Michael Knowles (6:36)

Well, this is something that the left wingers have been bringing up. They say, look, there's no constitutional requirement that it be nine judges. So come on, we've changed the number of judges before. What's the big deal? You're making a mountain out of a molehill.

Ted Cruz (6:50)

And it has varied anywhere from five justices to as many as 10. And for the first hundred years or so of our country's history, the number of justices largely followed the number of court of appeals circuits.

Michael Knowles (7:06)

There were.

Ted Cruz (7:06)

The idea was each Supreme Court justice was the circuit justice for that particular court of appeals. So as Congress added another court of appeals, they added another justice. It's been at 9, though for 150 years. So really kind of Civil War era forward, it hasn't moved. And nine has been steady. Now there are 13 courts of appeals, but there's still only nine justices. It's been steady. And the most famous instance of court packing is the one Joe Biden was talking about in the clip we played a few minutes ago, which is fdr, so fdr, four term dominant Democratic president, Great Depression, trying to push through his New Deal. And he was finding different components of the New Deal struck down by the Supreme Court. And he was really frustrated, he was really angry. And so he proposed to pack the court. His plan was for each justice over a certain age. I forget if it was 70 or 75.

Michael Knowles (8:10)

I think it was 70 or thereabouts.

Ted Cruz (8:13)

But that there would be a new justice appointed so you wouldn't kick the old ones. Off, you'd just appoint a new one for all the old guys. And that would have immediately taken the court up to, I think, 15. And it was interesting. Number one, the Democratic Congress, there were big Democratic majorities of both houses. They said, this is too much. We're not going that far, we're not gonna do it now. History. And so they resisted. They said it would destroy the independence. They actually agreed with what Joe Biden just said, that it would destroy the independence of the court. It would politicize the court. One interesting thing about that fight though is actually history. In many ways, FDR may have won that fight anyway.

Michael Knowles (8:57)

So at least the good news here is though, FDR tries to stack the courts and pack the courts rather, and, and he loses. So then the issue goes away for a while, right?

Ted Cruz (9:07)

Well, yes and no. He lost the fight to pack the court. But actually history shows in many ways he won the political fight. So there had been five justices who were striking down multiple New Deal programs. And when he introduced the court packing legislation, one of those justices, a Justice named Owen Roberts, switched his vote. And it's referred to as the switch in time. That saved nine because he had. Justice Roberts had been voting with four other justices. The four others were known as the four horsemen, which was not meant to be a compliment. And Roberts switched his vote in 1937 in a case that upheld the minimum wage laws from the state of Washington state. And there's some dispute among historians about whether Roberts switched his vote because of the court packing plan or not. But whether he did or not, before the plan, there were five justices ruling regularly against fdr. Once FDR launched a full on assault on the court, it switched and they began rolling over for him a whole lot more. So either way, the independence of the court was, I think, substantially jeopardized even by the proposal of court packing. And I think that lesson has a lot of powerful significance for where we are today. I think part of the reason Democrats are threatening court packing is A, I think they mean it and they'll do it, but B, I think they're also perfectly happy to try to intimidate the current justices. You know, we've seen John Roberts flipping his votes in a bunch of cases lately and voting with the liberals. And in fact, Sheldon Whitehouse, a colleague of mine on the Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to the Supreme Court in a gun control case, basically threatening the court that if they didn't do what he wanted, they would have to. I think the phrase he used was restructure the court. But it was a threat of court packing. And what's interesting, and part of the reason I believe that this threat is real, this is not. You know, there's some folks in the media, some folks who think, gosh, they really wouldn't do that. That seems really radical. The biggest indication to me that they really mean it is there is a concerted effort among Democrats and the media to redefine what it means to pack the court.

Michael Knowles (11:58)

Right, right.

