← The 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson
The 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson
The Cloakroom Preview: An Intentionally Anti-Democratic Voting System
00:24:38
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- [00:01]
A
Hi guys, Liz Wheeler here. So after we finish recording Verdict, every week Senator Cruz and I sit down and get into the nitty gritty of it all on our Verdict plus series called the Cloakroom, where we look at political issues through a specifically legal lens. And what I want to do today is offer you a sneak preview of the latest episode of the Cloakroom on Verdict. Plus you can also join us on a weekly basis by going to verdict with TedCruise.com plus if you use my promo code cloakroom, then you can watch for free for the first month of your annual subscription. That is verdict with TedCruz.com/promo code cloakroom. And without further ado, here's a sneak preview of the Cloakroom on Verdict. Hi guys. Welcome back to another episode of the Cloakroom. I'm Liz Wheeler. I'm sitting here with Senator Ted Cruz. And Senator, I wanna start today just by saying congratulations, we did it again. The left, the mainstream media is up in arms over something we talked about right here on Cloakroom last week, the cancellation of student loan debt. So I think we should start the show just by welcoming the Washington Post and Business Insider who wrote an article about your comments, your legal analysis of whether what Biden did with his executive order canceling student loan debt, whether it's legal. They joined the ranks of CNN and MSNBC who came to Verdict last month when we were talking about Obergefell because of what Clarence Thomas wrote in the Dobbs in his Dobbs concurrence. So before we get started on the rank choice voting, which is a fascinating topic that Verdict plus fans have been asking about, I wanna ask you, why do you think that the mainstream media is so up in arms about the legal analysis? Cuz that's what we were talking about, right? Not even the politics, the legality of the thing. Do they know that it's illegal?
- [01:45]
B
Well, they seem to. You look at the Washington Post story they wrote about Cloakroom and they basically acknowledged that it's contrary to the law. But we had an honest and candid discussion about the legal impediments there would be to getting a court to reach the merits of the dispute and in particular the problem of establishing standing. And look, the press likes it when any Republican discusses any impediment to principled arguments prevailing. They like that. Gosh, wait, this illegal student loan giveaway, maybe it survives. I will say since we did the last Cloak Room, we talked about different scenarios of who might have standing. And I actually reached out to one of the top Supreme Court litigators in the country is a dear friend of mine and he and I were brainstorming a little bit more on standing after we did the cloakroom last week. And he came up with one more scenario, one other group of people that would have standing and I think it's probably the strongest case for standing, and that is a student loan processor. So a company that is processing student loans and the reason they would have standing is the consequence of forgiving these loans, and particularly the loans that are forgiven down to zero, is that those companies would face, as I understand it, a very significant drop in revenue. That it is real money out of their pocket because of the illegal forgiveness of the debts. That would almost surely clear the hurdle for standing. The downside is if that you have someone that, that, that that is processing student loans and administering student loans, they're doing business with the federal government. So they may not be willing to sue because they don't want to piss off the Feds, but legally they would have a quite a strong argument for standing to be able to make the legal argument. And if it gets to the merits, I think the executive order gets struck down. I think it goes to the Supreme Court and has probably struck down 6, 3 the the same margins we saw on other lawless assertions of power by the Biden White House. So there is one group of plaintiffs that, that likely has standing. But, but time will tell whether they will will have the courage to be willing to bring lawsuit to, to press the claim.
- [04:21]
A
Well, maybe it'll be courage paired with how hard their business is hit if they actually are decimated and they don't really have a business left to risk if they challenge the Fed. That's, that's very interesting. Maybe we should just pause right here and send this little update to the Washington Post and this little update to Business Insider so they can update their articles to make sure that it's fully accurate. Exactly how we Republicans are going to challenge them.
- [04:43]
B
So. But can we make sure that the Washington Post are paying subscribers? I mean, I mean, they do need to pay to keep the lights on here.
- [04:50]
A
Of course. Of course they, well, I mean, they're here right now. They watched last week. So there you go. Okay, this week I have a really interesting topic. So Republicans unfortunately lost a seat in the House of Representatives in Alaska of all places. There was a special election in Alaska and the Democrat ended up winning, defeating Sarah Palin, former governor, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. And this was a little bit of an anomaly in Alaska because of the structure of their voting system, they have ranked choice voting. Actually let me back up. In their primary systems they have jungle primaries, which means it's not sorted by party. Republicans don't go vote for a Republican, Democrats vote for a Democrat. Everyone's in this primary together and then the top three, four people compete in the general election. And it's ranked choice voting, meaning you have to have over 50% of the vote. It's not just the person with the most, you have to cross that threshold. And if someone doesn't cross the threshold, which no one does, when you have four people, then you go to the ranked choice, you pick a second and a third choice. It's very messy, it's very weird. And it resulted in Even though the two Republican candidates combined had 60% of the votes and the Democrats combined had 40% of the votes, the Democrat is going to Washington D.C. give me your top down zoomed out analysis of I guess ranked choice voting. Like what's going on here?
