You've got to make the plays now.
Or maybe you've recovered possession of the ball, but you've got to make the plays.
And I think our people aren't focused enough on what to do.
There's something wrong when Donald Trump is focused on a piece of legislation that is antithetical to everything he believes in but is not pushing Louie Gohmert's bill, which strips the courts of power to adjudicate any case over immigration, which strips the courts of power to adjudicate any case over immigration, naturalization, asylum or the right to remain here or the right to He should be yelling about that every day.
It's not put in front of him.
Jailbreak Jared stuff is put in front of him.
Daniel, do you think it's too far to refer to some of this stuff as a judicial coup?
Because the way that my understanding ran, which is, you know, no great detail, but my understanding is, okay, you've got the Constitution, and then you've got Supreme Court, state governments, Congress, the president, the various executive agencies, and all have the right to view the Constitution and interpret it and enact it and negotiate with each other, And that's supposed to create this checks and balance system.
But now it seems like you've got the judiciary and in particular the Supreme Court staring and interpreting the Constitution.
And then that just sludge rolls downhill and captures everyone.
And there seems to be almost no pushback.
Congress is supposed to have a role pushing it back against unconstitutional decisions or precedents.
And so this idea now that you have this unelected judiciary that is in charge of the legal structure rather than anybody who answers directly to the people.
It seems like Congress in particular has been elbows aside and the judges appointed themselves as the arbiters of law.
And that is not at all how I understood the American system is supposed to operate.
But it makes sense.
Think about it. If you take Nancy Pelosi and you tell her, I'm going to put a robe on you.
Instead of you being in the House of Representatives, I'm going to put you on a bench.
And you could do whatever you want.
Whatever you want is the law of the land.
You could grant standing to anyone as a plaintiff, even though it's not a valid case or controversy.
And then, whatever opinion you render, you could put a nationwide injunction, meaning apply it nationwide, and you don't stand for re-election for the rest of your life.
So, I mean, at some point, I would say it's not so much a judicial crisis, it's a legislative crisis, and it's a conservative movement crisis.
In other words, most of the legal egos, they reside in what's called the Federalist Society on the right.
They believe in judicial supremacy.
They're just like, well, let's get better guys on the court.
But once you agree to the premise that anything a court does is the law of the land, being not related to an individual case where, look, government or some sort of law is taking away my property, imprisoning me, so I have the right to petition a court.
But if you say, I don't like the photo ID laws in elections.
We need 30 days of early voting.
That's not – I'm saying aside from the bastardization of the Constitution in order to arrive to that conclusion on the merits of the case, the notion that you could grant standing and adjudicate such a case, like you said, is completely divorced from what the preamble of the creation of Article III of our Constitution was.
The judicial power resides in the Supreme Court.
That is to adjudicate individual case or controversy, not a public policy.
But we've moved on from that.
So put yourself in their shoes.
A lot of people think these are some real studious, cerebral type of people.
They're no different from the crowd that's in the Democrat Party in the legislature.
They're cut from the same cloth.
That's what I'm telling you. So if you tell them, we'll put you on a bench and anything you – Anything you ever dreamt of doing in the legislature for 30 years and you were unable to do it, you can now do it with a flick of a wrist.
Keep in mind the left controls the law schools.
They control the legal defense groups.
They have the ability to put every single thing we do in court.
They have tens of thousands of pro bono people through the American – the Immigration Lawyers Association funded by Soros, ACLU. You name it, NAACP, and they've ratcheted up this 50-year growth of precedent where everything they do, there's a way to get standing for it.
So you get good people in.
It doesn't matter.
Here's the thing. The capacity of a good judge to do good is nowhere near the capacity of a bad judge to do bad.
It's something none of my colleagues understand.
None of them. They're upset.
They think Trump's remaking the judiciary.
And again, I'm not blaming Trump. He deals with the vacancies he has and he appoints the – by and large, most of them appear good.
I don't think all of them are because a lot of them, they abide by some of these same principles.
But they're not going to – Here's the thing.
The left will come in.
A left-wing judge will come in and say, these are not our values.
They're literally saying it with immigration.
Deportation is now – it's not our values.
They say, all right, that's wacko enough, but they're not going to rule that way.
Oh, yes, they're going to rule that way.
So the problem is you can't combat lying and cheating.
You can't combat cheaters.
Let's say you have a really good guy, generally a good guy you get on the court.
The guy is not going to abuse the rules of standing to say this would be the equivalent, for example.
Every American has to own a gun.
They're not going to do that.
Or let me just back it up even further.
