Latest / Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott / What Is The Thinking Behind These SCOTUS Decisions?

Transcript

What Is The Thinking Behind These SCOTUS Decisions? · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:08
  And so we begin the third hour of a show number five thousand and thirty
• 0:13
  five of The Morning Show with Preston Scott. I'm Preston. That's Grant Allen.
• 0:15
  Great to be with you. I shot a flare up in the air
• 0:23
  and reached out to Heritage Foundation. I said, I need a little Hans
• 0:29
  von Spakovsky, and lo and behold here he is on the program. How
• 0:33
  are you, sir? Hey, I'm doing Just find that I shot the
• 0:37
  flare up, Hans, because I am scratching my head. Before we get
• 0:41
  to specific cases that we've heard from the United States Supreme Court about of late,
• 0:48
  are you at all kind of perplexed by what kind of rulings that we're
• 0:53
  seeing coming out and the jumping back and forth between leaning somewhat active and somewhat
• 1:00
  originalists that some of these justices are doing well. I'm not surprised by the
• 1:08
  Chief Justice. You know, he sometimes he's really good and sometimes he's really
• 1:14
  bad, and he just kind of goes back and forth. And these days
• 1:19
  he unfortunately tends to be the swing vote, and sometimes he takes Brett Kavanaugh
• 1:26
  with him. And look, the best way of contrasting these is like when
• 1:34
  it has come to the Second Amendment, he's been great. On the other
• 1:37
  hand, it was the Chief Justice who said Obamacare was okay, you know,
• 1:42
  I mean, he just he waivers back and forth. So I'm not
• 1:48
  surprised. I'm often disappointed by him. I'm curious is it worth spending any
• 1:55
  time trying to understand what triggers the activist side of him? You know,
• 2:02
  I actually wrote a piece about this a while back, and the conclusion I
• 2:07
  came to is that sometimes, particularly with cases that everybody is really focused on,
• 2:15
  you know, really really cases that the media, everybody is very concerned
• 2:23
  about, I think sometimes he's so worried that the court with a particular decision
• 2:31
  is going to look like it's making a political decision rather than a legal decision,
• 2:38
  that he bends in order to try to in what his mind is thinking,
• 2:44
  Well, I don't want it to look like we're making a political decision.
• 2:46
  But by doing that, he makes it look like he's made a political
• 2:50
  decision. I was going to say, it's it's almost as if he spends
• 2:53
  a little too much time worrying about what social media and the mainstream media is
• 2:58
  going to say or think. No, I think that's exactly right, and
• 3:01
  what he ought to do is not read the editorial pages, watching both or
• 3:08
  the New York Times or anybody else, and just make the right legal decisions.
• 3:13
  Let's talk about first the ghost gun ruling. The Supreme Court sides with
• 3:17
  Biden blocks of judges order allowing ghost gun sales. But is this now a
• 3:23
  permanent ruling or are they waiting for something to happen on the appellate level and
• 3:28
  then rule again. I've been totally confused by the situation involving that case.
• 3:35
  No, I think they're waiting. This was all about injunctions and emergency stays,
• 3:40
  and basically they're saying they're going to let the case wind its way through
• 3:46
  the courts and then they'll make a final decision on it. Are we to
• 3:51
  read anything into that as it relates to a final decision about this, because
• 3:55
  I mean, look, people have been making their own firearms since the revolution.
• 4:01
  Yeah, I wouldn't read too much into it. For this reason,
• 4:06
  the history of the court is that it's been extremely rare for them to grant
• 4:13
  emergency stage in other words, when someone asks for a stay of a lower
• 4:18
  court decision before the case has worked its way through the trial stage, through
• 4:27
  the appellate court stage, etc. It's just very rare for the court to
• 4:30
  step in. They don't want those kind of emergency motions coming up all the
• 4:36
  time, and if they granted them, if they granted a lot of them,
• 4:41
  they would be overwhelmed with people trying to skirt over the usual appeals process.
• 4:47
  So no, I wouldn't read too much into it. It's disappointing,
• 4:53
  yeah, but I don't think that tells us what the final decision is going
• 4:56
  to be. The Morning Show with Preston Scott I got Benzon my News Radio
• 5:00
  one hundred point seven double USLA coming up to twelve minutes past the hour with
• 5:14
  Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation. We're talking over some recent Supreme Court
• 5:17
  rulings that many of you have written to me about, asking for more clarity.