- [06:11]
B
Well, ranked choice voting I think is a terrible design and it is intentionally anti democratic. So you gotta understand where these so called reforms came from. They come from enlightened, good government folks that want one of two things to happen. They either A want Democrats to win or B at the very minimum they want moderates to win. What they don't want to win are conservatives. All of this is designed to stop conservatives from winning. And the reason you see these lefties pushing these reforms is that when you actually have free and fair elections and the voters vote with some regularity, they vote to elect conservatives. And so this is all designed to rig the election to make it incredibly difficult to elect a conservative. This is designed to change the rules. It is in the same general family as ballot harvesting, as universal mail, in voting. All of these things are designed to make it harder for a Republican to win, harder for a conservative to win. And it the reason they're implemented is the so called reformers don't like what the voters do when they're actually given a straight up choice. So you look at this election, number one, you had the jungle primary, you had all of the Republicans and Democrats on the ballot together. If you had like most states had a Republican primary and a Democratic primary, then Republican prime voters could select their choice, their preferred candidate, Democrat voters could select their choice and you would have one major party nominee from each party. The reason that you see places like California do a jungle primary is they recognize, wait, conservative Republicans win primaries and then crap, when they win primaries, they turn around and win the general election. So let's do the jungle primary to make it harder for that conservative to win. Alaska, though, did put the whole thing on steroids with ranked choice voting. Because if you look at the numbers and here, let me pull up the numbers. So 60% of the voters voted for Republicans. However, the breakdown. This is taking me a second. All right, so the first round of voting, 40.2% voted for the Democrat, 31.3% voted for Sarah Palin, and 28.5% voted for Republican Nick Begich. So if you add up Palin and Begich's number together, you get right at 60%. So 60% of the voters voted Republican, 40% of the voters voted Democrat. What's the outcome? The Democrat gets elected. Why is that? Well, under ranked choice voting, the third place finisher, who, who was Nick Begich, he's third, so he's eliminated. And they look to the voters put a second choice. The Begich voters put a second choice, and they allocate those second choices to whomever they put. Well, as it so happens, 50.3% of the Begich voters put Sarah Palin as their second choice. So that. So half of Begich's votes got allocated to Sarah Palin. 28.8% put Peltola, who is the Democrat, as their second choice. And then what really had a big impact, 20.9% didn't put a second choice. They voted for Begich, and they left it blank. The consequence of this is even though 60% voted Republican, a Democrat gets elected. And it's that, as I said, is by design. The people who put this in place wanted either Democrats to win or at the very worst, moderates to win.
- [10:21]
A
So you compared this to ballot harvesting or vote harvesting, which I find very interesting, because ballot harvesting and vote harvesting is something that has to be dealt with at the state level, and many states have outlawed that practice. Is ranked choice voting something that should be outlawed by states to protect against. Well, this outcome?
- [10:42]
B
Absolutely. Look, it's a bad way of doing elections. It doesn't present an election is a binary choice. At the end of the day, you're choosing between one person or another, and only one person can win. And what happens with ranked choice voting is you end up. You look at some of the game theory in economics, you end up with people voting in ways that the outcome is perverse and backwards. Election should be about making choices. And the people who push these reforms know that. They know that the outcome, the reason they want to change the way elections are done is they don't like how the voters Vote. They're trying to prevent the voters from voting the way they would vote if they were given the ability to do so in an ordinary election. I will say, by the way, as an aside, on an infinitely less consequential stage, I actually participated in a ranked choice voting election in which I lost the election by one vote. And I'll tell you this story.
- [11:59]
A
As I said, it was.
