Loading summary
Transcript29 lines
- [00:00]
Ted Cruz
Enough from me. I want to hear from you. We all do. So we are taking your questions here. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
- [00:14]
Michael Knowles
Verdict with Ted Cruz is sponsored by stamps.com if you're looking for ways to skip the trip to the post office and dodge all that hectic holiday shopping traffic, why not save time and money with stamps.com stamps.com lets you compare rates, print labels and access exclusive discounts on UPS and USPS services all year long. Here at Soundfront we use stamps.com to send you merch like that sweet sweet cactus hat to do business on the road and to save time and money. It just makes sense, especially if your business sends more mail and packages during the holidays. Whether you're selling online or running an office or a side hustle, stamps.com can save you so much time, money and stress during the holidays and get discounts on post office and UPS shipping services without making the trip discounts you can't find anywhere else. Like up to 40% off USPS rates and 76% off UPS. Going to the post office instead of using stamps.com is kind of like taking the stairs instead of the elevator. If you spend more than a few minutes a week dealing with mail and shipping, stamps.com is a lifesaver. Save time and money this holiday season with stamps.com, sign up with Promo code Verdict for a special offer that includes a four week trial, free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts, just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page and enter code Verdict. Verdict is also brought to you by amac. Did you know there's a conservative advocacy and benefits organization with more than 2 million members and counting? It's called AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens. AMAC has become one of the most impactful conservative organizations in America. Joining AMAC gives you access to money saving benefits, cutting edge news and a magazine full of insightful takes on today's most important issues. But most importantly, AMAC is working tirelessly to preserve the freedom secured by our Constitution. With a full time presence on Capitol Hill, AMAC is pushing back against the efforts to defund our police, weaken our borders, and replace your freedom with government controls. So stand with me and over 2 million patriots by joining right now at AMAC US Cactus. That's AMAC US Cactus. The benefits are great, but the cause is greater. So join today at AMAC US for forward slash Cactus. Verdict with Ted Cruz is also sponsored by American Hartford Gold. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed everything is getting expensive. We are in the biggest economic crisis since 2008 with a government that's printing trillions and trillions of dollars. Consumer prices are the highest we've seen in 30 years. Inflation is certainly here to stay. And if the government continues its out of control printing and spending, the dollar could continue its free fall and lose its coveted role as the world reserve currency. So how do you protect your money, your retirement, your savings? Well, American Hartford Gold can show you how to hedge your hard earned savings against inflation by helping you diversify a portion of your portfolio into physical gold and silver. They'll even help move your existing IRA or 401k out of the volatile stock market into a precious metals ira. And they make it easy. They are the highest rated firm in the country with an A rating from the Better Business Bureau and thousands of satisfied clients. And if you call them right now, they'll give you up to $1,500 of free silver on your first qualifying order. So don't wait. Call them right now. Call 855-768-1883. That's 855-768-1883 or text Cactus to 65532. Again, that's 855-676-81883 or text Cactus to 65532.
- [04:06]
Ted Cruz
Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz. So wonderful to be with everybody. We have not done a great job on recent episodes in taking questions from our wonderful Verdict audience. We've gotten so wrapped up in the things we're talking about that we have neglected the absolute best part of the show, which is hearing from you, which we will do in one second. But before we do that, we, we have a favor to ask. You need to apply@yaf.org verdict to bring this show to your school. We don't just want to hear from you in the mailbag. We want to hear from you in real life. We had a great time on the fall tour, going all around to Wisconsin, to Texas, to Washington, D.C. we're going to be doing another three schools this spring with Young America's Foundation. So if you want to apply, the deadline is December 15th. Head on over to yaf.org all right, Liz, let's hear from our wonderful listeners in the mailbag.