With the immigration cases, they violated 200 years of what Justice Jackson, he was the dissent vote in the Japanese internment case.
He was the lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial.
He knew a thing too about due process.
And he said, this is the most settled area of law that there's no due process rights to remain in the country as a foreign national against the will of the political branches.
With the flick of a wrist, a lower court judge could just say, screw that.
I'm not doing that. You will not find a single conservative judge that will go against Obergefell, the gay marriage case, that's only a few years old.
And that in itself was a violation of, well, what's a bigger precedent than the foundation of civilization?
Natural law? I mean, I was going to say Anthony Kennedy's precedent from two years before in the Windsor case, two years before Obergefell, Anthony Kennedy said, Nope.
States have full control over marriage.
Like, all right, well, states have full control.
Two years later, well, they only have full control if they want gay marriage, but not if they don't.
See, they could do whatever they want.
That's the thing. It drives me nuts because the worst form of disinformation is when you not only don't recognize the problem, but you think you're rectifying it when it's actually getting worse.
We have a judicial crisis that's unimaginable now.
And yet most of our movement thinks it's not a threat because Trump is appointing judges at record – at a record pace.
Now, again, if you look at them – and again, a lot of people in the conservative movement in America, details are not their thing.
A lot of these people, they're replacing some of the best judges.
So you're not moving anything forward.
And they're on circuits where you're not going to swing anything.
Either there are a few circuits that are already good, like the 5th and the 8th and the left, they're just not going there.
Or the 9th will actually have six vacancies, but okay, so they'll have a, instead of a 27 to 1 majority, it'll be like a 21 to 7 majority.
I mean, this is what they don't understand.
I just, I know there's a lot of doom and gloom for me today, but the first step In searching for a solution is recognizing the extent and severity of the problem.
Right. Now, let me just run an analogy past you.
I'm always trying to find ways that people can conceptualize this stuff so that they can explain it to others.
Let me run an analogy past you and see if it makes sense in terms of how to explain some of this stuff to people.
So, I write books, as do you.
So, there's the writer, there's the editor, and there's the proofreader.
Now, the way that I think of the law as a whole is that it's the people who actually write...
I don't know if Congress writes the laws, but it's the people who actually write the laws because it's the politicians who say, what do you want me to do?
And the people say, well, I want you to say control immigration or lower taxes or whatever it is that the majority wants.
And so the majority say, this is what we want done in the legal system.
And then Congress is like the editor.
So the people are like the writers of the book.
And then Congress is like...
The editor, in terms of like taking the often inchoate will of the people and translating it into something that can be implemented in a legal framework.
And then to me, after you have the – and the editor is not supposed to change the fundamental meaning of the book.
They're supposed to help you achieve your vision in a more consistent and enjoyable and digestible format.
And then you have the proofreader.
Now, the proofreader is not supposed to change much at all.
In fact, they're only supposed to change deviation.
So if you use the word on when you meant to say no, they point that out and you fix it and so on.
So to me, the people write the books, the Congress edits the books, but the courts are really only supposed to be proofreading.
They're not supposed to be creating.
They're not supposed to be rewriting.
They're not even supposed to be doing reviews.
They're just supposed to be, you know, where there's a couple of hiccups here and there, smoothing it out to achieve the actual intended meaning, which may have got a little bit lost in translation.
And right now, if this analogy is fairly correct, Daniel, right now, the judges are not proofreaders anymore.
They are writers and editors and booksellers and readers.
They've encapsulated the whole process, which was supposed to be divided to prevent this kind of corruption.
They've encapsulated the whole process under their own robes.
And this is, I think, where the fundamental tyranny may be coming from.
Well, again, the other branches ceded this authority, so they took it.
But I would... I disagree a little bit.
I don't think they were meant even to be proofreaders.
I think they were meant to be readers.
Just to simply be the...
I would say, you know what it is?
I don't know if you've had any audiobooks.
I have never produced an audiobook yet.
But it would be the professional voiceover.
The guy with the nice voice, right?
Who can do accents, right?
No, but what I mean by that is the court's power was supposed to be nothing.
Nothing. We're good to go.
IBM and Microsoft come before them for a dispute.
And because they're involved in the politics and they get elected, they, you know, deal with the constituencies and all the money interests would influence them.
You gotta have just an independent judiciary to go and adjudicate that case.
And that's the point of the appointments rather than the elections so that they're not subject to lobby groups, political process as much.
But to be clear, Politically, Congress controls the courts.
They're not separate in terms of their structure.
