Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 314 | The Monumental Importance of the Supreme Court | Guest: Sen. Ted Cruz

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

The importance of good justices serving on the U.S. Supreme Court cannot be overstated. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), himself a veteran of many legal battles, joins to discuss the nomination and confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett. Cruz also discusses his new book, "One Vote Away," which describes how Americans nearly lost their fundamental rights during the course of history. You can buy Senator Cruz's new book on Amazon. Today's Sponsors Hydrant: Go to drinkhydrant.com and use promo code "ALLIE" for 25% off your first order. Built Bar: Go to builtbar.com and use promo code “RELATABLE” to get 20% off your first order. Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Today I have a very special guest, Senator Ted Cruz. We are talking about the Supreme Court, the importance of the Supreme Court, the threat to our freedoms that packing the Supreme Court, something that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to do. if they win, something that Democrats have said that they're going to do if they gain power.

Why that is such a threat to our liberty and to our civil rights? We are going to talk about all of that today with him. This is one of those conversations that is so important when we are thinking about who to vote for. I know I sound like a broken record, but if there is anything that I can emphasize, that I can get people to see is that this election, all elections, but I would say in particular, this election has such far-reaching implications. If we are talking about a party, the Democratic Party, who has said that they want to pack the Supreme Court, that means expanding the Supreme Court to 13 seats, filling in those extra seats with liberal justices, liberal justices always go in the way of

democratic dogma, no matter what the law says, no matter what the Constitution says, So that means liberal activism at the expense of your civil liberties. If they do that, if they abolish the electoral college, if they decide that they're going to give statehood to Puerto Rico and D.C. If they decide that they are going to be able to reconfigure the Senate, which of course would be hard to do. But many people on the left do not believe that the Senate should have the same number of representatives, the same number of senators per state. they believe like the House of Representatives that it should be based on population. If that happens, it will no longer be a democracy.

We will no longer live in a representative democracy in a republic. The middle of the country, the minority will not have a say at all. The way our system is set up now, it makes sure that the 51% are not tyrannically ruling over the 49%. That is how our country was set up intentionally. and abolishing the electoral college, reconfiguring the Senate, makes sure that conservatives, especially conservatives in the middle of the country, don't have a say anymore in our democratic processes. They are using the courts, especially the Supreme Court,

to pass ideas and policies that they know are not popular democratically and that they can't get passed through legislative means. And so they weaponize the courts in order to push things that the Democratic elites want, but the rest of the country does not want. That's how it works. And so voting for President Trump has these long-term implications because we are talking about nominating and confirming a justice and Amy Coney-Barrant that is going to have a lifelong appointment and whose decisions are going to have lifelong generational implications.

And so when we are talking about the election and we're talking about the consequences of the election, It is so much more important to think about things like this and think about the preservation of things like the First and Second Amendment, those amendments that protect constitutional rights for all demographics, rich, poor, black, white, immigrant, native born, whoever you are. And it is so much more important that we think about the preservation of those rights than a president's personality. And again, I know I've said this so many times. but policies, decisions made by judges and by the Supreme Court are what is going to shape your future and the future for your children and your children's children. Not Trump's personality, not whether or not he interrupts at debates, not even his personal foibles and his moral flaws, which I understand he has many. That doesn't mean that we can't criticize him. That doesn't mean that we can't

point out where he's wrong or where he's not Christlike. We don't have to pretend like he is our savior. when we are voting, we are thinking about the policies and the decisions that are going to affect our civil liberties, that are going to affect our constitutional rights and the rights of our kids and our grandkids. And so take a step back from Trump's personality, from his personal failures, and think about what policies and decisions you want implemented. I've tried to make the case over the past several weeks that conservative policies are best for every demographic. That doesn't mean the Democrats get everything wrong. That doesn't mean that everyone on the left is wrong about everything.

But the current brand of leftism, which is far leftism that is increasing in popularity in the Democratic Party, I believe only has the ability, by nature, only has the ability to deconstruct and divide. It does not have the ability to build up and to bring together. Leftism just doesn't. If you look at the history of Marxism, how it's been implemented throughout the world, which is the brand of leftism. that we're seeing from the Black Lives Matter, Antifa, AOC, Ilhan, Omar, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, wing of the party. It doesn't work. The implementation of Marxism of socialism only divides. It only brings destruction and deconstruction and ultimately suffering and starvation and resentment and tyranny.