• 5:23
  I've not been able to really provide much. I'm not an expert,
• 5:29
  but I have stated a holiday in express as the joke goes. Hans von
• 5:31
  Spakovski, however, is an expert and he's been following the Supreme Court for
• 5:35
  years understands the nuance of the Constitution far better than I. Let's talk about
• 5:43
  the decision by the Supreme Court to reinstate a Missouri law that bars authorities from
• 5:48
  enforcing federal gun laws. Missouri basically tried to create what I'll call a Second
• 5:56
  Amendment sanctuary inside of its state. Your thoughts on all that, Well,
• 6:02
  you know, the problem Missouri has run into is, you know, look,
• 6:09
  under the Constitution, the federal constitution has priority. It can no state
• 6:17
  can pass a law that violates the federal Constitution and federal laws that are properly
• 6:25
  passed in accordance with the Constitution. And so that's I mean, that's basically
• 6:32
  the issue in that the answer to that is to go after the federal agencies
• 6:42
  like the ATF that are going beyond what they are entitled to do under the
• 6:46
  law, and to try to get federal law changed. A state can't defy
• 6:51
  the federal government. I mean, we remember we decided that issue in eighteen
• 6:58
  sixty four at the end of the American Civil War. I mean, that's
• 7:01
  what that issue was all about, was that the states could not defy the
• 7:08
  federal government and federal law. That's called the supremacy clause, right, exactly
• 7:13
  right, And and so you know, it's it's an interesting little sidebar a
• 7:18
  lot of the gun laws in this country that states have had on the books
• 7:25
  were passed in order to keep blacks from getting firearms. It was a race
• 7:30
  related matter, wasn't it. And that is exactly right. The first gun
• 7:35
  laws in this country were passing the South, and they were passed after the
• 7:41
  end of reconstruction after the Civil War. And yeah, they were intended to
• 7:46
  ensure that the newly freed black citizens wouldn't have the ability to defend themselves.
• 7:53
  Does the state of Missouri have any legs on their I guess contention, And
• 7:59
  I think it seems like they're arguing, Look, the Second Amendment is really
• 8:03
  clear. We're just going to say that that's what we're following. Well,
• 8:09
  they can look, yeah, Missouri, Missouri can do everything it can to
• 8:15
  try to enforce the rights of the people to own own firearms under the Second
• 8:20
  Amendment, but they can't do it in defiance of the Supreme Courts interpretation and
• 8:30
  application of the Second Amendment. On the one hand, I mean, we
• 8:33
  have to say that's an area where in the last ten years the Court has
• 8:37
  been really good. You know, they say, for the first time in
• 8:41
  American history, finally recognize that it's not a general right. It's not a
• 8:48
  right militia right. It's the right of each individual. And that's that's a
• 8:52
  good thing. La on your phone with the iHeart Radio app and on hundreds
• 8:56
  of devices like Alexa, Google Home, Xbox, this is and Ihearts radiozation.
• 9:03
  He has been a good friend of this radio program, sharing his expertise
• 9:07
  with us over the years. Hans von Spakovsky with the Heritage Foundation talking about
• 9:11
  the Supreme Court some very consequential decisions, though a lot of them are just
• 9:20
  sort of temporary. Let's talk about the decision to allow the White House to
• 9:24
  contact social media outlets again, that just hit me as weird. Hans.
• 9:31
  Well, again, that was on an emergency stay. So the case,
• 9:35
  the substantive case is not yet before the court. And I got to tell
• 9:39
  you that's another one where at I was very disappointed if you read the decision
• 9:46
  of the District Court judge. And this is the case in which two states
• 9:50
  dued the Biden administration over the fact that they were secretly behind the scenes contacting
• 9:58
  so social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and saying, you know, we
• 10:05
  don't like what this person is saying about this particular issue. And it was
• 10:09
  everything from COVID to elections, and we think you should censor their account and
• 10:16
  the social media companies did it, and the district court judge issued to stay
• 10:20
  saying you can't do this. You can't censor Americans. And while a private
• 10:28
  company, you know, can do that, these private companies were coerced and
• 10:33
  pressured by you, who can regulate them into doing this, making them your
• 10:39
  agents. They were agents of the government that the court order. You can't
• 10:46
  read that without being shocked, frankly and scared about what the government was doing.
