CLAY: We begin with the Party of Science running into a bit of a brick wall, Buck Sexton. The Party of Science that has been arguing for two years now, basically, “You have to wear a mask. You have to socially distance. Your kids can’t be in school — or they can be in school, but they have to have masks on,” all these different moving parts which are unsupported by science at all.
I feel like they came to a head in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing late last night, when Sen. Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee — who, by the way, is scheduled to join us tomorrow on the program — asked what would be a fairly simple question considering we have one of the great, esteemed legal minds of our generation (according to Democrats) poised to join the Supreme Court. Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked Ketanji Brown Jackson a simple question.
She said, “What is a woman?”
This is what it sounded like:
CLAY: Oh, “I’m not a biologist” is going to become a famous line, I think, because most kids out there if they were in kindergarten, “Can you tell me the difference between a boy and girl?” Probably have that nailed down a little bit even by kindergarten. “I’m not a biologist” is an all-time line.
BUCK: It’s amazing, Clay, I’ve actually heard this. This is what the activists expect. There’s multiple levels here, and in one moment you see so much of what the Marxists in our midst have become. Here’s the thing. If she were to define it — which you or I could sit here do, everyone listening here, everyone, a woman, a female human being with female human parts and you could get into more specifics if you want.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: If they define it, then they’re actually excluding some people from the definition. So they won’t actually give you a definition.
CLAY: By “some people,” you mean transgender people?
BUCK: Exactly, and if they defined it in such a way that was broad enough that it included transgender individuals, a lot of the country would say, “Wait, hold on a second.” Now a woman is officially a person who psychologically and emotionally identifies as female. What are the parameters for that identity? Does it have to be a physical transition? How quickly can this happen? And it all falls apart.
So they can’t actually give you definition that they would want to have because there is no definition that’s acceptable to them, and then I think beyond that… So she did exactly what the left expects. She knows that she would have upset the activist Democrat left if she had said, “A woman is a biological female or an anatomically female human being.”
So they also expect you to say things — and this is part of the “fealty to wokeness,” you have to say things you know to be untrue and to make you sound dumber than you are as part of what it means to be woke. You have to be willing to do that. It’s a form of intellectual self-negation. You have you to bend the knee and say, “Yes, sure! I don’t know what a woman is because I’m woke.” That’s where it is now, if you’re going to be at that elite level for the left.
So there are major — I would say major — issues now being raised about Ketanji Brown Jackson as these questions are going on. Now, it’s not going to change the outcome, because I don’t think it’s very likely that a Democrat is going to bail on her. I think Joe Manchin is there to vote for her, and Kyrsten Sinema, the people willing to bail on some of the Biden agenda. I don’t think they’re going to bail here.
So at worst case scenario, we’re looking at 50/50 with Kamala Harris able to break the tie. This is one bad answer, Buck. Do you agree, by the way, that the Democrats will stay solid here and there’s no way they’re prepared?
BUCK: I told a friend of mine who is a very solid legal scholar on the right, just in passing, I thought it will be five. He thinks it will be two or three Republican votes. But there’s going to be a couple. You know who some of them are. She’ll get through most likely with a handful of Republican votes. I think it’s going to be four or five. But it will at least be a couple of them. There’s another level to this, Clay, in the response. Democrats will absolutely keep a unified front. Imagine if you’re a Democrat and you’re going to be running in a primary at any point and you voted against the first…?
CLAY: It might help Joe Manchin if he runs in 2024.
BUCK: I wasn’t thinking about Manchin.
CLAY: Because his state is the most Trump state in the entire United States. So if he’s gonna run in two years, he might be the only Democrat that would legitimately run.
BUCK: He’s kind of a Republican but that’s a fair point.
CLAY: He stuck with the Republicans at the State of the Union Address which didn’t get as much attention as I thought it might.
BUCK: But even Kyrsten Sinema 100% will vote for her. By the way, people are calling her KBJ. There’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg, RBG. I think we’re starting to see KBJ. Remember there was a cult around Ruth Bader Ginsburg. People were worshipping her. Rest in peace. She was a geriatric, old woman and people were worshipping her workout routines. Remember that?
CLAY: Yeah.