- [04:58]
Michael Knowles
Thank you, Michael. We have a lot of great, great questions over on Verdict today. As always, if you wanna submit a question for the mailbag portion of our show, you can do so on verdict. Plus, just go to verdictwithtedcruise.com and submit your question. Subscribers over there get exclusive access to be the ones to ask Michael and the Senator and me any question that you want. As I said, we have a lot of great questions. You can always continue to submit them. But let' to the first one, the first one, Senator Cruz, is for you. It is from Jersey. Jersey asks can the federal government, after a person has been tried and judged by his and her peers, retry a case? By what authority or law do they even have that authority and power to intervene in a state's judicial system? What in the Constitution or Bill of Rights gives or retrains the federal government from the power to intervene in a concluded and tried in a court case?
- [05:50]
Liz
Well, that's a good question. So the Constitution protects you from what's called double jeopardy, which is you cannot be tried twice for the same crime. So if you're charged with murder and there is a murder trial and you are acquitted, they can't come back and say, oh, we don't like that result, so let's go bring another murder charge against you. There is, however, an exception to double jeopardy, which is you can be tried for a different crime. And so there's a legal analysis of whether. So for example, let's say you, to use an easy example, you're tried and acquitted of murder, but you also were speeding on the way to the murder. You can certainly be tried and convicted or acquitted of the speeding because those are separate and distinct crimes. When it comes to a federal crime, if it is a separate and distinct crime, you can be charged with it, but there's a legal analysis in terms of whether you're simply retrying for the acquitted conduct and the acquitted crime. So no, on a murder charge, for example. But yes, if they are different and distinct crimes.
- [07:02]
Michael Knowles
All right, Michael, let me pivot over to you, because this is a question that came in specifically requesting clarification from Knowles. JJ4884 says, I know you often criticize libertarians for being too licentious and crazy when it comes to certain moral issues. Are there certain people of certain occupations or fields of interest that cannot be traditionally conservative? That is tech issues? Are there ways you could steel man libertarianism and any prominent libertarians you could stand alongside? That's a great question.
- [07:31]
Ted Cruz
Well, you know, I'm glad to hear you brought up big Tech, because at first when you said that you wanted to know if certain professions just naturally can't lend themselves to virtue and naturally lend themselves to licentiousness, I assumed you were talking about say, prostitution. But working for Big Tech is far, far more disreputable than being a prostitute or a drug dealer or something like that. So I think that's a pretty good example to bring up Big Tech here. Yeah, there are certain fields that, that naturally are just not going to be all that conservative. And I do think it has been a mistake of the conservative movement to try to be all things to all people and to say that you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt me or scare the horses in the street. I mean, this is why we still have drug laws in this country is we're saying there are some things that you can do with your body that we don't think that you should be allowed to do, or actually, for that matter, laws against prostitution. And so now, as we have discussed on this show a number of times, one of the debates on the right is over the influence that libertarianism should have versus traditionalism versus all. You know, conservatives love all their isms. A friend of mine once told me that the obscure political monikers are the right wing version of gender pronouns. So everyone's got one and some people have multiple. And after the second World War, there was what's called fusionism. This was the post war conservative movement put together by guys like Bill Buckley and Frank Meyer. You might call it the Reagan coalition of libertarians and traditional conservatives and Warhawk Democrats. They all had a common enemy in the Soviet Union. They might have hated communism for different reasons, but they partnered together and won the Cold War. And since that time, probably the libertarian side or the neoconservative side has led that coalition. Traditional conservatives and some of the other groups have fallen out of favor, lost some of their power. In 2016, then you saw the more traditional conservative types or the more populous types try to take ground. And so these debates are inevitable. But in answer to your question, would you stand alongside libertarians? I say of course I would. The fact is, politics is the art of inclusion. And the only way you're ever gonna do anything is if you can win elections. And in order to win elections, you need to win 50% of the vote plus one. And there simply are not enough traditional conservatives or enough libertarians for that matter, or enough whoever to win on their own. So you've got to form coalitions. I just think that in some cases the libertarians have had a little too much leeway. And frankly, I even use this term libertarianism reluctantly because I don't think that legalizing all drugs and saying that we have to totally redefine marriage and legalizing all manner of vice and licentiousness is exactly in the tradition of John Locke or Thomas Jefferson or even the 20th century libertarians, certainly not the classical liberals. So I just think we need to be a little more substantive about our views. Not merely the right to freedom of religion or the right to freedom of speech, but actually have something to say and actually something more clearly that we can believe. And I think part of that is just intrinsic to the conservative movement in America. But whatever we've been doing for the past 20 years or so, it doesn't seem to have worked that well. We seem to have lost on every major cultural issue. And so I think we need the courage to say no, this is good, this is bad, this is true, this is false, and stand by those convictions even if they're unpopular.
