The Briefing with Albert Mohler - Thursday, August 8, 2024

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.Part I (00:13 - 11:34)Important PSA, Joe Biden is Still President: President Biden is Still Attempting Major (And Even Unconstitutional) Changes in the Last Months of His PresidencyBiden: Forgotten but Not Gone by The Wall Street Journal (Kimberley A. Strassel)Part II (11:34 - 17:37)Petty Politics Guised as a Proposed Constitutional Amendment: President Biden’s Proposed Supreme Court “Reform”Part III (17:37 - 21:48)The New York Times Runs Article Questioning ‘Transgender Care’ for Youth – Are We Witnessing a Major Turn in This Moral Issue? Final Report by The Cass Review (Hilary Cass)Why Is the U.S. Still Pretending We Know Gender-Affirming Care Works? by The New York Times (Pamela Paul)Part IV (21:48 - 25:38)What Happens in California Won’t Stay in California: Governor Newsom’s Horrific Transgender Law in Public Schools Could Be Coming to a State Near YouSign up to receive The Briefing in your inbox every weekday morning.Follow Dr. Mohler:X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeFor more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.To write Dr. Mohler or submit a question for The Mailbox, go here.

It's Thursday, August 8, 2024. I'm Albert Mueller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Oh, by the way, Joe Biden is still president of the United States. It is interesting, and it's a phenomenon of our political experience that given the events of the last several weeks, Joe Biden has basically fallen off the headlines. And by that, I mean, he has literally fallen off the headlines. You look at several editions of the nation's most influential newspapers in recent days. The President of the United States is not on page one. And that's pretty much indicative of the way Joe Biden has now been basically dismissed from current conversation. Now, that's not entirely unusual when it comes to a president who's not running for re-election. Especially by the time you get to this point in a presidential election cycle, everyone's basically talking about those who are running, not the president.

the one who is not. But in this case, of course, there's more to it because of the rather embarrassing way that Joe Biden left the 2024 presidential campaign. More or less, not of his own volition. He was pushed out by his own party, and undecorously so. He was also in a position in which he was basically being dismissed because he was no longer believed to be capable of running a campaign. But if you can't run a campaign, you certainly can't run the White House. But, we also now know, President Biden hadn't been running many things for quite a long time. Pretty much encapsulating the situation with President Biden, Kimberly Strassel, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, wrote an article entitled Biden, Forgotten, but Not Gone. You see what she did

there. The reality is that he, of course, isn't forgotten. And this is where I want to zero win on exactly what Kimberly Strassel very correctly underlines. And that is the fact that he can still do a lot of damage as president. And the most important thing to recognize is that at this stage in a presidency, Joe Biden is in no position whatsoever to influence much foreign policy. And that's simply because even foreign nations and their leaders are pretty much factoring in politically who's coming next and is going to be the power of the future rather than the one whose power is dissipating day by day. But domestically, it also means that there's really no way President Biden can go in the last weeks and months of his presidency to Congress with any kind of major initiative.

So you ask what's left? Well, let's answer your question. What's left? Mostly executive orders and talk. And those two things are not unrelated, of course, but the president can issue some executive orders. And as many have pointed out, one of the problems of that is that even as the president's running out of time, he's not running out of stationary, so to speak. So he can issue these executive orders, and even if they are later reversed, well, the fact is he at least gets the temporary satisfaction and the cheap political thrill of having made headlines by issuing this or that executive order. So what are we looking out for? Well, in particular, we're looking out for what he has been doing in terms of efforts at such things as student loan forgiveness. The president's

dead set on doing what there is no constitutional power for him to do. And that's why several courts have checked his attempts just single-handedly to basically rewrite massive amounts of federal money when it comes to loan agreements for student loans. I've also talked about the fact that that is a very, very dangerous way for a government to do business. I realize that some listening to me today and some loved by those who listen to me today may greatly benefit from the forgiveness of student loans, but that's not a way a responsible country can put a moral financial and, say, borrowing, context into a system. You can't do that because if indeed you're going to have people take out money, which is coming from the federal taxpayer, with the assurance that it's going to be paid back,

