Ron Paul, Tom Woods, Peter Schiff on Freedom Watch

This Wednesday afternoon, Ron Paul joined Tom Woods, Peter Schiff, Wayne Allyn Root, Michael German, Mancow, Sam Dodson, Michael Maresco and Shelly Roche for an insightful discussion about the latest political and economic developments.

Audio only:

Download the show as a podcast here (53:57 minutes).

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkKHRajo84I (Ron Paul)
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj_24cM_TH4 (Ron Paul)
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf-Mbp7g5wY
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtPFKX43lV8
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN92YFfSc5U
Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyfscmI1z04

Channel: Fox News Strategy Room
Show: Freedom Watch
Host: Judge Andrew Napolitano
Date: 5/27/2009

Transcript of Ron Paul’s appearance:

Judge Andrew Napolitano: But now, it is my great pleasure to introduce to you one of the great defenders of freedom and liberty in the Congress today and my good friend, Congressman Ron Paul who joins us from his home state of Texas.

Congressman Paul, welcome back to Freedom Watch. We are also joined in the studio by Peter Schiff and on the telephone by Tom Woods from the Mises Institute.

Congressman Paul, to you first. It’s probably no surprise, but what is your reaction to the nomination of Judge Sotomayor to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court of the United States?

Ron Paul: Well, I would have to say I’m not surprised. I mean, this is sort of what one would expect from our current president and I guess I can’t be too optimistic. Oftentimes, you know, the judges don’t turn out to be exactly what they’re picked to do. You know, some of the judges that the Republicans picked turned out to be pretty liberal and vice versa.

And if you come from a libertarian constitutional viewpoint, sometimes you can always be hopeful. But I don’t know enough about her to say in which areas; the few cases I’ve heard about haven’t been too reassuring to me that she’s going to come out on the side of very limited government.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Tom Woods, it sounds to me like she’s just what the President promised. We only know as Congressman Paul just indicated of her views on a couple of hot-button issues. For example, even though the Supreme Court in Heller said the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental liberty, her view is it’s a fundamental liberty only as against the Federal government and not the State governments and even though the whole purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment is to keep race out of the decision-making process by the government, her view that the city of New Haven, Connecticut can tear up a test just because it was passed by all-white firefighters and no blacks. Is any of this a surprise to you?

Tom Woods: No, not at all, specially when we remember the exact words of President Obama when he was just Candidate Obama, he said, these are his words of referring to a Supreme Court Justice, “We need somebody who has got the heart, the empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old, and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.”

Well, you know, for a people who don’t actually know any of the relevant issues, that sounds like another one of these pretty, little speeches of Obama, but I hope I won’t be ridiculed for pointing out that this is just Bolshevism. This is a Bolshevist legal philosophy when the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, one of the first thing they did was to make clear that legal precedent didn’t matter anymore. The accumulated body of law over the years was really just a (Burshwa) trapping to enrich the ruling class. xxxxxxxxxx

So what you need to be a judge in Bolshevik Russia was not even a law degree. That would actually work against you. What you needed was a good revolutionary consciousness that you would see each case and you would know according to your revolutionary consciousness how the decision ought to come our, not according to any fixed principle, but what your revolutionary consciousness told you.

Well, this is exactly what we have in this woman. I mean, she says, “I would hope that a wise Latino woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Well, what…

Tom Woods: I mean, what we can even say about statements like that?

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Could you imagine if a white male said that my intellectual experience is superior to that of a woman with color, I would think that somebody in the House of Representatives would move for their impeachment before he finished saying it.

Peter Schiff: I don’t want it to go there, but the basic problem is this whole notion that the Constitution needs to be interpreted. That’s crazy. The Constitution isn’t written in Chinese. It doesn’t need to be interpreted. It needs to be enforced. The only thing that maybe needs to be interpreted are the facts and as they apply to a clearly-written Constitution.

The problem is you have Justices that want to ignore the Constitution under the guise of interpreting it and they want to apply their life experiences and their empathy and their own agendas and ideology to places where they don’t belong.