- [11:10]
Liz
Well, and Michael, let me chime in on that real briefly, which is I think I'm a little bit more libertarian than you are, but I'll go even further right now, Senator.
- [11:19]
Ted Cruz
I think Attila the Hun is a little more libertarian than I am, so I think it's absolutely fair.
- [11:23]
Liz
But I'm going to go even further and praise a libertine which is and by name Bill Maher. Bill Maher. His politics are very different from yours. They're very different from mine. He may be an old school liberal, but Bill Maher is someone who I think might well admit he's a libertine and he defends licentiousness with gusto and pride. And it's an amazing statement of where we are today that Bill Maher as an unabashed libertine is finding himself relatively conservative because and maybe the new impetus for the new fusionism will be the woke anti Americanism of the hard left. Because when Bill Maher speaks out against cancel culture, when he speaks out against Democrats who have lost common sense, when he speaks out against the idiocy of canceling people and correcting your pronouns, or when he speaks out against radical jihad and today's angry left condemns him. Even though Bill Maher and I disagree on a lot of issues, I'm grateful that he has the courage to speak out against the petty tyrants that would silence all of us.
- [12:45]
Michael Knowles
The next question is from Elizabeth P. And I promise I did not pick this question solely based on the fact that we share a name. I picked it cause it's a good question as well. But there might have been a little element of it's not nepotism but you know, some sort of similarity of name. Elizabeth P. Says, please ask the senator to block all efforts by the DOJ to retrial Kyle or to retry Kyle and attach Parents attack parents speaking out at school boards. Senator.
- [13:12]
Liz
Yeah, look, it is a great point. I very much hope we do not see the Biden Justice Department try to attack Kyle Rittenhouse. We had a trial. The jury rendered its verdict. They need to accept that verdict. Now, I. I'm concerned. I think this Justice Department has been wildly political. I think it's, in the first year, been in many ways more political than the Obama Justice Department, which is hard to believe because the Obama Justice Department was deeply politicized. The second half of that question focused on going after parents, and it's one of the worst examples of the politicized Biden Justice Department, where the national association of School Boards wrote a letter to the Biden White House saying, will you please go after parents, treat them as domestic terrorists, use the Patriot act, and silence them. Because, gosh, we really don't like parents getting mad at us for teaching critical race theory. We don't like parents getting mad at us for covering up sexual assaults of girls in bathrooms at school. And so would the Department of Justice go after these terrorists. And just five days later, the Attorney General directed the DOJ and the FBI to target parents and to use tools to go after them. I think it was an absolute grotesque abuse of power. It wasn't law. It was politics. And I gotta say, if we see the Biden DOJ go after Kyle Rittenhouse, it won't be law, it'll be politics. And so the question asks, will you please stop them? I will say, sadly, I don't have a magic stop button in my Senate office. I wish I did. I would, much like Bill Buckley, luckily, perhaps stand athwart history and yell halt or yell stop. But I do at least have a spotlight and the ability to draw attention and call them out. But under our Constitution, it's the executive branch that executes. And so right now, the Biden administration is the only federal branch of the federal government that can bring an indictment. It is the only branch of the federal government that can execute the laws. So I can do all I can to shine a light on them and denounce them. But at the end of the day, until the voters come in and give us a new Congress and a new executive, we're gonna continue to see more and more abuse of power, sadly, from the Biden doj.
- [15:38]
Michael Knowles
And, Senator, this next question is a very good question, as it pertains to, I guess, the legal authority of the chief executive here. This question is from Verdict Hawk, who asks if a court suspends or rules against an action taken by the administration, that is the vaccine mandate, but the administration persists, what remedies are available to the court?