• 10:54
  And yet the Supreme Court granted the Biden administration's motion for an emergency stay
• 11:01
  and said, no, until this case gets to us, we're not going
• 11:05
  to allow this injunction to stay in play. So I think that was a
• 11:09
  big, big mistake. But again, the case is not over. What
• 11:13
  about the decision to keep Trump on the twenty twenty four ballots as they're being
• 11:20
  put together. Yeah, as you know, there's an effort going on all
• 11:26
  across the country by the left to try to get him disqualified from the ballot
• 11:33
  under this little known provision of the fourteenth Amendment that says you basically can't hold
• 11:39
  a federal office if youth engaged in insurrection or rebellion. There are about five
• 11:46
  reasons why it simply doesn't apply, the most important of which is that that
• 11:54
  provision has something unique in it. It is in no other amendment Constitution.
• 12:01
  It says at the end that the Supreme Court can get rid of this disqualification
• 12:05
  provision with a two thirds vote of each House. The reason they did that
• 12:13
  was Rebert. This was put in after the Civil War. It was to
• 12:16
  prevent Civil War Southern Southern Confederate officers and others from serving in government. In
• 12:24
  the late eighteen hundreds, Congress did exactly that. They passed two amnesty Acts
• 12:28
  and they struck that vision out of the constitution. It's no longer there.
• 12:33
  It can't be used to disqualify anyone. But you never hear any of the
• 12:39
  folks talking about this mention those two amnesty acts, So it just doesn't exist
• 12:45
  anymore. It can't be used against Trump. Lastly, election integrity in general.
• 12:50
  You and I have talked off and on over the last couple of years
• 12:52
  about the subject. I'll just ask you to kind of give me a broad
• 12:56
  overview first and then drill down as deep as you want in the couple minutes
• 13:00
  we have left. Do you have confidence in the next election from a federal
• 13:05
  level? Being fair, I pretty much do. And the reason is that
• 13:13
  many many states, particularly red states Florida among them, by the way,
• 13:20
  they were shocked by the twenty twenty election results and all the problems and issues
• 13:26
  people raised, and so their legislatures acted to pass all kinds of good reforms
• 13:33
  to tighten up the election process. I mean just last month, actually this
• 13:39
  month, sorry, we were still in the October. Just this month,
• 13:41
  the voters in Louisiana passed a referendum three quarters approving a referendum to amend their
• 13:48
  constitution to ban Zuckbucks, you know, private donors, partisans giving money to
• 13:56
  local election offices to try to manipulate election recos results. Many other states have
• 14:01
  done the same thing and passed all kinds of good reforms that I think make
• 14:07
  us more secure. Is it perfect? Has everybody done what they ought to
• 14:11
  know? But we're in much better shape than we were in the twenty twenty
• 14:13
  election. I know the questions coming in the email box, so I'll ask
• 14:16
  it in closing, What about Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and
• 14:24
  perhaps even Nevada. Those are problematic states. Pennsylvania has had problems because every
• 14:33
  time the Republican legislature there, for example, has tried to pass a good
• 14:37
  reform package, the Democratic governor has vetoed it. So yeah, Pennsylvania remains
• 14:43
  a problem. Although the one bill they did get passed and that the Democratic
• 14:48
  governor apparently finally was embarrassed in the signing, was a ban on Zuckbucks.
• 14:52
  And in North Carolina, the Republican control legislature just voted to overcome the Democratic
• 15:01
  governor's veto of a big election reform package, So things there are good.
• 15:07
  Nevada and Nevada is in bad shape. Arizona's a little bit better, but
• 15:13
  they still have problems. But it's mostly the blue states that have not only
• 15:18
  not tried to fix anything that in some states that they've gotten worse. But
• 15:22
  the red states, almost all of them, have actually improved things greatly,
• 15:26
  like Georgia. But is it enough to overcome the blue states in the next
• 15:31
  presidential election. I think it is. I think psych said, I think
• 15:37
  we're going to have a much more secure and fair election, and I think
• 15:43
  the sign of that is look in the last last congressional elections, Republicans were
• 15:48
  able to take control of the US House. YEA, barely. All right,
• 15:52
  Hans, you're my hero. Thanks for the time, Sure thing,
• 15:56
  anytime. Hans von Spakowski with us this morning on the Morning Show with Preston's
• 15:58
  Got Up and