It never ends well. And for people to vote for Joe Biden based on the fact that he seems like a nicer guy, which honestly to me he doesn't, seems like maybe a little bit of a better guy because he's a calmer in a debate and because he, you know, wears a mask when President Trump doesn't and he doesn't tweet the same as President Trump. It's short-sighted. It's short-sighted. So that's what this episode is about today. This episode is about the importance of long-term thinking when we are thinking about our vote. And a great example of thinking long-term is the Supreme Court and who is going to be making the decisions that will have an effect on which constitutional rights are preserved and which ones

are thrown out the window for left-wing activism. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality.

We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. we ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Senator Cruz, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me.

It's good to be with you. Yes, so you've written this book, one vote away. It's about the Supreme Court, why the Supreme Court is so important. important. Can you just briefly tell us what inspired you to write this book right now? Well, I actually sat down and wrote it this spring and summer. So it was during the COVID lockdown. And I was at home, working from home. And so pulled out my laptop and wrote it. And obviously at the time, I had no idea that we would have a Supreme Court vacancy in October. But I did know that, that, of course, we had a presidential election in November. And I think judges and the Supreme

important particular are the single most important reason to vote for Donald Trump over Joe Biden. And so this book, the way it's structured is each chapter talks about a different constitutional liberty. So there's a chapter on free speech. There's a chapter on religious liberty. There's a chapter on the Second Amendment. There's a chapter on democracy and elections. And it's not an academic or theoretical book. Instead, it's practical and real. What it does is bring people inside, bring people behind the curtain inside the court to understand the Supreme Court, understand the justices. You know, before I was in the Senate, I was a Supreme Court litigator.

That's what I did for a living was argue cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. And so every chapter tells war stories of the big landmark cases, many of which I helped litigate to help people really understand what's going on there. And you know, it's striking on case after case after case. many of them were five to four, meaning we're just one vote away from losing our fundamental liberties. There seems to be a lot of confusion, at least in more liberal circles online, the difference between a constitutional right and a privilege. We see a lot that if you are against the constitutional, or if you disagree with a Supreme Court decision on a constitutional basis, it must mean that you don't

want women to have rights or LGBTQ people to have rights or whatever it is. Can you explain why that is a fallacious argument and maybe the difference between an actual constitutional right and a privilege? Well, there are all sorts of things that may or may not be good policy decisions, but that are not under the Constitution given to judges to decree. You know, under our constitutional system, public policy is meant to be debated in the legislatures, in the elected bodies. What happened, and I trace this history in the book, is in the 1960s, the left decided that convincing their fellow Americans of their policy agenda was too hard. And so instead, they would just go to the courts, and it was much easier to get five

unelected lawyers in robes to decree that result for the whole country, than actually to try to convince Americans it was a good idea. And so we've seen that pattern go on and on and on. Look, I'll give an example. So one of the chapters in the book is about school choice. I am passionate about school choice. I think school choice is the civil rights issue of the next century. That being said, I don't think it's the court's job to mandate school choice.

I think it would be wrong for the Supreme Court to say, we have to have school choice everywhere in America. The right place to make that argument and to win that fight is in the elected legislatures in the state and in the U.S. Congress. And in the Senate, I lead the fight for school choice in the Senate. But what I describe in the book is the case called Zellman v. Simmons-Harris, where there was a challenge to Ohio school choice program. It went to the Supreme Court. By a vote of 5'4, the Supreme Court upheld the program, but four justices were ready to strike the program down and strike down every other school choice program in America to rule that nobody could have school choice. Now, that is blatantly contrary to the Constitution, but we're

one justice away from a five-justice, left-wing majority shutting down every school choice program in the country. Can you explain the difference between how a left-wing justice or judge decides a case versus a constitutionalist, originalist, textualist, judge or justice? Sure. It's a great question. You know, the job of a justice is to follow the law, not to implement whatever policy they might agree with or they might not agree with, but to follow the law and follow the Constitution. And so that means in the school choice context, allowing the elected legislatures to decide whether you agree with or don't agree with what they like. Or another example is the Second Amendment.

So there's a chapter in the book talking about the case, Heller versus District of Columbia. It's the landmark Second Amendment case. What happened there is a fellow named Dick Anthony Heller, who was a federal police officer in D.C. He carried a firearm at work, but D.C. law made it illegal for him to have a functional firearm at home. And so he filed a lawsuit challenging that. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. I represented 31 states before the Supreme Court defending the individual right to keep and bear arms. And the Supreme Court, by a vote of five to four, struck down the D.C. law said it was inconsistent with the Second Amendment right.