- [16:01]
Liz
So that's a great question. There are a couple of different incidences of that occurring right now. Two come to mind. Number one is the order you just referenced, which is the fifth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals has issued an order staying the effect of the Biden vaccine mandate insofar as it applies to private employers. So the OSHA mandate that applies to employers with 100 more employees, that's been stayed pending litigation. Initially, the Biden White House, the deputy press secretary went out and said, well, you ought to just comply anyway, never mind the court order, just obey anyway. And we've talked on the pod about how I think the Biden White House knows that this vaccine mandate is illegal and it's likely to lose in court. But I think they cynically are counting on most people obeying anyway while the litigation proceeds. And I think that order was an example of, or not the order, the comment from the press secretary was an example of that lawlessness. I will say OSHA did formally suspend the order pending the resolution of that lawsuit. So you did see, ultimately the administration forced to comply even while they're urging people to pretend like the order still has force of law. A second example of this concerns our open borders. And the decision that Joe Biden made that caused the most havoc on our southern border was the decision to end the Remain in Mexico agreement. Remain in Mexico was an agreement Trump negotiated with Mexico where people who came illegally into Mexico were applying for US Asylum. They'd stay in Mexico while the asylum case was proceeding. Remain in Mexico was unbelievably effective. Last year. We had the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years. Biden came in on day one, ended remain in Mexico and the illegal immigration skyrocketed to now the Highest rate in 61 years. Biden administration was sued for pulling out of Remain in Mexico by Texas and Missouri and Biden Admin lost. A district court in Texas ruled that the Biden administration had violated the law by pulling out of the Remain in Mexico agreement without going through the notice and process and the procedural steps required to do that. So they're under an order to re enter the Remain in Mexico agreement. They are dragging their feet and they're basically defying that order. And I've talked to whistleblowers at Customs and Border Patrol, who said that even though this court order has been in place for many, many weeks now, they're just slow rolling it. They're moving unbelievably slowly. So they're telling the judge, oh, we're going to comply. But in particular, with this kind of order, it's easy for a defiant administration to resist it because it requires the cooperation of a sovereign nation. So all they have to do is surreptitiously tell Mexico, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, please tell us you don't want to do this. And then Mexico says, sorry, we don't want to do this. And they say, gosh, Judge, nothing we can do. Mexico doesn't want to do this. I have deep suspicions that's what they're doing. When Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas testified before the Judiciary Committee, I asked him that question specifically. He denied they were doing it. But, you know, you just asked a minute ago, what remedies are there? I'll tell you, the judge has a remedy, which is you can hold. The judge can hold specific members of the administration in contempt for violating the order and can literally incarcerate them. And, you know, I asked Secretary Mayorkas, what would you say to the judge if the judge said, Mr. Secretary, why should I not put you in jail right now for defying my order and slow walking my order? Mayorkas answer is, well, we're trying to obey. We are complying. What he didn't admit is they're doing so unbelievably slowly and allowing the chaos to unfold. Ultimately, they risk. I think there's a real possibility. You see a judge enter a contempt hearing because they have, as a real and practical matter, a contempt for anything holding them to account.
- [20:25]
Ted Cruz
And what makes it even more confusing, especially for a layman like me, is we keep talking about this as a fight between the executive and the judiciary. And we're taught in school that there is the executive and the judiciary and the legislature, but there are a couple of other groups that pop up as well. We sometimes talk about the media as a fourth branch of government, but what about the administrative state? You know, in this case, the judiciary is saying, don't enforce the order. Joe Biden is tasking an administrative agency, osha, to enforce his order. And so Biden says, make employers keep following the order. Osha, the administrative agency, says, okay, we're gonna suspend the order until the court finally decides on this. And so you seem to have a little bit of dissent, even within the executive branch. You know, the president and his administrative agencies all of which says to me, without a law school education, never having argued before the Supreme Court that our government might not work quite the way we were told it does in Schoolhouse Rock.
