Judging Freedom - Today_s Hot Topics 3_2_23

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, March 2nd, 2023. It's about one o'clock in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. I have hot topics for you today and there are two two very hot areas. Guns raised by Joe Biden himself and Ukraine. We'll start with the president who's pretty much on the warpath to ban assault weapons. He defines assault weapons, I assume the way the feds define them, as a very sophisticated rifle that has a handle on it so you can put your fist around the handle underneath the barrel of the rifle as opposed to your palm under it that fist obviously gives you more control over the weapon than your palm for some reason the big government anti-gun crowd doesn't like that. Something they also don't

like, which is absurd, but it's in the definition, a clip at the end of the barrel which would allow you to put a bayonet on it. Man, I don't think I have ever seen a rifle with a bayonet on it used to commit any crime. That would slow the criminal down. It would slow down anybody. People that lawfully use these things are not interested in bayonets. But the particular rifle that he has targeted, AR-15, you can call it whatever you want. It's as accurate a weapon as there is. And that's the reason it's lawful, and that's the reason so many buy it, because it's accurate. The president is also complaining about the size of magazines. He wants the police to be able to have big magazines. That's the device that holds the rounds, 15, 20, 30 rounds, but he doesn't

want civilians to have that. Well, that's a violation of the Heller decision. Heller, H-E-L-L-E-R versus the District of Columbia. That's the opinion written in 2008 by the late great Justice Antonin Scalia, which says two things, that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual personal right. It doesn't belong just to the militia and it doesn't belong to the government. It belongs to all persons in America. And in terms of what kind of weapons you can have, you can have the same weapons that the bad guys have and that the government has, which means if the government has magazines of 50, well, 50 would be too cumbersome, of 20 or 25 or even 30 rounds, then individuals have the right to have magazines of that size. The government exists by the consent of the governed.

It is just inconceivable that the government can have something that the governed can't. How can we give the consent to the governed, to the government to own something that we can't own. We wouldn't have that consent to give. All the government's power comes from our consent. And when we consented, we consented to the government existing. We didn't consent to taking away our rights and taking away what we can own to protect ourselves from it if it's taken over by tyrants as from time to time it has been or from the bad guys because we all know the cops arrive at the scene of a crime or a slaughter after it's over with here's the president yesterday ranting and raving about assault weapons and the size of magazines take a listen a. A little state above me, Delaware, has one of the highest rates of gun ownership.

But guess what? We're going to ban assault weapons again. Come hell or high water. And high-capacity magazines. When we did it last time, it reduced mass deaths. He's wrong about that. He's talking about mass killings in the United States, in schools and bars and nightclubs and at shopping malls. These things are perpetrated by handguns, not by assault weapons. what he calls the assault weapon, a rifle with that extra plastic on it, making it more accurate, is something that if you carried it in public, you would immediately draw attention to yourself. These creeps that kill people, with the exception of

the killings at the school in Connecticut 10 years ago, these creeps that kill people use handguns. And the reason they're able to kill is because they go into areas where it's like shooting fish in a barrel. You can't bring a gun into a bar. You can't bring a gun into a school. You can't bring a gun into a place where you'd want to protect yourself. These creeps know where the armed citizenry has been disarmed. So he's got it all wrong. And in terms of magazines, well, why do you have a lot of toilet paper?

Because you need it. Why do you have a lot of rounds in the weapon? Because you need it. Anytime there's creeps in the world, more than one, you need more than one round. And you may need more than one round to defend yourself and to defend your property. I'm almost tired of saying this. It's so obvious. I really don't think that the president knows what he's talking about.

Somebody else that doesn't know what he's talking about, Governor Gavin Newsom, who was taken to attacking federal judges personally and by name. And he's doing this because federal judges in California, one in particular, have been interpreting the Supreme Court's opinion, not the one by Justice Scalia in 2008, but the one by Justice Thomas in 2022, which said that the right to keep and bear arms and carry arms is an individual right outside the home, and that the presumption is that any adult can carry a weapon. In California, New Jersey, and New York, the presumption is that nobody can carry a weapon, and you had to approve affirmatively why you needed one. After the 6-3 opinion by Justice Thomas, that's been reversed. The presumption is that you can carry it, and if the government doesn't want you to carry it, they have to prove affirmatively why you can't carry it.

Governor Newsom is so upset by this, he's blaming judges who are putting it into effect. Having been a trial judge, subject to the decision of a Supreme Court in the New Jersey state system, I can tell you, you are subject to what the Supreme Court has written. This trial judge is implementing the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States and is stopping the state of California from invalidating those decisions. And Governor Newsom, who is protected by a gaggle of armed agents carrying handguns and assault weapons, for some reason doesn't want anybody to be able to carry the weapons that he can carry. Earlier this week, the president repeated that Governor Newsom's bodyguards can carry, which of course violates, again, the decision by Justice Scalia

that you can own both decisions. You can own whatever the government owns in terms of weapons, and you can carry whatever the government carries. How else could you protect yourself? Why are these killers stopped in their tracks? When somebody shows up with superior firepower, a better weapon, a more accurate weapon, a more courageous person, superior firepower is what stops these killers in their tracks. A written statute is not going to stop them. Human emotion or terror or empathy is not going to stop them. Only a weapon stronger than the one that they have, used by a courageous person who's more accurate than they are, will stop it. I wish that people like Governor Newsom and President Biden would understand that.