Ted Cruz (11:59)

So, you know, we've talked about before the incredible message discipline that Democrats have. About a week ago, the talking point went out that every Democrat began repeating, which is, well, the Republicans have been packing the court for four years. Well, that's not actually what packing the court means. Filling vacancies when there's a vacancy, appointing a justice, confirming the justice. That's not packing the court. Packing the court is expanding the number of justices to put your cronies on there. It's a very different thing. And they're trying to. You're seeing the media exercise this theme. And I think it's all set up to have it be the predicate for next year to say, well, Judge Barrett was illegitimate, Trump packed the court already. So we just need to actually, ap, they recently wrote an article where they said to depoliticize the court. So you want to talk about an Orwellian term packing the court, adding new left wing justices and growing it beyond 9 to, I don't know, 11, 13. Wherever they go is, according to the Associated Press, is depoliticizing the court. The AP wrote this week. And it went on to say. Which some critics have referred to as packing. Well, no, actually everybody referred to it as packing.

Michael Knowles (13:24)

Of course, the term court packing is much older than the term depoliticizing. So what you're telling me. Cause I was just about to celebrate. When you told me there was a Democrat surrender on Amy Coney Barrett today, I thought, oh gosh, this is good news, we finally got a win here. But what you're suggesting is this may have been a tactical surrender. They've got no dirt on Barrett. They're not gonna stop this nomination. It would maybe hurt them if they did. But they are going to use the confirmation of Judge Barrett as another excuse for court packing, which, you know, we played it earlier. Joe Biden in the 1980s may have said that, that he thought it was a boneheaded scheme. But don't forget, Joe Biden has changed his views 180 degrees multiple times over the course of his career. You saw this actually during the George HW. Bush administration where he said it would be a terrible idea to nominate and confirm a judge, a Supreme Court justice, in an election year. Then Fast forward to 2016. He said, it is absolutely essential that we nominate and confirm a Supreme Court justice in an election year. Fast forward to 2020. He's flipped on this again. So I see there's no reason not to suspect something similar would hold for the question of court packing.

Ted Cruz (14:33)

Well, it's not just Joe Biden that's changed his views. Practically every Democrat has. I read a number of these statements today at the questioning. Pat Leahy in 2017, quote, the judiciary Committee once stood against a court packing scheme that would have eroded judicial independence. That was a proud moment. Dick Blumenthal, 2018, commenting on the 1937 Judiciary Committee's statement that it is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America. That was two years ago. Dick Durbin, 2018, 75 years ago, we went through this, and I think the Congress was correct in stopping this popular president named Franklin Roosevelt from that idea. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2019, just last year, here's what Justice Ginsburg said. She said, if anything would make the court look partisan, it would be that one side saying, we're in power. We're going to enlarge the number of judges. Notice she knows what packing is so that we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to. And she went on to say, nine seems to be a good number. It's been that way for a long time. I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court. They all agreed with this until they got very unhappy with the president's judicial nominations for the vacancies that he had. And at this point, I think it is all about power and it's all about, you know, we talked yesterday in the podcast about, I went through the litany of constitutional rights that are hanging in the balance, that are one vote away. All the different rights that I talk about in my book, one vote away, religious liberty, free speech, the Second Amendment. And I explained in the hearing how every one of those rights was hanging in the balance. You know what's amazing, Michael? Both yesterday and today, not a single Democrat disagreed with me. Not a single one of them argued on the merits. Not a single one of them made the case for what their radical justices actually want to do, taking away those constitutional liberties instead. This is about brute power. I think they recognize they can't stop it now. So their plan and their hope is they win in November and then they use brute power to just grow the court and force in radicals who will mandate their view of policy from the court.

Michael Knowles (17:07)

Well, I want to ask you about one particular example of the exercise of brute power, which today frankly, completely overshadowed the confirmation hearings. That was the matter of Big Tech censoring. A new report just came out from the New York Post. It showed emails between Hunter Biden and one of his oligarch pals over in Ukraine. We talked at length on this podcast about the shady business connections between Hunter Biden and these Ukraine energy companies and oligarchs. An email suggesting that Hunter Biden not only discussed this issue with Joe Biden, but actually introduced the Ukrainian oligarch to Joe Biden. This is very explosive stuff during a presidential campaign. Big Tech platforms Facebook and Twitter censored the New York Post report. They offered no evidence to the contrary. They had no reason to suggest that this was not real. They simply said this could be damaging information. Damaging to whom? Damaging, of course, to the Biden campaign. And the craziest part of it all is it worked. It didn't work to stop the conversation, but it worked to stop the spread of this particular link throughout Big Tech. We've criticized Big Tech on this show before. I did not know that those companies would take election interference to. To this kind of a dangerous extent.