This is something that we have to look at more because this was the same thing that was said about masks and about, “Oh, you’re not an epidemiologist. You’re not an epidemiologist!” Oh, so I can’t know that it’s moronic to have children who are the least at risk from covid masking in school all day and then have adults all around them all day long living their lives entirely normally in bars and restaurants and everywhere else? I can’t know that when they tell me I need to mask up more quickly when I’m eating — I guess it’s not peanuts because of the allergy, but whatever.
CLAY: Snack packs.
BUCK: The spreadable cheese. That’s good. I can eat the spreadable cheese, not the crackers. When they tell you to mask up more quickly, I’d say this is moronic. You’re not an epidemiologist. The appeal to expertise as a means of shutting down rationality, reason and debate is a favorite tactic of leftists, as you know, all the time.
CLAY: But here’s the thing, too, Buck. I’m “not a biologist,” and I know the difference between a cat and a dog.
BUCK: Right!
CLAY: Right? The basic analysis of male and female is not really that difficult. I also loved, by the way, this is the bigger issue. Her judgment — I’ve got to give credit to Sen. Josh Hawley asking questions that I thought were pretty significant going directly to her role as a judge. In particular, he grilled her about the child porn sentencing. She has been incredibly lenient on child pornography defendants who came before her. Listen to Josh Hawley as he breaks down some of these sentences that she gave. This is cut 4.
BUCK: I mean, what other answer is she going to give there? I saw, Clay, in one of the cases they’ve actually gone in… I think the guideline, the sentencing guideline was eight years as a statutory offense. Two or four was what the federal prosecutor asked for, and she gave them two months.
CLAY: And she also argued about as a part of that — maybe we can have a discussion on that too — is that a lot of the child pornography guidelines were based on photos when it wasn’t as easy to distribute on the internet. So we don’t need to be as egregious or as severe in our sentencing.
I’m like, “Wait a minute. The internet making child pornography easier to distribute, to me, leans in favor of punishing child pornographers even more, because they’re able to take videos and photos and share them more widely than ever before.” The other thing she did was one of these defendants was 18 years old and she said, “Well, he wasn’t that much different in age than the people involved.”
The kids were 8. So for everybody out there who is… The difference between an 18-year-old — who is a full-grown, functional adult — and an 8-year-old who is in third grade is pretty massive. The difference in age might be only 10 years, but we’re not talking about the difference in age between an 80- and 90-year-old or between a 40- and 50-year-old.
We’re talking about legitimate, young children and people who are functional adults, and so if you’re going to be leaning in favor of child pornographers in terms of leniency, that’s directly to your judgment as a sitting judge. And does that sound like somebody of great legal scholarship or someone of great moral clarity and authority that you want to have one of the nine seats on the highest court in the land?
I am increasingly of the opinion that while she is certainly able to be nominated, I don’t know why any Republican would vote in favor of her at all. Just so you can get a little bit of a nice thing written about you in the New York Times.
BUCK: Maybe we can invite Mitt Romney on when he votes for her. “Hey, Mitt, why don’t you explain what the feeling was?”
CLAY: I’d like for him to explain why he voted in favor of the mask mandate continuing. By the way, there’s some weird decisions being made by Utah Republicans. I’m not in favor… Did you see their governor?
BUCK: The transgender issue.
CLAY: What’s he doing?
BUCK: This is cowardice in the face of corporate pressure. These governors who will not sign to protect women sports in their states are bending the need to corporations and corporate money for their campaigns, and corporate money that will be waiting for them as consultants and board members and things like that afterwards.
In state after state, this is the reality where it happens. Look at Governor DeSantis, in Florida, who says, “We’re going to stand with women’s sports. We’re actually going to celebrate the best NCAA female swimmer in the country,” and look at other states, where all of a sudden, “We can’t do that. We can’t do that.
BUCK: “I’ll sign an executive order as governor that will deal with this just as well.” Really? Why didn’t you sign the legislation? Please.
CLAY: Some of them are saying this is not a big deal yet. Were you going to change the legislation when it becomes a big deal, when the girls start losing all of their matches to biological men? No. You address this before it becomes the issue. It’s clear that it’s coming.
BUCK: Look, we want the right, we are conservatives here. We want conservatives to win, but anybody who’s GOP, who has an R next to their name, there’s got to be accountability sometimes, too, folks. That will be happening between now and Election Day as well.
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