I often wonder if President Biden has ever had any kind of a weapon in his hands because his understanding of them and then the articulation of his understanding is so profoundly wrong. All right. Earlier this week, the president sent Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen to Kiev. And she promised, I don't know if she delivered a check earlier in the week, I said she delivered a check. She handed some sort of a piece of paper to President Zelensky. Whether it was an actual check that he's gonna deposit in a key bank, I don't know. I would think they wire the funds today. But she said she was authorized to promise another 1.8 billion and that an additional 8 billion is on the way. It's tough

to keep track of these numbers. So depending upon how you add it up, we have spent 48 billion with a B and are committed to spending another nine and a half to 10 billion with a B. That authority ends at either 100 billion or 113. You'd think these numbers would be precise, but they're not. The authority that the president has to spend cash, and Secretary Yellen was just talking about cash, or military equipment, ends at either 100 or 113, again, depending on how you read that statute. That law was enacted before the election of 2022, before the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives. I don't know that it makes any difference who controls the House of Representatives. The Republicans have as many

neocons in their ranks as the Democrats do. And I think when the president runs out of that money, when he spends all 100 or 113 billion, let's call it 100 billion for the sake of ease, when he spends or commits all that 100 billion and wants authority for more, I think Congress will give it to him. Many of you may have seen my interview with Congressman Andy Biggs, who leads the conservative caucus, the constitutional caucus in the Republicans in the House. These are Republicans who are not in favor of deficit spending, who are not in favor of a blank check to Ukraine, who are generally not in favor of a war, unless it's a war that is one of necessity to protect the national security of the United States. He says that he thinks that Ukraine is going to continue to get this money. The Speaker of the House is in favor of giving them whatever they want. Republican Kevin McCarthy, the majority leader in the Senate.

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, is in favor of giving Ukraine whatever it wants. The Republican leader in the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, he's in favor of giving them whatever they want. So it looks like there's a majority in the Congress, a majority in both houses, in both parties in both houses to giving Ukraine whatever it wants. Again, with no inspector general, no American team in Ukraine certifying where it goes. I mean, if that piece of paper that Janet Yellen, the secretary of the treasury, handed President Zelensky was literally a check for $1.8 billion, which she made it sound like it was, and he deposits it in a bank. Well, who can draw from that bank? And what can they do with the money that they draw out of the

bank? If we had an inspector general, that inspector general and his or her team on the ground in Kiev would monitor the expenditure of every nickel we have given them. But when Congressman Thomas Massey, libertarian from Kentucky, offered that proposal in the House, and his colleague and counterpart, Senator Rand Paul, libertarian, also from Kentucky, offered that in the Senate. The Republican leadership in both houses made sure that those resolutions didn't even come to the floor for a vote. This is a recipe for corruption. And in terms of the war, it's catastrophic. It's needlessly killing Russian boys who are needlessly killing Ukrainian boys.

All we're doing is extending the war, extending the inevitable. If you don't believe me, check out Colonel McGregor on Judging Freedom, 1.30 Eastern today. Check out Scott Ritter, 4 o'clock Eastern today. We'll be talking about this in great detail, as well as the most recent developments there. One of the more recent developments there is Germany. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany promised two things. One was to give Ukraine whatever equipment it wanted, and Germany is more or less complied with that. The Ukrainians, of course, want fighter jets.

Nobody in NATO, not even Joe Biden, is giving them fighter jets because everybody knows that they'll be attacking Moscow with those fighter jets. And the retaliation from Moscow will be catastrophic and potentially against the countries that provided the fighter jets. The other thing that Germany promised when the conflagration in Ukraine started was that Germany would rearm. Now, Germany hasn't exactly been disarmed, but it hasn't had a huge military training with lots of military weapons because of a general attitude as a consequence of World War I 100 years ago and World War II 75, 80 years ago, that Germany would be a peaceful country,

would not be provoking Russia, and would be trading with Russia. When Chancellor Scholz became the Chancellor of Germany just six months ago. In his first day in office, he said to his chief of staff, you know, we have all this natural gas we get from Russia and all this trading with Russia. What's plan B? What do we do if Russia becomes an enemy and won't trade with us? The answer, there is no plan B. At that point, the American Navy and the infamous CIA attacked and destroyed the Russia pipeline, which forced Chancellor

Scholz's hand. The inexpensive natural gas that Russia had been selling to Germany now could no longer be sold, or at least it couldn't be sold through that pipeline. That caused the cold winter. We're now entering spring. That caused tens of billions of losses in the German economy, and it caused rethinking this decision to rearm. Does Germany really want to rearm and provoke Russia as the United States wants it to do? That's where we are today, my dear friends. This war is just going to keep going on and on. Joe Biden is determined to run for re-election like his two historic forebears, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who ran for re-election as wartime presidents. He's determined to do that. I think he's dead wrong. I know that there are a lot of Republicans

who want this war, Senator Lindsey Graham foremost among them, but I don't think that the American public does. The last time we saw a gradual buildup of American troops like we're beginning to see in Ukraine was Vietnam. Now, there was a draft at the time, of course, which made the American public even more opposed to the war. There is no draft now, thanks be to God. Technically, the draft exists, but there is no mechanism to put it into place, at least not yet. Is Joe Biden actually willing to risk the lives of young Americans so that he can get reelected? If that's the case, he is utterly and totally unworthy of holding public office. More as we get it.

Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.