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I can't wait for 2020 to be over. This year has been not a good one. It's been a pretty awesome year for us in some ways on this program. We've been very blessed, but the country has suffered a lot. We've lost friends, we've lost family members. We have seen the cost of the lockdowns. We saw our entire electoral system compromised in front of us. It has not been a good year overall. But of course, in all years like 2020, there's plenty of things to take away and learn from and plenty of things that hopefully we'll never do again. But I want to congratulate somebody. I want to congratulate Senator Josh Hawley. Senator Josh Hawley is now going to officially be more hated than Senator Ted Cruz. It's pretty incredible when you think about it. I think Senator Josh Hawley is about to become the most hated United States senator in America. Now, that really says something because the activist media have. They've gone out of their way to demagogue and attack Rand Paul and Ted Cruz throughout the years. Today, Senator Josh Hawley has announced that he will object to the Electoral College results on January6. Josh Hawley has come out and said that he will put forth an objection, a motion that says he does not believe that the Electoral College results are without flaw. Senator Josh Hawley said the following, quote, following both the 2004 and 2016 elections, Democrats in Congress objected during the certification of electoral votes in order to raise concerns about election integrity. They were praised by Democratic leadership and the media when they did this, and they were entitled to do so. But now those of us concerned about the integrity of this election are entitled to do the same. Senator Josh Hawley continues by saying, quote, I cannot vote to certify the Electoral College results on January 6 without raising the fact that some states, in particular Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws. And I cannot vote to certify without pointing out the unprecedented effort of mega corporations. Good for you. Including Facebook and Twitter, to interfere in this election in support of of Joe Biden. At the very least, Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity of our elections. But Congress has so far failed to act for these reasons. I will follow the same practice Democrat members of Congress have in years past. And to object during the certification process on January 6th to raise these critical issues. Now this is in direct defiance to Senator Mitch McConnell. This is in direct defiance to Senate leadership. There were many articles published over the last couple days kind of as warning shots towards Republican senators, basically saying, do not do this, do not go down this path. You're saying, what are you talking about? I thought the election is over. Wasn't that happened in early November? Or some of you are probably saying, isn't that what the Electoral College is for? What does Congress now have to do with this? So let me begin by saying this. This is not an ideal set of circumstances. I don't love the fact that Congress is now getting involved in our elections. I don't. This is not something that I have great delight in. This is not something that should be taken lightly. Because as soon as you give the power of elections to a legislative branch, you almost become a parliamentary system. You lose the idea of a republic and a state based republic as that. That's a very dangerous road to head on. However, unusual times call for unusual measures and nothing that is being discussed right now in any way whatsoever is unconstitutional. Some people are going to be laying the criticism that this is an unconstitutional. No, no, no. It's unprecedented outside of the election of 1876, which we'll dive into as a kind of refresher course. As we've talked about here before, it definitely has not been done in the last hundred and fifty years, but it's not unconstitutional. Now there is an argument to be made that Congress does not have this authority that has not been decided by the U.S. supreme Court. I'm gonna do that argument from a devil's advocate standpoint, but let's just go through the process. Just for all of you that are saying, I'm confused, what does a senator from Missouri have to do with election results from Pennsylvania? Fair question. Okay, so when you vote on election day, you're not actually voting for president, you're voting for electors to go vote for president for you. So you go vote for human beings that then go represent you in the Electoral College. According to the United States Constitution, those electors are chosen by state legislatures. But it is the people that directs it. Okay, so the Electoral College met in December. The state certified their results. We know that should not have happened, but it was weak Republicans that were trying to save face. The Electoral College certifies the results. Now, typically in a kind of fourth grade civics class, that's kind of where the conversation would end. But let's go to the AP level, right? Let's go to the higher graduate course level of American civics. There's one more step that typically is just a procedural step, and it's a very important one. It's in the Constitution. Let me read this word for word. So you have all these electoral College results, And then on January 6th, a bunch of people wearing dark suits carry in the results in boxes, literally, and they follow this protocol, quote, the President of the Senate. Let's stop there. Who's the President of the Senate? If you just said Mitch McConnell, you're wrong. The President of the Senate is the Vice President of the United States. The President of the Senate is Mike Pence. He is the only member of the executive branch who also has a leadership role in the legislative branch. Dick Cheney made the theory, I believe it's called Unitary executive theory, very famous when he used that as an excuse for, I believe, not disclosing financials, something of that sense. Anyway, the President of the Senate is Mike Pence. So for just kind of substitutionary reasons, I'm going to actually just say, Mike Pence shall, in the presence of the Senate and the House, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest number of votes for for president shall be President. So it's majoritarian shall the president, if such number of majority of the whole number of electors appointed, and if no person has such a majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted as for President, the