- [12:01]
B
It was infinitesimally less important, but it was. When I was in college, I was at Princeton, and I was very active in the American Whig Class Office Society, which is the world's oldest debating and political society. I was the chairman of the Classophic Party, which was the Conservative Party that was founded by William Patterson, who was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The American Whig Party was founded by James Madison, the father of the Constitution. I ran for president of the American Whig Class Office Society, which is the entire debating society. Unfortunately, Whig clio used ranked choice voting. So at the end of the first round of voting, I was leading. I had 52 votes. The second place candidate had 44 votes. So I had won by a sizable margin on the first round. The third place candidate had 19 votes. Because the third place candidate was eliminated, those 19 votes were reallocated. Of those 19 votes, five had me in second. So my 52 went to 57 and 14 had the second place finisher as their second choice. And so his 44 went to 58 and I lost 58 to 57. Uh, and I gotta tell you, at 20 years old, it sucked then. Uh, and I gotta say, it sucks for Sarah Palin. Sarah is a friend of mine. I like Sarah. Uh, I am sorry for the outcome that happened. That and. And it sucks even worse for the people of Alaska.
- [13:38]
A
That's funny that you phrase it like that, because when you're telling this story about losing by one point, that's the only thing that came into my head. Just, wow, that really sucks to lose by one point. Even if it's a college debate society that really sucks to lose in this way. How did Alaska specifically end up with a system like this? Who is the they that are behind these reforms?
- [13:56]
B
So there's some dispute about that, but there was a referendum effort to put it on the ballot, and the voters voted for it. Now you could say, well, gosh, isn't that consistent with democracy? Yes, in a sense, the voters put it in place, but I am not at all convinced the voters understood what the consequences would be. I'd be willing to bet people are astonished today that 60% of the voters in Alaska voted for a Republican and the result is the Democrat wins. This is designed to deceive voters. And I think election mechanisms that are designed to deceive voters are not good mechanisms. They frustrate the operation of democracy.
- [14:43]
A
It seems like this is one of those things that conservatives and states across the country, not just Alaska, should check and make sure that this is not an effort that's being exerted in their localities, in their states to make sure to protect against this. Because that's the thing. That's what we saw with Mark Elias, right, in the summer of 2020 before the presidential election, when all of these changes to election laws in different states, especially the swing states like Pennsylvania and Arizona and Georgia and Wisconsin, people didn't really see it coming until it was too late. This might be a signal to people to make sure your state's not doing this so that it doesn't become too late.
- [15:17]
B
And Liz, these kinds of reform, jungle primaries and ranked choice voting, or in Alaska's case, both combined together, they are often supported by self described moderate Republicans because those moderates are frustrated that when they run in primaries against conservatives, more often than not they lose. So like, all right, let's change the rules so that we don't lose. So moderate Republicans sometimes support these reforms to prevent conservatives from winning, but when the moderates are doing so, they're also rolling the dice because they're increasing the chances of that the Democrat wins also and they're willing to say, all right, in order to stop the voters from electing a damn conservative, I'm willing to hand it over to the Democrats and the nuts that I don't think the voters want that outcome, but I do think there's some politicians who are okay with that outcome.
- [16:14]
A
Well, that's what happens when you're a pol. When, when politicians don't have principles, then they're willing to hand it over. If they lose power themselves, they're willing to hand it over to people with even fewer principles. Let's do a question from Verdict plus, because this is a great question and I'm interested in your answer as well. It's from Dade Goforth who says, what are the chances that the new assault rifle ban bill passes the Senate? If it passes, would it be constitutional? What would it mean for everyday Americans trying to buy guns in the future? He says, I've been listening since day one and love the podcast. Keep up the good work.
- [16:47]
B
Thank you. So the chances that the assault, the so called assault weapons ban passes the Senate at Least right now are essentially zero. It's not gonna pass. The reason it's not gonna pass is as long as we have the filibuster, it would take 60 votes to pass. It's not gonna get 60 votes. The last time we voted on it was 2013. Dianne Feinstein was carrying it at the time. It was her bill. It was a Democratic Senate. There were a majority of Democrats in the Senate. We voted on it, and it only got 44 votes on the floor of the Senate. So even though Democrats had a majority on the floor, it got zero Republicans and it didn't get all the Democrats. There were several Democrats who voted against. Does speak volumes that in the wake of the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, the Democrats didn't even try to push it. I think they recognized they don't have the votes. They may not even have the votes in their own conference, but there's no way they have the votes on the floor of the Senate. And it's why they pursued other gun control strategies instead of a so called assault weapons ban. One of the reasons why it didn't get a lot of support. So we had one in effect for 10 years and it expired. And the Justice Department studied it. You know, came out of Bill Clinton, was in effect 10 years, it expired. The Justice Department studied it and concluded that it had no statistically significant effect on violent crime, that it didn't actually reduce violent crime in any measurable impact. And I'll tell you a story about that. So 2013 on the Judiciary Committee were having hearings and Dianne Feinstein is pitching her bill and I'm arguing against it. And I'm a brand new baby freshman. I mean, I'm just there. And in fact, when she and I are arguing at one point she loses her mind and says, I am not a fifth grader or sixth grader. I am not a sixth grader. She gets very mad because I asked her a substantive question about the Second Amendment. And apparently in the Judiciary Committee, you're not supposed to do that to another senator. And subsequently I was debating with Al Franken, truly a charming soul. And that was tongue in cheek if that did not come across. And I pointed out that doj.