There was actually just a recent case that was very in the weeds, but it was very important that no one paid attention to, where Clarence Thomas said that the power of Congress to restrict the jurisdiction of the courts is just as fundamental as their power to coin money.
It is part of their powers.
The only thing they can't do, and this is almost a direct quote, In the case of Smith v.
Jones, Jones wins.
That's the only thing they can't do is adjudicate a specific case.
But now, let me take that a step further.
People are going to ask me, what about this concept of judicial review?
Well, don't the courts have this power?
Okay, I understand you're saying they mainly just interpret, read the law, that voiceover, that independent voiceover, but don't they have the power to sometimes cross out things?
To be clear, they don't have the power to cross out anything.
There's no – it's kind of a lazy parlance when we say the court struck down – a court can't strike down anything.
What a court does is this.
Here's where judicial review comes from, and here is why it's a refutation, not a proof, to judicial supremacy.
It means, let's say, an individual with valid standing, meaning not – because I don't like your election laws – Meaning, government is taking away my farm.
Government is doing something to me.
They're locking me up. They're about to execute me.
I have a right to come before a court and say, look, my life and liberty, not BS life and liberty, but real life and liberty is under attack, very individualized, and hey, this is unfair.
So the court says, well, okay, what does the law say?
Well, okay, it appears what the law says.
The law says you should be locked up.
Okay. Then what the founders envision is the question is, well, what if that law is not constitutional?
Let's say anyone with the name Molyneux and that type of spelling has to pay an extra 10% in taxes.
So that's a bill of attainder.
That's fundamentally repugnant to the Constitution, as Justice John Marshall said in Barber v.
Madison. So if I'm a Supreme Court justice or a lower court justice— I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution.
The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land, so I have to offer that person relief.
You don't strike down a law, but you offer, you grant that person relief.
Freeze frame. Right there.
Is that the law of the land now for the entire nation?
Well, it depends.
If what the guy said is black and white, everyone's going to follow that.
But let's say it totally flipped it on its head.
You have a right to immigrate, but you don't have a right to own gods.
So that's where the other branches of government have an equal right, how much more so with their robust powers to execute, to legislate, to fund the power of the purse.
They have a right, indeed, a responsibility to uphold their equal oath, by the way, and state officials wear the same oath to the state and federal constitution.
All Marbury meant was that even the weak courts, but how much more so, the other branches, they have the responsibility to uphold their powers as they see the Constitution.
If the Constitution stands on top, everyone's on a level playing field.
Well, what if there's a disagreement?
You push back against each other.
Let me give you a perfect example of what's going on there.
It's one thing if a court places a negative on a positive action of an executive.
In other words, they want to execute someone.
OK, then we then I go to court.
The court says, no, the jury pool is racist.
They're doing that a lot.
That's why I'm using that as an example.
The Supreme Court is invalidating a lot of capital punishments now based on BS grounds.
But to say that the executive branch, whether it's on a federal or state level, depending on the crime, should actively go and take an action and kill the guy, which is the most irrevocable act.
That's your Andrew Jackson not listening to a court.
That's what not listening to a court is.
But let's say, as is most of the cases here, a court places a positive On a negative of the executive branch or put another way, they mandate an executive action that they don't – a power they don't have.
You must issue a visa.
You must issue a marriage license.
You must tear down that World War I memorial cross like you had in Maryland last year.
You must hire county clerks to come in three Sundays before an election and have early voting.
Hey, no, you get your fat rear end off the bench and you go do it.
Oh, well, oops, you don't have the power.
It's the executive power.
So this is where people are saying, do you think Trump shouldn't listen to the courts on DACA? I'm saying that's not called not listening.
Trump is not allowed to actively give guidance to executive officials to violate the law in the Constitution.
If someone gets standing and says, we have DACA permits, well, The court doesn't issue DACA permits, and that's what I'm saying.
That's where it needs to start, from the most egregious cases of positive revolutionary actions that a court has no power to do.
It's the other two branches except this garbage, so the courts say, hey, we'll take it.
But that's the important difference between judicial review saying, all right, for my purposes and my case or controversy, I'm going to look at the Constitution.
And judicial supremacy, that they have the exclusive and final say in that opinion and it's rendered nationwide.
And I'd be remiss if I didn't remember to say this.
This was the fundamental debate between Lincoln and Douglas during the Civil War.
What the progressives are pushing is the legacy of Dred Scott.
Stephen Douglas said that, look, Dred Scott is law of the land, due process—it was called substantive due process—that it's your due process rights to property being taken away by not having slavery in the new territories.
Lincoln said, look, you could adjudicate your case or controversy there, but if you're going to tell me that it's binding on The new president, every senator, every congressman, you're full of hot air because the Constitution is the law of the land.
