Judging Freedom - New Abortion Ruling_ US Digital ID_s_ Ukraine War update

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, April 24th, 2023. It's a little after 11 o'clock in the morning here on the east coast of the United States. Here are your hot topics today, which takes us back to when we last spoke on Friday afternoon. Friday evening, the Supreme Court of the United States finally ruled on the issue of the abortifacient. That's a pill, a self-administered pill, without even an examination or involvement of a physician in order to expel the baby from the womb, a pill that has been lawful in the United States since the year 2000, a pill that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the year 2000.

To give you a little background, the pill was challenged last year in 2022, 22 years after it was approved. The approval process was challenged by a group of pro-life physicians and health care providers. The case got before a Texas judge known for his pro-life views. The Texas judge invalidated the FDA's approval. How could he invalidate something that happened 22 years ago? Good question. The statute of limitations is six years. After the FDA approved it, it kept modifying its approval by making the drug even more available.

Originally, it was only available by prescription. Then it was available because of COVID over a telemedical prescription where you communicated with your physician via your computer. Then it was available without any prescription. Then it was a telemed. Then it was available by mail. More available. This judge found the statute of limitations was reset back to zero. And the last time the FDA made this change was in 2016. The doctors who challenged it sued right under the wire. They got the lawsuit filed right before the expiration of six years from of looking at the law that is not followed by most judges and most lawyers. Usually when you're dealing with a scientific process that the FDA went through, you have to challenge that scientific process within six years of the process.

And the modification of the approval does not restart the six years back at zero. But this federal judge found that it did. This ruling came down at the same time as a ruling by another federal judge who ruled the opposite and said the FDA approval was fine and I'm going to order the FDA to keep the drug on the market. So you have two trial judges, two federal trial judges, one in Texas saying you can't manufacture or approve this, another saying you must manufacture and approve it. So the Justice Department appealed the decision of the Texas judge and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sitting in New Orleans, which hears all appeals from federal judges in Texas,

partially upheld and partially reversed him. It dialed the clock back to 2016, which means the drug is on the market, but you can't get it through the mail and you can't get it through telemed because the pandemic is history. So you can get it from your doctor, but the manufacturers can keep manufacturing it. The DOJ appealed that to the Supreme Court. And after a delay in its own decision-making where the Supreme Court had to give itself more time to rule, when you're the Supreme Court, you can do that. The court ruled by 7 to 2 that the clock would be reset to where it was after 2016. What does that mean? That means that the drug is now fully available by prescription, by telemed, without prescription, without telemed, and via U.S. mail until the appellate court can hold a full and final evaluation of this. Justice Alito wrote a very stinging dissent saying there's no reason for the Supreme

Court to do this because the drug is still available and it is obviously more healthy to follow the science, which is you're going to take a drug that's going to expel a fetus, a living baby from your womb. You ought to have a doctor manage this process. On the other hand, Justice Alito said, who is the court to second guess the FDA? The FDA consulted its own doctors and its own scientists when it approved this, and the court is in no position to second guess it. All of this is done in what's called preliminary rulings. So there's no full-blown trial in either the Texas court or the Washington state court. There's no full-blown hearing before the Fifth Circuit and there was no full-blown hearing before the Supreme Court. By full-blown,

I mean a trial with testimony where doctors actually testify about what happened during the approval process. By full-blown appellate hearing, I mean appellate briefs and exhibits and evidence for the appellate court to review and the same thing for the Supreme Court to do. The Supreme Court of the United States has been severely criticized of late for what's called a shadow docket, where it makes major decisions on the basis of very scant evidence before it. What evidence should it have before it? It should have the evidence of a trial in the Texas or the Washington State Federal Court. But there were no trials there because those judges ruled on an emergency basis as well. So they ruled just on the basis of the papers that were filed to them and the oral argument

made by the lawyers. There was no live testimony. Therefore, there's no live testimony for the appellate court in New Orleans to review. Therefore, there's no evidence for the Supreme Court to review. That's what prompted Justice Alito's dissent. Justice Thomas dissented as well without stating a reason. So by a vote of seven to two, the Supreme Court has said all the FDA rules, the original approval in 2000, and all those changes it made along the way up to 2016, making this drug more available. They're all the law of the land going back to Texas for a full blown trial. We'll take the case when it gets us gets to us here in the ordinary course. You may have missed that over the weekend. It came out at 630 on Friday evening. There you have a summary of it. More on Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman whom the government says is the leaker of top secret national defense information documents, hugely embarrassing to the government. Whether Teixeira is the leaker or whether he is a dupe of someone senior to him in the intelligence or military communities, we don't yet know.

But what we did learn over the weekend is that the documents were first leaked. The leaking was a process. It didn't happen just once. And the process began in February of 22, not February of 2023. So Airman Teixeira has been discussing these documents with his buddies in his chat room since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. And the documents reveal that during the course of the war, not just now, but during the course of the war, the government itself, the American government itself, doubted that Ukraine could win this.

And as the war progressed, the American government itself concluded that the Ukraine air defenses were degraded irreparably and will be down to zero by early June, which is just six weeks from now. And during the war itself, the American government concluded that it, the American government, could never get to Ukraine the equipment and material that it needed. All of this hugely embarrassing to the government. But it's a head scratcher. This stuff has been out there for 15 months. And the Department of Defense didn't know about it. And the intelligence community didn't recognize it.