Ted Cruz (18:34)

I don't know if this New York Post story is true or not, but it was really quite stunning. This afternoon. Both Twitter and Facebook just decided, we're going to block this story. And by the way, so they would block it a. If you tweeted it. If you tweeted it. If I tweeted it and you linked to the story, if you tried to click on the link, you'd get a warning on Twitter that this link has content that may be harmful, well, maybe harmful to Joe Biden's political prospects, but it's not. And not only that, they did something which I don't recall seeing them have the cajones to do before that being a Cuban term.

Michael Knowles (19:14)

I'll look it up.

Ted Cruz (19:16)

Which is they banned the New York Post itself. So the New York Post publisher, the Post was. And the Post has one of the largest circulations of any newspaper in the country. I mean, this is not, you know, Bob's newsletter. This is the New York frigging Post. And they blocked the Post from tweeting out their own story. And mind you, neither Twitter or Facebook say it's False. Neither of them have. They don't have any evidence that it's inaccurate. They simply made the unaccountable decision, the arrogant decision. We will not allow this to be shared, discussed. And you, the press, can't even put out your own stories.

Michael Knowles (19:59)

And it was so brazen. Senator, the staffer in communications at Facebook who made this decision to suppress the information, he ended up tweeting about it. I looked up his bio. Do you know what his jobs were before he started working at Facebook? He worked for Democratic Political action committees. He worked for Democratic elected politicians. He was a Democrat operative at a supposedly neutral tech platform. Using that neutral tech platform to suppress damaging information about Democrats. Mere weeks to an election, how can we permit that to continue?

Ted Cruz (20:35)

So he has on his Twitter bio that he is an alum of California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer's office. So not just any Democrat, but one of the most partisan left wing Democrats to ever serve. And he's also an alum of the dccc, which is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. It is literally their political arm who exists for one purpose, to elect Democratic members of Congress. That's the Facebook spokesperson explaining their decision. We're going to silence that. Nothing to see here. So I sent today letters to the CEOs of both Facebook and Twitter as chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, setting out a series of questions, asking them who made the decision, what was the basis for it. What other news sites have you blocked and silenced? Have you ever blocked the New York Times? Have you ever blocked the Washington Post? Have you ever blocked anything damaging of Donald Trump? Or is it only stories that you think are damaging of Joe Biden that you're gonna block? And what's interesting about this, you said a minute ago, well, you know, they were able to succeed in this. I actually think they screwed up. I think their arrogance is their pitfall. But because this is now a 10 times bigger story because they blocked it than if they just ignored it, if they'd let people tweet about it. Look, one of the challenges, and we find this, you know, when we did the podcast, talking about James Comey and you know, all the Russiagate and everything, people are tired of it. They're just all the names and Brennan and Comey and it's complicated and people want to tune it out and it's noise. And I get it, look, do this for a living. And it's hard to follow all this stuff. I think this story could very easily have faded into that kind of mist of noise of. I'm not sure what Barisma is anymore, Ukraine or Biden, whatever, Hunter Biden. And I'm not sure it would have gotten a whole lot of attention beyond right wingers who already are gonna vote for Trump, but I'm not sure it would have gotten a lot of attention beyond that, except for Twitter and Facebook censoring it. Where you're sitting there going, okay, if they can block a major newspaper a couple of weeks before a presidential election, publishing what purports to be evidence of corruption at the very highest level of politics, that's a big friggin deal. And I think it actually backfired on him.