Otherwise, we don't have a constitutional republic.
We have a judicial oligarchy by definition.
I mean this was clear from Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
So these progressive leftists are really pushing the legacy of Dred Scott that no matter how egregious it is, slavery is the law of the land because the court says so.
That's basically what they're telling us.
Right. And for people to get an idea of just how far immigration law has drifted from the norms of law, just as a brief mental exercise, let's have a look and see if tax law was run like immigration law in the United States at the moment.
It would be a very strange place.
It'd be very hard to collect any taxes because you could announce that you weren't going to pay taxes.
And they just say, okay, fine.
Or that you'd get free legal advice for 10 years to fight anything in taxes.
Oh, and by the way, if your parents didn't pay taxes, DACA style, then you wouldn't have to pay taxes either.
Oh, and also, there would be sanctuary cities where you could go where you wouldn't have to pay any taxes.
Or you could avoid paying taxes by saying, well, I feel persecuted by the IRS. It's making me nervous.
I feel anxious about it.
So... Then they'd say, oh, well, if you feel upset about it, you feel persecuted, then you don't have to pay any taxes.
We all understand that if this was the case in the—oh, and the other thing, too, because they say, well, if you didn't know which exact laws you were breaking, you can't be deported.
Everyone's seen this, like, half a library worth of tax codes, and nobody understands the whole thing.
So you could say, well, I didn't really understand exactly what taxes I was supposed to pay.
And they say, well, you know, it is kind of complicated.
So I guess you don't have to pay any taxes.
If we took what's going on with immigration and we try to apply that same subjectivism and political activism to the tax code, well, I guess there'd be a ragged cheer going up across the land among certain people who don't like the tax code, which is, I think, most people.
But that's how far it's drifted because the left wants the votes, the left wants the political support, and therefore the law means nothing to them in this regard.
But that's the legacy of the left.
The first try with the emotion and the compassion.
And once they make something a value...
All the intellectual arguments you can give go out the window because now even though legally they should have less of a case because at least if you're an American citizen, you should have some sort of due process right to advance – proper advance notice of when you're violating a law.
They don't have the right to have advance notice of when – They're allowed to stay here because they don't have any right to stay here.
We could say we don't like the way you talk.
We don't like – you don't take a shower often enough.
We could say we don't want anyone here with orange hair.
There's any – again, it's not a legal framework.
It's sovereignty. But when you wrap it up in compassion, then it becomes a value, and if it's a value, it becomes a legal imperative.
And that's the success.
And I think there's a failure on the other side in America and really elsewhere in the world where we don't combat this at its root and say, not only is this lawless, but you are the one that is creating death for tens of thousands of people.
See, the analogy I'd give for this is like if someone felt so – man, he had so much compassion for people that don't have enough food and the homeless.
He's going to stop his car on a freeway, on an interstate highway, and start handing out food and medicine.
And to hell with the car wreck that happens.
I'm being compassionate.
We don't point out what that does.
There's a whole other sphere to this, and I alluded to it before, that really...
I mean, and I've been trying to focus on it more often.
What they've done...
And it's pretty effective, is focused like a laser beam on a very small number of people.
There's 325 million Americans.
There's, what, 150 million or so Mexicans.
And there's a relatively small number that crosses over, and let's say, to make a better life in America.
Let's just say, for argument's sake, the ones doing that.
They're so focused on them.
What no one wants to talk about is the atmosphere that an open border creates for the existential crisis of the drug cartels, the tens of thousands killed from drugs in America, MS-13.
And did you know that 29,000 Mexicans were murdered by the drug cartels because of the turf war we created?
This is what Judge Andrew Hennon, you want to talk about one good judge in the Southern District of Texas, he had a riveting visionary opinion in 2013 where he predicted the drug crisis.
And he said the government was creating this atmosphere where it's now profitable for them to smuggle in drugs, use children precisely because they know if they're caught with drugs, nothing's going to happen to them.
So the children are the – it's not just like, oh, the more sympathetic version of amnesty.
It's the worst form of amnesty because that's the linchpin to MS-13 recruitment.
That's the linchpin to the drug crisis and, like I said, connected to Hezbollah.
But somehow it's not sexy to talk about 29,000 Mexicans who were killed.
Let me tell you something. If you had my immigration policies in place, if you made it clear that you could never come here illegally – That you'll get nothing.
You'll be deported immediately.
There's no court case. There's no anything.
The entire drug crisis would end.