- [19:16]
A
We'll see from the Washington Post headlines after this whether the humor came across or not.
- [19:22]
B
Well, I pointed out at the hearing that DOJ had studied the assault weapons ban that was in effect for 10 years and concluded it had zero statistically significant effect on violent crime. And Al Franken came and argued that's not true. That's not true. It had an enormous effect. I don't remember what he said, but he was quite worked up saying that what I said was not right. And I in turn responded that, you know, given this study, anyone who argues that there is a measurable effect on violent crime is engaged in sophistry. A couple hours later on the Senate floor, I'm standing on the Senate floor and Al Franken runs up to me and said, you accused me of engaging in sophistry. I didn't know what that meant, but I went and looked it up and now I'm really mad. And I gotta admit, I was genuinely speechless. I'd like. Okay. And Al later wrote a book entitled Giant of the Senate. I joked at the time that it was a perfect title. It was only missing one word. But he had an entire chapter in his book devoted to me that was called Sophistry. So I found it quite amusing that for lefties, they seem to believe that if they. His whole book tour, he basically just did a stand up routine insulting me, which apparently works to sell books to liberal Democrats. Like, like, like it is. I think he, he thought it was a good way to sell books.
- [21:05]
A
Well, I mean, in a sense, you almost have to respect him for admitting that he didn't know what the word meant. That's really hilarious. But it's also hilarious to see liberal Democrats who are anti free market taking advantage of capitalism to sell books based on their insults against you. You gotta love the whole thing. One last question. So you say that the assault rifle ban has very little chance of passing in the Senate. What about the gay marriage bill? What are its chances?
- [21:30]
B
I don't know. That is actually a good question. We. I think the odds are good we're going to vote on it in the next month. Schumer said he's going to bring it up for a vote. He hasn't done it yet. It could be as soon as next week. He hasn't told us what we're voting on next. And Schumer controls the floor. For it to pass, they've got to hold all the Democrats and they've got to get 10 Republicans. Several Republicans have publicly said that they would vote for the bill to get to 10. I can tell you we are having vigorous arguments in the conference about it. I and several others are pushing for an amendment to the bill that would be a strong protection of religious liberty because the bill as written would have enormously harmful consequences for religious liberty. It would result in 501c3 tax status being Denied to universities that embrace a biblical definition of marriage, to churches that teach a biblical definition of marriage, to charities that follow a biblical definition of marriage. This bill without a religious liberty protection would have massive consequences across our country. Weaponizing the Biden administration to go and target universities K through 12 schools, social service organizations, churches, and strip them all of their tax exempt status. That is enormously consequential. I don't know if we'll succeed in getting the vote on that amendment and I don't know how the vote will shake out, but I'm a no regardless. But this what its prospects of success are on the Senate floor. I hope it doesn't pass, but I don't know what will happen.
- [23:35]
A
And shame on any Republican who claims to be for limited government but would support a bill that targets people of faith.
- [23:43]
B
I can tell you I'm arguing vociferously to my colleagues. Look, I get some of you, you know, are in purple states and you want to show how, you know, touchy feely and you are. Okay, great, put out a statement. But don't vote for a bill that will be used as a weapon to target and persecute churches and universities and religious schools and Catholic charities. The harm from this bill would be massive.
- [24:13]
A
It's a shame to see it. It really is sad to see it. And the fact that Schumer's not telling you when you're going to vote on it I think tells us what we need to know. To the Verdict plus Community. This is the second cloakroom in a row that we've used or that I've chosen to use your topics. We did the convention of the states and then we did ranked choice voting. So keep those ideas coming. I love to hear what you guys care about, what you're thinking about, what questions you have. I'm Liz Wheeler. This is the Cloakroom on Verdict.