So if what Airman Teixeira did was so harmful to the national security that he had to be arrested by an army of FBI agents in an armored personnel carrier and while carrying machine guns, and yet no one was harmed, the government wasn't harmed. No one even knew that this stuff was out there for 14 months. If it was out there for 14 months and no one was harmed, why is there harm now? Why is this guy even in jail? All right. You know my view. My view, and I trust it's the view of many of you, and I believe it is from the comments that you send, is that truth is a higher value than security. Truth is a higher value than secrecy. Truth is a higher value than the government's lies. And when someone exposes the fact that the government is killing people and lying about it, that person is a hero. Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, Bradley slash Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Jack Teixeira. The government doesn't agree with me. Prosecutors don't agree

with me. My judge friends don't agree with me. My conservative buddies don't agree with me, but I'm adamant on this. You and I are far better off. Everyone in America is far better off knowing that the government has been lying to us and giving us an opportunity to evaluate that government at the polls. Has the head of the government discussed this? No. Has Joe Biden taken any questions on this? No. Has he given any material response to any of this? No. Has Joe Biden taken any questions on this? No. Has he given any material response to any of this? No. As the government says how it's been harmed with these secrets out there for 14 or 15 months going back to February 2022, it has not. While all this is going on, bipartisan legislation introduced by Senator Sin to have their own digital footprint,

their own QR code registered with the government. Oh boy. George Orwell, where are you? Do we really want to have to prove who we are by showing our own QR code to the government every time we deal with the government. That's what this legislation would require. And it was passed out of whatever committee in the Senate evaluates these things unanimously, perhaps because it's bipartisan, one Republican and one Democrat slash independent. Where the hell is the government taking us? Will computer chips embedded in our skin be next? We know that Dick Cheney and others seriously suggested that to President George W. Bush shortly after 9-11. Thank God that legislation got nowhere, but this is a step in that direction. Do you really want to have your own QR code mandated by the feds and registered with the feds and which you would have to trigger every time you engage in a commercial transaction or any transaction with the government or with your lawyer or with your doctor,

this is really going too far. It is a form of forced speech. You have your name. I have my name. You have your social security number. I have my social security number. That's enough to identify who we are. The government will say, oh, wait a minute. There's so much going on. There's so much identity theft going on. We'll protect you. The government will protect you. The government can't protect its own secrets. The government can't deliver the mail.

The government can't spend within its budget. The government can't decide whether or not it wants to win a war. The government can't fill potholes. And the government is going to protect your identity? Baloney. This is just another means of government control. Oh, that QR code. It's in your mobile device.

Where are you? Bingo. We'll just press the QR code in, and it will tell us where the mobile device. Where are you? Bingo. We'll just press the QR code in and it will tell us where the mobile device is so the government can follow you like it or not. President Zelensky announced two weeks ago, it was revealed over this past weekend, that the so-called everybody waiting for counteroffensive, the Ukrainian counteroffensive against the Russians cannot start until the United States and NATO sends more equipment to Ukraine. I don't know why he would make this announcement. You would think if you're fighting a war with the

Russians, you'd want to keep them off balance and keep them guessing. And maybe this is a trick to lull the Russians into a false sense of security. But what is not a trick is that the weapons makers in the United States, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning, simply cannot make weapons and ammunition fast enough, simply cannot hire enough workers or skilled fast enough to do all this work. You've heard me say this before and I'll say it again. President Biden has gotten us into a war without congressional authorization for us to fight a war and we are in far deeper than the American public knows it, than the American public knows. We know from the documents leaked either by or through Teixeira, I say through because he may have been, if you've heard Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson

and Colonel McGregor and Scott Ritter and Tony Schaefer on this program, then you know that there's a lot of evidence out there to demonstrate that Tehera was a willing dupe, that someone far north of him gave him these documents. But however he got them, we know from the documents that Ukraine is losing. Now we know that Ukraine's so-called, everybody's waiting for counteroffensive, ain't going to happen until more weapons and ammunition get there. And those weapons and that ammunition, they're not on their way yet because American manufacturers can't hire enough skilled workers to get this done and can't produce the weapons and the ammunition fast enough.

So, Mr. President, how are you going to get out of this mess? You have American military equipment on the ground in Ukraine loaded with American ammunition. The equipment today has computers on it. You have American technicians. They're military, they're out of uniform operating the computer right there on the ground, picking Russian targets. They're not pulling the trigger there. The trigger is being pulled remotely back in Poland by American military in uniform, comfortably, safely in Poland. American military equipment, American ammunition being aimed at Russian boys being fired by American boys. One part of the war. American CIA on the ground in Ukraine and in Russia, gathering data about the Russian military whereabouts and maneuvers and giving it to Ukraine intelligence. That's the other part of the war. Americans shooting

at Russian boys, Americans spying on Russia for the Ukrainians. If that doesn't equal war, then I don't know what does. Oh, wait a minute. Did the Congress authorize this? The Congress gave Joe Biden a blank check for $113 billion with a B dollars. He spent between $60 and $68 billion of it with a B already. Some in cash, 400 million of which the CIA told him has been stolen by Zelensky and his cronies. Most of it in American military equipment. I've described to you how much of that military equipment is operated. But what the Congress didn't bargain for was American troops on the ground. What Joe Biden did on his own was American troops on the ground. What Joe Biden did on his own was American troops on the ground, because Joe Biden would like to run for reelection like his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as a wartime president. Someone who doesn't care about life, whether it's Russian soldiers or Ukrainian soldiers or American soldiers out of uniform in Ukraine, in uniform in Poland.

Just re-election. Now, with the Deshera documents out there, this does not look good. We know that the government all along knew this was a losing venture, and it has no comfortable way out. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.