House shall then choose the president immediately by ballot for president. So there is a lot there. Let's take this piece by piece because there's gonna be a lot of conjecture and quite honestly, a lot of bluster in the next couple days. And I want to make sure you get the information of exactly what's going on here. Because Senator Josh Hawley objecting is not just some insignificant act of political feeder. This is a very big deal. He says, I'm objecting to the results. What? What does that mean? Well, unless you're a seasoned constitutional scholar or you listen to every single second of every single episode of the Charlie Kirk show podcast, you might be a little confused. And that's okay, because I spent a couple hours this morning and last evening diving into the actual constitutional intent, calling around to a couple constitutional scholars that I know that are very, very credible kind of understanding what was the founder's intent behind all of this? And is this wishful thinking? What is the process here? Okay, so as we just read the entire paragraph from the United States Constitution The President of the Senate shall basically, in the presence of the House and the Senate, open all the certificates and the vote shall be counted. Person having the most votes becomes President from the Electoral College. Okay, we know how the Electoral College works. That part's kind of completed. Okay, so Senator Josh Hawley is saying, I'm going to object. We already have Congressman elect Madison Cawthorn, who in four days will become the youngest Congressman ever elected to the US Congress. Who's objecting? Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks, and I think Louie Gohmert is as well. And so the way that the statute is written, let me be very clear, statute, not law. The statute, which is House rules, it's precedent. If a singular member from the House and a singular member from the Senate objects, then it goes into two hours of debate. Now, according to one constitutional scholar that I spoke to, it's two hours per objection. So if Madison Cawthorn and Matt Gates and Mo Brooks and Louie Gohmert all object, that would be eight hours of debate. Okay. And other people have said that as well. We've heard that dozens could potentially be joining. If that's true, it could be 130 hours of debate per member, two hours per objection. That remains to be seen. Now, the paragraph that everyone is zeroing in on is admittedly open to interpretation. The only precedent that we have is the election of 1876, the election of a little bit, maybe 1960, if you want to stretch it a little bit. But 1876 is probably the best example of this. In 1876, you had Rutherford be his up by one electoral vote to Samuel Tilden, Democrat and the House. And the House was Democrat, if my memory serves me correctly. And the Senate was Republican, and they were unable to determine a winner. And so it went to the House and the Senate just like it's about to, and they became gridlocked. And that ended up becoming the great compromise of 1876, which ended up basically ending Reconstruction in the south, really bad thing, and then ended up being a winner for the Republican President Hayes. And so that compromise was because of the gridlock in Congress. Okay? And so let's read this word by word. This is super important because this is about to be the number one news story. And only here on the Charlie Kirk show are we actually diving into this. Okay? The President of the Senate, Mike Pence, shall, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted. That sentence is about to be torn apart, dissected and interpreted by every major Cable news constitutional pundit, because that sentence could go any way and the Supreme Court has not really ever ruled on what that sentence actually means. So let's, let's dive into this. In the presence of the Senate and the House open all the certificates and the votes shall then be be counted. So some establishment Republicans and people that I do have a lot of respect for are saying that the Constitution says we're just supposed to be there and watch. We don't have the constitutional authority to interject or to intercede. But then that asks the question is why would the Founders have you there if they didn't want you to have any sort of power? Why would the Founders want the Senate and the House to be present if it's nothing more than just a spectator sport? The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and the House open all certificates and votes shall then be counted. So the President of the Senate, the Vice President of the United States is in charge of accepting the electoral college results in Congress. Now, by a matter of statute, the members of the House and the Senate have the ability have the freedom to object. Now this is not in the U.S. constitution. That is statute. It has never been litigated up to the US Supreme Court and has never been challenged. Now the election of 1876 did show that we have precedent that Congress can be a last line of defense against electoral college results. Now let me be very clear. I don't like the idea of a legislative body all of a sudden becoming the determining factor for a presidential election. I don't like that it is not the system of government that our Founders intended. However, alongside of that, the Founders put in this fail safe for extraordinary measures, we have the election of 1800, 1876 and 1960 to show us that Congress can get involved and should get involved. So the devil's advocate argument, the opposite argument, that certain people in the Republican establishment are going to say. They're going to say this is wholly and completely unconstitutional is what they're going to say. And to just make their argument for them, they'll say that this paragraph, the President of the Senate shall, and the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives open all the certificates and the vote shall then be counted at hard stop. They're going to say nowhere does it say about objection. It doesn't say about stopping. It doesn't say about process. None of it. So. Right. However, two points of argument here. And then this is the stuff that Federal judges and U.S. supreme Court judges would have to wrestle between. The idea of original intent and textualism. And of course, whatever revisionist Sotomayor Kagan nonsense that they'll write is this is that if the Founders wanted the House and the Senate to be there, did they really want them to be there with no power at all whatsoever? I find that very hard