Michael Knowles (23:01)

And frankly, that itself is a bigger story, perhaps even than Joe Biden's potentially corrupt dealings with Ukraine. The idea that a few oligarchs in Silicon Valley are now going to control effectively the public sphere, the control of information around the Internet, interfering in an election in a way that the Russians could only have dreamed of, they would never have been able to interfere to that regard. Is there something that we can do? I mean, obviously the Democrats control the House, the Republicans have the Senate and the White House. For now, hopefully that continues. Is there anything that we can do? Or are we basically at the whims of these Silicon Valley masters of the universe?

Ted Cruz (23:40)

So there's a lot we can do. As you know, I've been leading the charge on this for several years. The most of the action that can be done on this is in the executive branch. So I have met and talked with on this topic. President Trump, Vice President Pence, the White House Chief of Staff, the White House Counsel, Attorney General Bill Barr, the Deputy Attorney General, the Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division, the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. I've urged all of them to use the enforcement power of the executive branch. Look, in Congress, we don't have the ability to empanel a grand jury. We don't have the ability to bring indictments. The authority to enforce the law is with the executive branch. And so I've chaired multiple hearings, I shine a light on it. But at the end of the day, the executive has to move. And one of the challenges at DOJ is it tends to be very siloed. Where the antitrust division thinks about antitrust issues, the civil division thinks about civil issues in each little silo. This challenge of tech censorship is a new creature and it doesn't fit neatly into any of those silos. And so I've had multiple conversations with Barr about it. I hope DOJ is willing to press forward, but I'm frustrated We're four years into it and I know the President's frustrated with it. I've had multiple conversations with him. I also think section 230, the special immunity from liability that Congress has given Big Tech is plainly failing. That was based on the notion that these Big Tech entities would be neutral public fora. They're not anymore. They're not pretending to.

Michael Knowles (25:20)

Just today alone, I think obliterated the that pretense. There is no way that you can argue when you are interfering weeks before an election for one political party over another. There is no way that you can argue that you are a neutral tech platform.

Ted Cruz (25:34)

Yeah. Although I will say it all comes down to the election. Because if we start next year with Biden, Schumer and Pelosi, they're not gonna do a damn thing about Big Tech. They want Big Tech to censor your speech. So not only are they gonna go after your speech through the Supreme Court, but they're also gonna go after your speech through Big Tech. You know, we had a couple of years ago, Mark Zuckerberg testify before Judiciary Committee and Commerce Committee, and it was this monstrosity of a joint committee meeting where there were 40 some odd senators. And it was striking in that virtually every senator, Democrat and Republican, was critical of Zuckerberg and Big Tech. And it should have gotten the nervous, wait, why is everyone pissed at us? This is dangerous. But if you listen to what they were saying, the two sides were pissed for very different reasons. Republicans, at least some of the Republicans, were upset at the censorship, at the abuse of power, at the silencing of dissenting views. The Democrats were upset that they didn't censor more. The Democrats were upset on the other side. And basically, if I were to sum up the Democrats argument at that hearing, it was how the hell did you let Donald Trump win? How could you possibly let these crazy conservatives communicate on your platform? Next time, censor more. That's what the Democrats want. So if they win, there's not gonna be any DOJ enforcement, there's not gonna be any enforcement of laws. If the Democrats win, Big Tech is unchecked and it is the oligarchs running things until another election changes things. And so that's one of many reasons why I hope we have a good election and Trump gets reelected because we need to address this is the biggest concentration of power in the world of the media and communication that the world has ever seen.

Michael Knowles (27:32)

That's right. And it's an important point you make that the election is the key here. The 2016 election is the impetus for so much of this censorship. Now this new censorship is coming down to the 2020 election. If we want to control our public sphere again, our public square again, we're going to have to focus on those elections as well. Before I let you go, Senator, I know you've worked now what a 12 or 14 hour day. But before I let you go, I have to get to the mailbag. And there's one question in particular that popped up that I really want to hear your answer on this question is from Steve. Senator Cruz, what did you think of Jim Carrey's portrait of you as a demon entering hell?

Ted Cruz (28:16)

It was pretty surreal. Look, Jim Carrey is a funny guy. I love his movies. Mask was hysterical. What is the one where he plays the newscaster who becomes God for a period of time?