- [21:21]
Liz
Michael, I was with you right until the moment that you cast aspersions on Schoolhouse Rock. That was going too far. And my God, man, have you no shame?
- [21:32]
Ted Cruz
Have you no decency, sir? Yes.
- [21:34]
Liz
At long last, have you no decency?
- [21:39]
Michael Knowles
All right, our next question. Michael, I'm gonna toss this one to you. This is from. Well, the username of this individual, just to quote it exactly, is Deadass Nemo. Take that or leave it. Here's the question, though. It's a good question. What do Michael and Senator Cruz disagree on politically and culturally?
- [21:54]
Ted Cruz
Well, we touched on something earlier which is Senator said he's probably a little more libertarian than me and because just about everyone, including Genghis Khan, is more libertarian than me, I guess that would be one area of distinction. And then, well, we're both Italian, we were both cigar smokers in terms of legislation, we probably agree on almost every single thing. You know, Okay, I know what we agree. I have a big point of disagreement here. Senator Cruz is a Monte Cristo guy and I'm a little bit more of a Cohiba man myself.
- [22:32]
Liz
You know, I'm willing to split the difference and smoke both.
- [22:36]
Ted Cruz
See, that's compromise.
- [22:38]
Liz
It's the art of the possible.
- [22:40]
Michael Knowles
All right, the last question is from Eileen. This one, topically it's not out there, but I thought it was very interesting because you don't often hear this question. Eileen asks, what are your ideas for an alternative option for our power grid? Senator?
- [22:56]
Liz
Well, there are lots of things we can do to enhance the resiliency of the power grid. Some of it is having a diversity of sources of energy so that you don't have a particular source that goes down and that the system is dependent on that. You have coal fired plants which are widespread and pretty consistently the most reliable. They also pollute the most. You've got natural gas, electricity generation. Natural gas is also very reliable, has much, much lower pollution, much, much lower CO2 emissions, which is a big part of the reason why last year the United States led the world in reduction of CO2 emissions because we shifted a whole bunch of electricity production from coal to natural gas. You've got wind and solar, both of which are important parts of the grid. The state of Texas, a lot of people don't know Texas is the number one producer of wind energy in the country. One of the problems with wind and solar is they're not always reliable. There are days when the sun doesn't shine where it's cloudy or it's rainy, and solar doesn't produce the same power. There are days when the wind doesn't blow, and so wind and solar can supplement your electrical output, but they're not good on days. They're not consistently reliable, and they tend to be highly variable in terms of their output. And in places like Texas, where we don't often have cold, we saw in the winter storm last year, a lot of the wind turbines froze because they weren't weatherized. You can weatherize wind turbines, and in colder environments, they do that. In Texas, they hadn't. And that clearly proved to be a mistake that hopefully is being corrected. And I know the state legislature passed legislation to weatherize the grid. You've got nuclear. I think nuclear has enormous potential in terms of steady, reliable production of electricity with virtually no pollution or carbon emissions. We actually had in the freeze in Texas, one of our major nuclear plants went down, and it went down. I actually went and visited the plant a few weeks ago, and it went down because one small pipe, and it was a little pipeline that transmitted water, was not weatherized. And we're talking pennies to weatherize this pipe. And that one pipe froze, and it was water that was used for a sensor. But because that pipe froze, it triggered the alarms, and it shut down an entire reactor for days and took a bunch of power offline because one pipe years ago had not been weatherized, and it didn't jeopardize the safety of the plant. But because that water pipe froze, the warnings went off and they shut the plant down altogether. They've obviously since weatherized that pipe, but it was a lesson that was not fun learning in the process. I'll say something else that is really potent for resiliency of the grid, and this is going to surprise at least some of you, but it's bitcoin. And we're going to do a subsequent podcast, diving into cryptocurrency and bitcoin, because that's a topic I've been getting very, very involved in. It's a complicated topic. Most members of the Senate don't know a damn thing about bitcoin. Don't know a damn thing about cryptocurrency. I've been in the process of trying to educate myself, learn more about it, meeting with industry experts, but one of the