It was Justice Scalia wrote the opinion. It is the finest opinion Justice Scalia ever wrote. Now, the position of the dissenters, and this is important to understand, It wasn't that some gun control sometimes is a good idea or is acceptable. That's something actually on which reasonable minds can differ. We can have an intelligent debate about what the right standard is for whether gun control works or it doesn't. That was not what the dissenters said. What the dissenters said was that the Second Amendment protects no individual right to keep and bear arms whatsoever, none,

that it protects only what they called a collective right of the militia. which is essentially fancy lawyer talk for a non-existent right. What it would mean, if they got one more vote, if the four justices became five, it would mean that no American, you, I, nobody would have any individual right at all under the Second Amendment, that if Congress or the state or your city made it a crime for you to own a gun, that you would have zero legal remedies. And it functionally is erasing the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights. leading it. Now, in this instance, the liberals don't like that people own guns. They support gun

control. Well, it doesn't matter what their policy preferences are. The Second Amendment is written into the Bill of Rights, and the job of a justice is to enforce the terms of the Constitution. Right. Can you tell us what other civil liberties are on the line? If Joe Biden does get his way, either if they pack the courts, which I'm going to ask you about, or if he just gets his liberal judicial nominee confirmed? Sure. I'll give you another example. One of the chapters in the book is on free speech. And I focus in particular on Citizens United.

Now, a lot of folks have heard of Citizens United. They don't really know what the case was about, but they know that Democrats really hate it. It's worth focusing on what Citizens United was, about, because it was about whether you and I have the right to criticize politicians. In that case, Citizens United, the group is a small nonprofit organization based in D.C. They made a movie that was critical of Hillary Clinton. And the Obama Justice Department wanted to go after them. They wanted to be able to find them and punish them for daring to make a movie critical of Hillary Clinton.

case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And there was one really, really chilling exchange at the oral argument. Justice Sam Alito asked the Obama Justice Department. He said, under your theory of the case, would the government have the authority to ban books? Could the federal government ban books if they criticize politicians? And the Obama Justice Department said, yes, we have the authority to ban books. Never mind what the First Amendment says, We can ban any book we don't like if it criticizes a politician. Citizens United was five to four. So the majority struck down that attempt at government power and said, no, the First Amendment gives us a right to speak and to criticize politicians.

But there were four justices willing to hold the federal government can prohibit movies and books if they criticize anyone in politics. That is a radical extreme position. And I'll tell you, even more scary, both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have explicitly pledged to nominate justices who will vote to overturn Citizens United, so to take away our free speech rights. And they've also pledged to nominate justices who will vote to overturn Hiller, so to take away our Second Amendment rights.

These rights are at the edge of the precipice, one vote away. You hear a lot from the left that people like Amy Coney Barrett, Republicans, one of take away their rights. And yet the examples that they give, they don't really, they don't hold a lot of water. There's not a lot of evidence behind it. Can you tell me kind of what's behind those accusations of conservative justices taking away what leftists see as rights? Well, you know, it's, it's interesting. They say that, but you know who didn't say it was Kamala Harris last night in the debate. You know who didn't say it a week earlier was Joe Biden in the debate with Donald Trump. And actually, the left knows that their positions are not popular. The left knows that taking away free speech

is a very unpopular position. The left knows that erasing the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights is very unpopular. The left knows that their assault on religious liberty. There's a whole chapter on religious liberty. One of the things it talks about is the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic convent of nuns who the Obama administration persecuted to try to force the nuns to pay for abortion-inducing drugs and others. And by the way, Joe Biden has pledged if he's elected, he'll resume persecuting the little sisters of the poor. That's not a popular position. And it really, I think it's worth conservatives, Republicans ought to note that in the debates,

Kamala and Joe don't defend those positions. They run away. They pretend, you know, it was really revealing last night when Kamala was asked, I think, four separate times, are you and Joe going to try to pack the Supreme Court if you win? And she wouldn't answer. She wouldn't answer. She wouldn't answer. She wouldn't answer. And the answer is, yes, their radical base wants them to do that. But they know the American people don't want to see the court politicized turned into essentially a democratic super legislature that overturns the will of the people. If you want to change policies in our country, the right way to do it is the political process. Convince your fellow citizens, but democracy is messy and the far left that they don't believe in it anymore. They believe in dictatorship and

power and orthodoxy and censorship. And if you dissent from anything they say, they will cancel you, they will silence you, they will shut you down. And that's an incredibly unpopular position, but I think it's incumbent on us to point out. That's what they're arguing for. And the funny thing is their buzzphrase right now is save our democracy, preserve our democracy by electing Joe Biden. They've talked about packing the Supreme Court and abolishing the electoral college. I mean, I don't understand how that is the preservation of democracy. Could you talk about specifically what are the implications and really what's the meaning of, first of all, packing the court and even doing other things like possibly abolishing the electoral college.