to believe. The only arguments as to why the Founding Fathers and the Framers would want the House and the Senate members to be there without any power is, is just so that they could witness the results and they could go back to the people and say the results were actually counted correctly. They were not counted in a corrupt fashion. However, the power really does rest and lie on the President of the Senate. So the President of the Senate, the Vice President has an incredible amount of power in this regard. In the election of 1960, it was John F. Kennedy versus Richard Nixon, a very famous election for a variety of different reasons. It is most commonly taught in government class and civics class as being the election that was more on television than on radio. Especially during the debate of Nixon versus Kennedy. It was the young Catholic Kennedy versus the establishment Richard Nixon, who was actually Vice President at the time. It's a very important point. And so the election was very tight in a lot of different states. In particular in New Jersey and in Illinois, but also in Hawaii, the new state of Hawaii at the time, original election results showed that Richard Nixon, then Vice President, had won the state of Hawaii. The Governor's signature and the Governor of Hawaii actually certified the election results for Richard Nixon, not for jfk. JFK challenged the election results and went to a recount. Nixon was up 141 votes. But after a recount JFK pulled ahead. Now this actually happened after the results were sent to Washington. So Nixon was the President of the Senate in 1960. He was the Vice President. He was Dwight D. Eisenhower's number two guy. So what did Nixon do? Nixon being a gentleman, Nixon trying to rise above political infighting while the election was being stolen from him in Chicago and New Jersey by the Mayor Daily Machine. Specifically in Illinois, Nixon, in defiance to federal law, ordered that the Democrat candidates certificate gets counted because they also ceded Democrat electors and ignore the accompanying Republican certificate. Now what's the significance of this? A couple things. Number one, while Republicans were playing nice, Democrats were licking their chops for power. And they did get power. But number two, it actually shows the President of the Senate can do whatever he wants. There's really no check and balance against Mike Pence on January 6th. Do I like that? No. Is it the framing of how it is, yes. Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800 with highly contested election results in Georgia, when he was running up against John Jay and others. Guess what Thomas Jefferson was at the time, you guessed it, Vice President. He was the president of the Senate overseeing this process. And the Virginia law records show that Georgia was a hotly contested election. It's kind of funny how this all comes full circle, right? And Thomas Jefferson decided to put Georgia in his category. Despite the controversy. Thomas Jefferson ended up becoming our third president, executing the Louisiana Purchase and amongst other things, designing our declaration prior to that, becoming known as one of America's greatest presidents. Same in 1876. So Pence has what is called a plenary power, which is a fancy legal way to say absolute. Nixon basically saw the results from Hawaii and said, I don't like him. I'm giving him the Kennedy and actually hurt him. He wanted to do the gentleman thing, the honorable thing. Whether or not he was correct in that is up for Nixon historians to come on this program maybe at a different time and debate. However, there is no check and balance against that. And so there's precedent, there's constitutional authority. Mike pence's power on January 6 will be plenary and unappealable. As President of the Senate, every objection comes directly to him, and he can rule any objection as out of order. Accepted. Denied. You get more debate. He's kind of king of the Senate. Now, why did the Founders design it this way? I'm gonna have to dive back into the Federalist Papers to explain that comprehensively. However, the best way that I could do it kind of in real time is that the Founders knew that if the process of counting votes was solely a legislative body exercise, then you would have a parliamentary system. The reason that they included a member from the executive. To be involved in legislative affairs is to prevent a parliamentary system from ensuing. Now, this is a high threshold. Do I like the idea that one day a Republican might win an election and there might be a Democrat vice president? And what they might do? Not really. However, we'd be fooling ourselves to think they wouldn't do this, as if they're only going to do it because we have the courage to. To stand up against it. And let me be very clear, what we are building out on this program is not some sort of lust for power, is not some sort of insatiable appetite to get another four years. What we're talking about is an election that is so compromised, so polluted, so poisoned, that certain states should not have their election results counted as Valid now as objections come up state by state. And again, there's a lot of questions about this. So there's a significant amount of pressure on my friend Mike Pence. A lot. And let me be clear, I do not envy his position here. I don't. Because no matter what he does, he will come under immense criticism and some of it will be unwarranted because there really is no modern day political playbook to how to navigate all of this. However, we do know that the President of the Senate will call it to order. And if there is an objection for each state, does that mean that each state gets two hours of debate? Does that mean that the whole point of order gets two hours of debate? Does that mean that every objection gets two hours of debate? It would be my personal opinion that the healthiest way to do this is do it state by state. That's the electoral system. Take it by Arizona, take it by Georgia, take it by Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. And I don't think anyone's going to object to Florida's results. I don't. The President of the Senate is the closest thing to ultimate power that we will see when it comes to a presidential election. Nixon showed us you could just decide not to follow federal law and do whatever you want in favor of a Democrat. Same when it came to Jefferson in 1800 and in 1876. And Democrats actually have objected before, despite their moral gallivanting that they're doing right now.