interesting possibilities, and you may be saying, well, what does bitcoin have to do with the grid? And to the extent you think about anything concerning bitcoin and the grid. You think about it as energy consumers. Well, Texas is becoming really the epicenter of bitcoin and crypto mining in the United States and in the world. And part of the reason is if you want to mine bitcoin or other crypto, you need abundant energy. You need low cost energy. And Texas has a lot of that. And there is an opportunity. It's something. A couple of months ago, I spoke at the Blockchain national conference that was in Austin, Texas, and I talked about a win, win opportunity that there is that in West Texas, in the Permian Basin, we've got lots and lots of wells that are right now flaring natural gas. And what happens is you drill an oil well, starts producing oil. Often with the oil, there's natural gas and there's not enough of the natural gas for it to be economical for you to build a pipeline to transmit the natural gas and use it. So instead what they do is they flare it. And flare it literally means they light it on fire. So you go out to West Texas at night and you see these flames like torches that are just burning the natural gas that is being produced alongside the oil that they're piping out and selling. Well, what bitcoin provides the opportunity to do is you can go and set up a bitcoin rig. Think like an 18 wheeler, like the back of an 18 wheeler. You can set it up right there at that oil well. You can capture the natural gas, put it in a generator right there and so produce electricity using that natural gas. That electricity in turn can power a bitcoin rig that is mining bitcoin. So you're capturing it benefits the environment. Because flaring natural gas is not great for the environment. It produces a lot of pollution, a lot of CO2. If you capture it and put it in a generator, it's much better for the environment. You generate bitcoin. It makes instead of economic waste, it makes it an economic profit. And if you have that rig connected to the grid, what it provides is a real opportunity for resiliency because those rigs can be switched on or off in 1 1/100th of a second. So if you have, let's say you have a weather disaster, whether it's a hurricane or a tornado or another freeze, and suddenly the grid, there's a shortage of electricity and the price for electricity shoots up. Well, if suddenly the price on the grid for electricity is higher than the value that would be generated mining bitcoin in a hundredth of a second, they can stop the mining of the bitcoin and put that electricity instead onto the grid. So one way to think about bitcoin and crypto mining is it's like a battery. It's a way of producing excess electricity that can be diverted back into the grid to meet critical needs in. In a time of emergency. So it can enhance resiliency of the grid.
- [29:48]
Ted Cruz
You know, my answer was just gonna be hamsters on wheels. So that's much more interesting, Senator. That's. That's. Gosh. And especially now. I just recently went out and bought a crypto coin. I had not really invested in crypto at all. I don't know anything about crypto or really anything about investing. So I wanted to do it, and I found a coin that was kind of mean about Joe Biden and. And I bought about a billion of them. So I am a billionaire. I don't want you to treat me any differently now, but I'm very excited for this future episode where I will get to learn about the thing that I just invested in, because it sounds like there's a whole lot of possibility there. So I'm very excited about it, but we'll have to hold it until then. Thank you, Liz.
- [30:31]
Michael Knowles
All right, anybody who wants to ask a question for next week's episode, go on over to verdictwithtedcruise.com plus, if you are a subscriber on Verdict, you too can ask a question to Michael Knowles, Senator Cruz, or to me, that is verdict with TedCruz.com plus, if you love.
- [30:49]
Ted Cruz
Watching Verdict, if you love writing into the show, if you potentially love having us to your college campus, you gotta get the merch. You gotta. And you can do that now@verdictwithtedcruise.com shop. That's right, verdictwithtedcruz.com shop. You can get all of the great merch. Not a lot with my face, not a lot with Senator Cruz's face, a lot of cactus. Why the producers made that choice, I don't know, and I won't be offended by it. But you can get your merch today. Head on over to verdict with Ted Cruz.com shop In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz. We'll see you next time.
- [31:35]
Liz
This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom, and Security pac, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations, and candidates across the country. In 2022, jobs, freedom and Security PAC plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.