Michael Knowles (28:31)

Oh, yes, Bruce Almighty.

Ted Cruz (28:33)

Bruce Almighty. I mean, Bruce Almighty is side splittingly funny. He's a talented guy. He's gone hard, hard lefty. And he's actually a pretty talented artist. He paints, but he paints these sort of hard lefty, nasty. So he actually, back when I was in my reelection campaign against Beto, he did a painting of me that was really horrible attacking you. So this is the second time he's painted me, which is very odd that Jim Carrey is like, so this, this second one, I'm like bright red and look like a demon out of hell. And actually I'll tell you, I'll answer this question by telling you the story as I had the conversation with Caroline last night. So Caroline is my 12 year old and she is a spirited girl. And she was explaining, she said, she, she said, dad, I, I'm really sarcastic. You wouldn't understand it because you're not sarcastic. Like, wait, what do you mean I'm not sarcastic? I'm a smart aleck all the time. Like what? Like when your 12 year old tells you like you're not sarcastic, it actually kind of hurts. And she's like, when, when have you ever been sarcastic? And then you're just like, okay, all my like dad efforts here are, are not succeeding. And I said, well, all right, I'll give you an example. Can Carolina. I said, you know who Jim Carrey is? She's like, yeah, everyone knows who Jim Carrey is. Of course I do. And I said, well, this week he painted a picture of me as a devil and a demon. She's like, what? Why would he do that? So I actually texted her the demon devil thing. And then what? I, I tweeted the picture out and I said, hey, Jim Carrey, can I get a copy of this for my office? And it was just kind of, you know, I figured, embrace it, have fun. And she's like, dad, that's narcastic. That's not sarcastic at all. She was, if you know how to impress a 12 year old, please tell me. My 9 year old, I can do no wrong. My 12 year old, I can do no right.

Michael Knowles (30:32)

So you know, Senator, everybody is a Critic from the 12 Year Old Girls all the way up to former comedic actors who I have to tell you, I agree with you. Jim Carrey is very funny. Me, myself and Irene is one of my favorite films. I think though these days Jim Carrey is funnier when he's being serious than when he's in these comedy films. I don't know, that's my view.

Ted Cruz (30:54)

Look, his Joe Biden in SNL's pretty funny. I mean, he's a talented actor. I just wish he would do a little less politics, a little more acting. I will tell verdict listeners something. So I'm already planning, don't tell anyone else this, but on Halloween I'm gonna make his painting my avatar on Twitter.

Michael Knowles (31:14)

Well, luckily this conversation is just between me, you and, I don't know, a million or so people. So no one will know. And I look forward to that. I'm sure Jim Carrey will be very honored. We've got a question on court packing that actually we didn't touch on. This is more of a tactical question, I guess for Republicans. This is from Chris. If Democrats win in November and actually do pack the court, do Republicans then respond in kind when they return to power? You know, Democrats grow the court from 9 to 12 and then Republicans grow at 12 to 15, who knows?

Ted Cruz (31:49)

I think we do. I think, of course we do. I think that'd be terrible for the court and terrible for the country. So I don't wanna go down that road. But I think if they go, I think whatever happens, it would go to an odd number just so that you have, you have, you don't have the possibility of a tie. But if they go to 11 or 13, I think we go to 15 or 17 and I think it becomes tit for tat and you end up having the court as this super legislature with a bunch of politically appointed people. And it's an escalation that I think would be a terrible idea. Now, by the way, there is a chance that Republicans are too wimpy to do it, that we let Democrats pack the court and then when we take control, we like, are Scared of our own shadow and don't do anything. I'm hopeful we wouldn't do that because, frankly, if we find ourselves in that picture next year, even though I think they're gonna do it, I'm gonna fight as hard as I can to stop it. And then one of the main arguments I plan to use is if you do it, we'll respond in kind. And if you can't even credibly respond to that, then you might as well just give up right now.

Michael Knowles (32:58)

Right. It's a sort of political version of peace through strength. You know, if you have strength, that will hopefully encourage your opponents not to be so aggressive. But I think you're absolutely right. The idea of unilateral political disarmament is just absolutely mad, and it will only invite more political aggression.