The idea of a good justice is to be able to hand down a decision even if she thinks it’s not right, even if she thinks that it’s not going to be socially just, or it’s not going to be in the economic interest of the country. She has to enforce the Constitution regardless of how it plays out.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Congressman Paul, how I wish that the Senate were filled with people like Peter Schiff when it comes to confirming who would be on the Supreme Court of the United States. We are not going to see that with this woman. In fact, we rarely see it with anybody on the Supreme Court in our lifetimes.

Ron Paul: Well, Judge, let me ask one question. Should she get a few points for being honest? I mean, she says that the courts are there for policymaking and at least, she’s right up front that we should expect the worst. If she is [rather] in the business of writing policy than writing law and we know what to expect, so we have been forewarned. We were forewarned by the President and she has already forewarned us what she thinks of the judicial system.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Yeah, do you think the Republicans will gain any points by being aggressive with her or do you think they’ll give up the ghost because the President has either 59 or perhaps 60 Democrat votes in the Senate by the time the final vote on her nomination comes to pass.

Ron Paul: Well, if you look at it in strictly political terms, it’s a total loser and people will say, “Why waste your time and energy because you’re going to lose anyway.”

I’ve always reproached that and said that if there is a problem and you sensed that you think you know the right answers and you believe in truth, how does it hurt? You lose a political battle, but you at least establish a record. If she is one to expect some very atrocious rulings, why don’t they say so and set the record and warn the people and let the chips fall where they may. It may be that, you know, maybe they’ll be a couple from the Democrat side that might wake up if there’s some, you know, really worse things about her that we don’t know about yet.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Okay.

Ron Paul: They should fight the appointment is my point.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Tom Woods, before Fox News Channel, and my colleague Trace Gallagher gets there with his camera crew, which was simulcast us on Fox News and on Freedom Watch. Is empathy… it’s not empathy for the Constitution, it’s empathy for one of the litigants. Is that the new code word for diversity? I mean, should she be given credit for being open about the fact that she is going to allow her womanness and her Hispanic background to influence her decisions on the Bench?

Tom Woods: Well, in a perverse sense, she deserves credit for saying that, “I have no idea what it means to be a Supreme Court Justice and I’m a political hack.”

And I know she graduated at the top of her class, but given the way law schools are today, that means she’s just an expert at parroting, you know, garbage. I mean, I’m not impressed by that.

So, yeah, almost anybody he’s going to choose is going to be a disaster. She’s got a very, very minimal track record so far, but everything she said is all predictable, politically correct stuff. By empathy, she means social justice, which means wealthy distribution, which means the Supreme Court involved in every dispute in American society and the real problem is that the Court is involved in so many issues it has no business in, overturning decisions in local school boards or whatever. It needs to stay out and if it doesn’t, then the Congress should use its authority to start stripping these Federal courts of their jurisdiction in areas where they shouldn’t be poking their noses in the first place.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Except that many times, Congressman Paul, you know this, the Congress wants the court to rubberstamp its authority and it wants the court to find some new and creative way under the Commerce clause that the Congress can regulate the most intimate and private behavior.

Ron Paul: Yeah, you wonder whether they work in collusion, you know, when they make these plans, they rubberstamp what the Congress does. The Congress rubberstamps what the President does and the President just marches on with more power. So there’s not going to be any resistance. There’s no balance of powers left at all. It just seems like all three branches want one thing and that is more centralized power and control and those who stand up against that get marginalized rather quickly.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: How do you think she would rule if the constitutionality of HR 1207, when it becomes law, is challenged by the Fed?

Ron Paul: Well, I think we wouldn’t expect, you know, a favorable ruling and if you look at history on all of the cases dealing with money and the Central Bank, we have not fared well.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Right.

Ron Paul: There is one particular time that it was ruled favorably for us, and then it was reversed, so I don’t expect she or any of the other ones for that matter to rule in favor of sound money and against the Federal Reserve.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Congressman Paul, thanks for joining us. Tom Woods, thanks for joining us.

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