and then you just say, never mind, well, guess who's actually holding the tap? And so even as there is the immediate political thrill of someone like President Biden being able to say, look, what I did for you, the fact is what's not acknowledged is what you just did to the nation's economy and to, frankly, future taxpayers. But one of the really big things we need to look at, because this is going to outlive the Biden administration, is what the President of the United States did days ago in Austin, Texas. President Biden, and this was coming just days after he announced he was withdrawing from the race, he went to the Lyndon-Bain's Johnson Presidential Library and the Johnson Center there at the University of Texas in Austin, and there he delivered an address in which he

called for major changes when it comes to the United States Supreme Court. Now, there have been speculation about the president making these calls for what the administration calls the reform of the Supreme Court, but let's face it, what's really going on here is the fact that the political left in this country is very angry at the fact that Donald Trump was able to appoint and get confirmed three justices to the United States Supreme Court. That's a third of the justices. And quite frankly, even as the left is infuriated about the conservative jurisprudence, or at least the turn towards a conservative jurisprudence on the part of the U.S. Supreme Court, the really infuriating thing is that you have justices serving for life.

So when President Biden gave his address, and remember, this is really just about words, but let's remember fellow believers, words matter. The president of the United States, who can't get this accomplished himself, nonetheless wanted to go down in history and frankly wanted to capture some headlines, and he did. Top of the fold, New York Times, for example. He wanted to capture the political initiative and go down as the one who called for at least three major reforms, he called them. I would say assaults on the United States Supreme Court. So let's look at what the president called for.

Number one, the president there speaking in Austin, Texas, called for a constitutional amendment that would strip president. of any presumed immunity for all actions taken while in office, actions that might be construed as relating to political business or the constitutional assignment of the president. Now, understand that there's a lot going on here, and a lot of it has nothing to do with Joe Biden. A lot of it has nothing to do with Donald Trump. It has to do with the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. And it has to do even with debates in the founding era, even as the Constitution was being hammered out. One of the big problems, and You can certainly see this as you look at other countries.

One of the big problems is that you have patterns. Mexico would be an illustration. So would France, as a matter of fact, in which new governments seek to bring criminal charges against previous governments. And so you have more than one French president who's been found guilty of criminal acts while in office. Were there criminal acts? Well, they might have been, but then again, they might not have been, at least as construed within a larger political context. And country by country, this is a huge problem. Now, in recent American political discourse, there are people referring to this as lawfare.

That means using law as an instrument of war, as in warfare. I think this is a very weak term, frankly, for what we're looking at on the stage of world history. Now, just think about this. When you look at the constitutional responsibilities of the presidency, that is the office of the president of the United States, arguably, especially in the context not only of U.S. law, but international law, there isn't a president of the United States, not one of them who could not be accused of breaking some law in the course of doing his work as president of the United States. Now, that's not to say that presidents can't also commit criminal acts, but it is to say that while a president is in office, when he is acting in his office, in his constitutional responsibility, acting as president of the United States. If all of that basically can become the fodder for some kind of criminal investigation,

well, again, just understand the complexity of the law, understand treaty by treaty, statute by statute, and understand that every single president will have to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life. We should say at this point in history, his or her life, understanding that the threat of prosecution is a very real threat. Now, the Supreme Court never confronted that in the Watergate case. But even as recent arguments have brought back to the surface, you know, when you're looking at least a lot of what President Nixon did wrong, and let's just state, he did a lot of things wrong. It is arguable that a lot of what he did would not have been susceptible or vulnerable to a criminal prosecution.