Yeah, well, you know, there's an entire chapter in the book on democracy and elections. And what it talks about principally is the case Bush versus Gore. So I was part of the legal team that represented George W. Bush in Bush versus Gore. I was a young lawyer at the time. I was working actually on the George W. Bush presidential campaign. So it was living in Austin, Texas. met my wife Heidi. We met on the campaign. We were in cubicles about 20, 30 feet apart from each other. And if you remember what happened in the year 2000, on election day, George W. Bush won. They counted the votes and he won.

But in Florida, it was very close. And so Al Gore sent in teams of lawyers to challenge the election outcome. And, you know, what you do if you've lost when you're doing an election challenge is you try to throw out the votes of the winner and you try to get more votes. for yourself. And so that's what Gore was doing. He was trying to throw out votes for George W. Bush, and he was trying to find new Al Gore votes after the votes had been cast. I was in Tallahassee. He was part of the legal team from the beginning and was down there the entire time. You know, one of the things I described in the book is, is it was utter chaos. In the war room, we had a whiteboard on the wall that had a chart. There were seven different lawsuits, It's all pending simultaneously, any one of which could cost the presidency of the United States.

And twice the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. So the first time it went to the Supreme Court, we won unanimously. We won nine and nothing. The Supreme Court concluded the Florida Supreme Court, which was a partisan Democratic court, had gotten it wrong. So they vacated that decision. They sent it back. The second time it went to the Supreme Court on the question of remedy, the final outcome, the court divided five to four. By a vote of five to four, the court said, enough is enough.

The ballots now have been counted four times. George W. Bush has won all four times. You can't keep challenging and challenging and challenging and dragging the election out. It's over. Now, the course of that recount was 36 days. 36 days where the entire country and the entire world didn't know who the next president would be. It was chaos. It was uncertainty. And what the Democrats wanted to do is they wanted the courts to decide instead of the voters. They didn't like that the voters had chosen George W. Bush, and so they were trying to get judges to set that decision aside. It's the same thing. I think there's a very good chance. We will face that same kind of electoral litigation after this election. And the Democrats want the courts to rule for them, never mind what the law

says to say Joe Biden wins. And if you want to understand the issues that are really at stake there, the book, one vote away, how a single Supreme Court seat can change history. The book is really, I think, a very helpful tool to understand the Supreme Court. A lot of people know it's important, but you don't necessarily understand what's going on. This book is designed. You don't have to be a lawyer to enjoy it. It's designed to be understandable, readable, readable, interest. and bring you inside, but it also gives you the insight what the election is about in November and what the epic fight over Judge Barrett that we're in the middle of right now. You know, when you're talking to your friends, when you're talking to your family,

you want to understand these issues. And this book, you know, I've got to say it's been really encouraging. It's shot to number one, the top bestseller in the country on Amazon. That is awesome. And I think it's because people are finding it helpful and interesting and fun and readable. So I would encourage folks, go to Amazon, go to Barnes & Noble, go anywhere you get your books, and I think you'll find it both interesting and helpful. Yes, it's extremely, extremely readable and easy to understand.

Thank you so much for writing it. Just very quickly, what are the chances of Amy Coney Barrett being confirmed before the election? I think they are very, very good. I believe the Senate will confirm Judge Barrett. We're going to start the hearings next week. The Democrats are going to do everything they can to turn it into a political circus like they did with Justice Kavanaugh. But I believe we have the votes. I don't think the Democrats can stop it. They're going to yell and scream and stomp their feet. But at the end of the

day, I believe Judge Barrett will be confirmed by the end of the month before election day. And I think that is a major victory by nominating her President Trump was delivering on his promises to the voters. And by confirming her, the Republican majority in the Senate will be delivering on our promises to the voters. Yes, well, thank you so much. Thanks for your fight and what you stand for. Thank you for writing this book. I do encourage everyone to go and check it out, purchase it on Amazon, wherever you get your books. Thank you so much, Senator Cruz. Thank you. Really appreciate it. God bless. You too. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political.

They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. on the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this Steve Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts.

I hope you'll join us.