You'll have little bits seeping in, but to the extent that you have it, the human smuggling, the rape victims, they don't want to focus on that.
I get it.
Americans suck. You're not allowed to care about Americans.
I get that. But what about the Mexicans?
Let's talk about the Mexicans.
It's 29,000 a year, and it started around Obama's tenure because that created this huge vacuum.
Again, picture someone saying, I want to hand out free candy on a freeway.
That's literally what we did.
The Mexican government doesn't control the border.
It's about four or five cartels control it from the Gulf Cartel in the east, the Sinaloa Cartel in the west.
You just empowered People that are as ruthless as ISIS. To kill all sorts of people, smuggling drugs.
That's the argument we need to start making.
So, let's talk, and you've got a list in one of your articles, and we'll link to your articles below, Daniel.
But you've got a list of to-dos, right?
Because when people get this information, for a lot of people, this is going to be kind of new stuff.
And it may be, I don't want people's last thread of hope to go pinging off like some broken harp string.
So what is it that people can do when they're in possession?
Because you look at this monolith of the court.
A lot of people are scared of courts, scared of judges.
You know, people in the entertainment industry on TV, the judges are always wise and smart and good.
A lot of propaganda. Why? Because they go in front of these judges quite a lot and they don't want to be upsetting the judges with negative portrayal.
So it's kind of rare, particularly on television.
A lot of people are kind of scared.
They feel it's like trying to influence the Olympian gods.
You can't do much about it.
It's like yelling at storm clouds, King Lear style.
So what is it that people can do, can act in their own lives that might help at least bring awareness to some of this issue?
Because if the awareness is there, it does begin to percolate up to the political people who might have a chance to do something about it.
You know, everyone needs to phone the White House and their congressman that there are pieces of legislation.
Louie Gohmert has one. Dave Bradt has one.
Some of the conservatives are starting to address this to strip the courts, at least the lower courts, at least the lower courts of power over all these cases.
Any case to adjudicate the right to remain in the country, the right to come in the country, that is the number one thing.
Number two, pressure needs to be brought to bear on President Trump, that he is right that Congress should act.
In lieu of that, he has – there's this misnomer that somehow our laws are written to force a president to let people in.
It's never the case.
The president has numerous tools.
He could – like I said, he could process all these cases in Mexico City and make it the government policy that we're not allowing anyone on our shores, which is really what Australia started to do.
And that stopped the boat people, reduced the amount of interdiction – Interdictions by 95%.
Now everyone's on their case and they've gotten weak on that.
But that's number one. Number two is to properly interpret his own or properly apply his own executive orders on January 25th of 2017, the first week after his inauguration.
President Trump issued an order to properly interpret the statutes dealing with asylum claims and what's called UACs, unaccompanied alien children, that you're only a UAC, meaning that you get to access the refugee resettlement program, if you're severely trafficked.
99% of them are self-trafficked.
Oh, and it's also, if you don't have any relatives in America, 95% of them are reunited with relatives in America.
So, you know, they are self-trafficked.
They are trafficking drugs.
They are the perpetrators of the crime for which the law was created to protect against.
As far as the asylum claims, you have to be a persecuted ethnic minority, religious minority, or persecuted because of your affiliation with some sort of group or public opinion.
It is pretty evident that these people coming over from Honduras are not being persecuted because they support free market healthcare or the Second Amendment.
I mean, there's no – and again, it ties into the courts because obviously they'll take everything to the courts.
That is the single most important thing to do from now until November, judicial reform.
That is, Congress has the power.
Clarence Thomas just issued a ruling on this.
They have the power.
Over even the Supreme Court, much less the lower courts.
Just as much as they have the power to regulate commerce and coin money.
It's that simple.
And now there is legislation.
Louie Gohmert has a bill to do just that.
But the problem is it won't see the light of day with the corrupt Republican leadership in Congress.
Trump needs to get on it.
Someone's got to get it in front of him because I'll tell you, Trump seems to know about bad legislation.
When Jared Kushner gets it in front of him.
So, I mean, that's the problem.
If you get Trump to harp on something, he's pretty good about it, but we got to get it in front of him.
All right. Well, we'll link to your articles below.
I really want to thank you.
Both thank you and not thank you for bringing this issue to my attention because it is one of these things, a little tough to look at and feel empowered.
But there is always things that we can do, particularly with the internet, conversations like this.
You can share this conversation.
You can pick up the book, Stolen Sovereignty, How to Stop Unelected Judges from Transforming America.
We will link to that below.
The website, again. Thank you so much for your time today and the passion you bring to bear to this issue.
It is essential. And I really, really appreciate your time.