Now, when it comes to things like obstruction of justice and other things, the story might be different. But the point is that it's not just Richard Nixon, just think about Bill Clinton, think about the Iraq war and all that was involved in that, and think about President George W. Bush. But it's every president, frankly. It's not just bipartisan. At the end of the day, this would apply to virtually every single president. And by the way, that would apply to Joe Biden in terms of some future criminal investigation or prosecution. Now, you could say, well, that's actually not historically likely, and yet the reality is you don't know. And the vulnerability here would put our entire constitutional order at stake. Now, you think about the Supreme Court decision that was handed

down just before the recess on presidential immunity. I mean, a lot of us were astounded that it went so far. But as you look at it, you also recognize how in the world could it actually that means the Supreme Court? How could the Supreme Court have drawn a really clear, visible, and understandable line short of the decision they handed down. I think that's the problem. Once you confront that question, honestly, the Supreme Court arguably did exactly what it had to do. Now, we're talking about this right now because the president of the United States said that reforms need to be brought to the Supreme Court. And the first thing he talked about was basically creating a constitutional amendment that presumably might someday be ratified that would reverse a Supreme Court decision. I'll just point out that doesn't

actually have anything to do with reforming the Supreme Court. it has to do with revising the U.S. Constitution. And that's where an amendment or a change to the U.S. Constitution is extremely unlikely, and the president has to know it. He can score some political points, particularly with the left, by grandstanding on this issue, but we at least just need to recognize that's exactly what he's doing. There's virtually no way when you look at the ratification process for a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that anything like that has any chance of passing any time soon. One other thought related to this is that, in a sense,

President Biden would make himself more vulnerable as a former president if indeed such a constitutional amendment were to be ratified. But don't hold your breath because he's not holding his breath. He scored the points by making the speech. What he called for, at least in that particular instance, isn't going to happen. Or at least no time soon. Now, a second big proposal the president made, again, just days ago, even though most Americans probably are blissfully unaware, is for the reform in the

Supreme Court to be extended to limited terms for justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, let's just remind ourselves, no one in recent years came up with the idea of lifetime appointments. It's in the Constitution. It's in the text of the Constitution. So long as they are able to do their jobs, they remain in their office until they either die or they retire. Now, you understand what's going on here. President Biden, president for four years, he got to appoint one justice to the U.S. Supreme Court. Jimmy Carter was president for four years. He got to appoint zero justices to the Supreme Court. Donald Trump, president in his first term, at least, for four years, was able to nominate three justices to the Supreme Court. That's a third of the sitting court. So understand that the call for term limits, and President Biden was specific, he said 18-year term.

for Supreme Court justices. If you take the nine justices, you can just structure that out to one new justice every two years. So if you're elected for a four-year term as president, you'll get to make two nominations to the Supreme Court, two out of nine. And then the next president, two out of nine. The next president, two out of nine. You can understand the attractiveness to a president, but you know what? When he was giving his address there in Texas, President Biden mentioned in terms of his own experience, thinking about the Supreme Court, that he served 36 years in the United States Senate, many of those years on and chairing the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Now, wait just a minute. He served in the U.S. Senate. And remember, that was before,

eight years as vice president, later than that, four years as president. He served 36 years in the U.S. Senate, and he's saying that Supreme Court justices are really mentally able to fulfill only about an 18-year term? It's nonsense, of course, and it's petty politics, but the left loves it. The left really loves it. They want revenge on the Supreme Court. Some of them have gone so far as to call for court packing, like back in the day of Franklin Delanoa Roosevelt, where President Roosevelt sought to overcome a conservative majority on the court there at the mid-century by loading the court with additional liberal justices. But the American people wanted nothing to do with that, because the American people, at least then, were still fundamentally committed to the separation of powers

with three separate branches of the United States government. So it's unlikely that's going to happen. The president and some liberal Democrats seem to think that they can accomplish this, not by forcing a justice to retire at a specific time, because after all, that would clearly violate the Constitution, but by adopting legislation that would separate justices into two categories, those on active service and those on inactive service. But of course, that distinction isn't in the Constitution. It's also not in common sense, and it's not in keeping with honesty. It requires something of an inactive, honest intelligence to believe that this is even a serious proposal. And quite frankly, it is interesting to see how many law professors and specialists on the left have basically said, no, that would require a constitutional