Ted Cruz (33:17)

It's worth noting that Republicans, the first two years of Trump, we had the presidency, we had the Senate, and we had the House. We could have packed the court then. We could have expanded it from 9 to 11 or 13 and just immediately stuck on justice. We didn't do that. I mean, that. And I would have opposed it. It would have been. And no one even suggested it was such a bad idea that no one even suggested it. And so the level of escalation, the fact that the Democrats are going down this road, the fact that Joe Biden is saying the voters don't deserve to know his answer, I mean, it's a really scary escalation. And you don't have to look back to ancient history to say republicans didn't do it. You have to look back two years ago. We didn't do it when we could have. It was the right thing not to do it then. And I hope we don't find it happening a few months from now.

Michael Knowles (34:12)

And it is scary to see even just that redefinition, the normalizing of that idea, as you said earlier, of court packing changing the meaning of the term. You actually just saw this yesterday as a result of the hearings. Senator Hirono was lambasting Judge Barrett for using the term sexual preference. She said this was. Which has been an innocuous term for as long as one can remember. She said, this is offensive. And then over the course of the day, everyone seemed to get on board. The media, leftist politicians, even the dictionary online. I think Merriam Webster's changed the definition of sexual preference to say that it's now an offensive term. That kind of power all in one place is obviously a great threat. And it just shows you what the normalization of a term like court packing could lead us to.

Ted Cruz (35:01)

So Webster's Dictionary in one day, when the Democrats criticize the term sexual preference, they change the dictionary definition the next day. That's a little terrifying. Noah Webster's gotta be twirling in his grave.

Michael Knowles (35:16)

Right.

Ted Cruz (35:17)

A final point, that's just kind of an interesting observation on that sexual preference issue. So both Mazie Hirono and Cory Booker lambasted Judge Barrett for using the phrase sexual preference, which I don't think Judge Barrett meant to convey anything, but just an interesting observation. Both Hirono and Booker insisted that sexual orientation is immutable, which I thought was actually a fascinating point. I was genuinely not aware that it is a position of the far left. Immutable means not capable of changing. Always constant, never changing. I wasn't aware that the far left maintains that sexual orientation never can change, that it is unalterable. And it's an odd position to have when they simultaneously insist that gender is capable of continuously changing. So, I mean, it's. And I don't know that that is the position of the left, but both Hirono and Booker insisted upon it. And I think it's a vestige of some of the arguments that used to be common between left and right about whether. Whether sexual orientation, whether being gay is. Is genetics or a choice. And so when they say immutable, what they mean is innate, but innate is different from immutable. To say you can never at any point change your orientation. I just thought it was a fascinating observation about the lack of introspection and the incoherence of the left's views on sexuality more broadly speaking.

Michael Knowles (36:58)

Well, of course, I mean, just to put it in very simple terms, if a gay man has a homosexual orientation, that can't ever change. If he then transitions and identifies as a woman but his preference or orientation doesn't change, then is he still. He's not a gay man anymore. You can't have those two things at once.

Ted Cruz (37:24)

Who knows? It's not reasoned. It's ideology. They state it as a virtue signal. So when they said immutable, I don't know that they're actually focused on what that word even means. It just was sort of a. I sent out a tweet yesterday. Just being like this is curious. This is odd.

Michael Knowles (37:42)

Well, I think if they don't know what the word means, they might very likely redefine it very soon. That does seem to be, you know, we have much more mailbag to get to. But alas, Senator, we are out of time. I can't make you work a 13 hour work day today. So we will be back again on Verdict. We will save questions until next time. Please to everybody do send your questions in. We love reading them. We like bringing them up on the show. Thank you of course to everyone for subscribing. If you haven't subscribed yet, be sure to do it. You can subscribe, as you know on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify. You can subscribe on YouTube until the big tech overlords shut us down. But until then we will be on all of those platforms. Thank you as always for listening, Senator. I will see you next time. I am Michael Knowles. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.

Ted Cruz (38:28)

Foreign 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.