amendment as well. That's not going to happen, or at least it's not going to happen anytime soon. move on. The third reform as package that the president called for was requiring far more rigorous disclosure and the adoption of some kind of external review when it comes to an ethics code for justices on the Supreme Court. Now here's the thing. When it comes to Congress and the executive branch headed by the president, there are ethics codes in place. Now, of course, tongue and cheek, you might say, well, look how effective those have been. But nonetheless, we do recognize in a fallen world that something like those processes and reports need to be in place, and at least there needs to be some way of requiring some level of disclosure. But it's quite a

different thing when you extend that to the judicial branch, and in particular to the Supreme Court. Now, I think arguably, even most conservatives believe that there should be some ethics code adopted by the court, but that's the point. And of course, the court's taken some action, but an even more extensive action may well be called for by the judiciary itself, especially as the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice, and his colleagues look at the situation. But the point is, another branch of government doesn't have the power to enforce that on the Supreme Court. Now, there may be some way of using, say, funding. That's what Congress has sometimes used as leverage against the executive branch.

It might be that someone tries that. That would require, in all likelihood, a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. But it's the kind of proposal that we just might expect coming out of something like a Kamala Harris administration. So time will tell. We'll see. On this issue, just one final observation. And everybody knows this. And yet many in the media aren't even pointing this out.

If you look at these proposals, let's just say that Congress did decide to act. I'm not talking about a constitutional amendment. I've talked about some kind of legislation. Say on term limits or anything else, guess who would have to review it for constitutionality? and how do you think the Supreme Court would rule on another branch of government trying to tell members of the Supreme Court they need to go on inactive service? I think you can do the math and pretty much figure out where that's going to go. Nonetheless, President Biden had at least a brief moment in the sun, but, and the Democrats alone can explain this, when you look at the massive rally just in recent days in which the vice president of the United States introduced her running mate,

and both of them spoke to a very big crowd, and of course they were mainly speaking to the American media and those watching the media. There was one major Democratic name that basically just didn't come up. That name? Joe Biden. That tells us something. It certainly tells him something. Okay, simply a massive issue we need to talk about, and that is where we stand right now, particularly on the issue of the transgender movement and minors, that is to say, children and teenagers. The issues truly never far from the front burner and in moral terms, so you understand why. We're talking about such a weighty issue. But let's just review some of the things that have taken place over the course of the last several weeks.

And honestly, Christians really need to pay attention to these issues. One major development when it comes to the transgender issue in teenagers came late in the spring when Dr. Hillary Cass, who had been the author, by the way, she's one of the most preeminent pediatricians in Great Britain. she presented a major report. First of all, four political authorities there in Great Britain having to do with gender medicine, youth gender medicine in the United Kingdom. And it was a devastating report so much so that as we know, in recent weeks and months and years, Britain has shut down its main youth gender clinic known as Tavistock because they decided that the trans treatments were doing more harm than good. Certainly over the long haul, but in on

honesty, even with a shorter term of evaluation. Now, the issue really exploded on the American scene because Hillary Cass began asking the question of why U.S. doctors are so out of date with the medical trends, the scientific trends, as she made very clear, the results of looking very seriously at these trans treatments, no surprise to Christians, telling young people that they actually are trans and then transitioning them by the use of hormones, not to mention surgical treatments, but in the U.S., still, a lot of surgical treatments, it is basically abusing these children and teenagers. And you have much of liberal Europe that has come to this conclusion. You have the United Kingdom, Great Britain, that has come to this conclusion.

The medical establishment has stepped back. Very interestingly, both major political parties, including the more liberal Labor Party, which is now in power, by the way, in Great Britain, they are in agreement that these treatments should not be considered good medicine. But in the United States, it's very different. You have the major pediatric authorities, the major teenage youth authorities, not to mention the political and academic authorities. They are all still adamantly, entirely pro-LGBQ plus, and always look out for that plus. But the T issue is going to be a crucial moral issue here in the United States.

Hillary Cass, that British doctor, made it clear when she basically called out American medical authorities and doctors asking how they can be so out of date when it comes to the findings of how so-called gender medicine is actually working. The bottom line, it's not. Pamela Paul, very influential columnist for the New York Times, and to her credit in this case, she came out with a massive article in the New York Times entitled, U.S. gender care is ignoring science. Now, when you have a major columnist in the New York Times, and to its credit, the New York Times gave this a half page in the print edition Sunday, July 14, 2024, this is a major development. When you have the New York Times, a columnist for the Times suggesting that U.S. gender care is ignoring science, basically just magnifying the concerns raised by Dr. Hillary Cass. This is a big issue in the United States, and it could represent a turning point in terms of this.

moral fight. Pamela Paul cited authorities such as Riem Asylum, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls who called the Hillary Cass Review recommendations seminal and said that policies on gender treatments, and I'll simply say here, such as the policies here in the United States, have, quote, breached fundamental principles of children's human rights with devastating consequences, end quote. Let's just realize once again, this is a major article in the New York Times about the obsession with the gender revolution and the transgender ideology on the part of American doctors, particularly doctors treating teenagers. But finally, on this issue, we need to recognize that just in recent weeks, the governor of

California, Governor Gavin Newsom, signed what's described as a first of its kind state law aimed at protecting LGBTQ plus students from having their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression revealed by schools without consent, end quote. Well, the governor of California signed legislation saying that school authorities in California cannot be required to disclose to a child's parents what gender identity or personal identity the child is claiming or exercising during the school day. Now, when you think about a subversion of creation order, a subversion of parental order and parental authority, a subversion of the family, it's, honestly hard to come up with anything on this scale. But this isn't threatened. This isn't

proposed legislation. Really no surprise here. This is legislation that was passed by the legislature in California. And even as some were suspecting, he might not. Governor Gavin Newsom, even as there were speculation about a potential Gavin Newsom run for the presidency, he signed the bill into law. Now, I think this is one of the darkest moments when it comes to family law in all of American history. You have a state that says that parents can be kept in the dark on even the gender identity, the names, the pronouns, the whole thing that a child, their own child may be using during the school day. It's basically just a little secret pact between the student and school authorities. Parents have no right to that information. You look at that and you ask,

how in the world can you put children into that school system? How can you have a school system that at least if operating on these principles, it's subverting parental authority, creation order. Who knows where this is going to end? Now, I'm not saying that there's an immediate withdrawal from the public schools of all Christians and Christian families and their children. I am saying this is going to be seen as a major turning point,

and at least from now on, and it's not just in California, because other states are going to copy this legislation. It's going to raise the question, just when does it become impossible for Christian families? to have their children in the public schools. Just how many steps like this are necessary? It is tempting to say, well, you know, this is just one law.

This is just one state, it's one governor. But when you're talking about California, we all know we're not just talking about one state. We're talking about the state that serves as a trendsetter and intends to. We're also looking at a state that has such incredible economic power that it seeks to influence what takes place in other states even by using that economic power and the power, say, to close off California markets, if other state governments don't get in line. Now, again, I'm not saying that that has happened this week or that it's threatened next week where you live,

but I am saying that it's dishonest to look at the last 50 years of American history and argue even for a minute that what happens in California, just to take one example, stays in California. And if you doubt me on the issue, just ask Vice President Kamala Harris. At this point, I think it's safe to say she's California's most famous export. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website at Albertmuller.com. You can follow me on Twitter or X by going to Twitter.com forward slash Albert Moller.

For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbtsbts.t.com. For information on Boyce College, just go to voicecollege.com. I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.