October 16, 2025 • 36 mins
Hour 2 of A&G features...
- Tim Sandefur talks to Jack Armstrong about parental rights
- Tim Sandefur talks to Jack about freedom of speech
- Tim Sandefur talks to Jack about investigational medications
- Airtags & information needed for official business
Stupid Should Hurt: https://www.armstrongandgetty.com/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio the George
Washington Broadcast Center. Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty arm Strong
and Gatty and he Armstrong and Getty. You don't know,
(00:24):
how's it going? Glad you're here. And we mentioned a
couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
October means the Supreme Court's back in session. First Monday
in October they start back up again. I've already had
questions about that. We welcome to the studio. Actually in
the studio, Tim Sanderfer of the Goldwater And so.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Now I have to admit the only reason I came
down to the studio was for your life size cardboard
cutout of Taylor Swift, which we do have. Yeah. No,
it's great to be back. It's been a long time
since I've been in here. It's nice to see it.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Why does the Supreme Court take a break? Why don't
they work year round? And they had so many cases
between June and October this year. Why don't they just
stay in session year around like other people with jobs.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
In one sense, they do. They do sort of work
all year round because they're always on call for emergency
cases and things like that. But the term that begins
in October and ends in late June. Right before the
July fourth break is when they hear oral arguments and
issue decisions, and they try to get all of the calendar,
all the decisions that on the calendar issued by the
(01:26):
end of that of that session. And most state Supreme
courts do not do that. The most, like California Supreme
Court is always in session. But it's just an old tradition.
I think the justice is like their summer vacation time
they get to go on these junkets to foreign countries,
or they teach classes for some law school that hosts
an event in Spain, and you know, it's kind of
a just the way they've done things, and you know
(01:48):
in the law, if they've done things for a long time,
that becomes legal. Right.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Interesting, So this particular Supreme Court session, what are cases
that you're excited about? And as you always point out,
what cases they decide to take as big as the rulings.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yeah, that's right. And because they don't have to hear
every case, they can choose to take a case or not,
and in fact, they only take about one percent of
all the cases that they are asked to decide. Yeah, yeah,
and fewer every year, really, And how do they vote
on that? Is that just a majority five for it's
four justices, so there's nine of them. If four of
them say they want to hear a case, then they
go ahead and together the case on the theory that
(02:26):
you might swing one vote one way or the other.
But the one good point, the one that really stood
out just this week is on Monday, the Supreme Court
said that they want to hear a case, well, a
few justices said they want to hear a case about
parental rights, and in particular these cases that are popping
up all over the country of schools deciding to transition
(02:48):
a student from male to female or female to male
and then conceal that information from a parent. And we
at the Goldwater Institute, in fact, are litigating one of
these cases. We file the petition the Supreme Court that
we're waiting for them to decide whether to take this
case or not. Out of Maine, where a school district
in Maine decided to take our client's child and give
(03:12):
this child a a device to restrain her breast so
that she would look male when putting a shirt on.
Was a teenager and gave this child two of these
and then said to the to the child, well, we
don't we won't tell your parents, and you don't have
to tell your parents. And then and so this would
(03:35):
lose my mind. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? These
are these schools are supposed to be You're supposed to
be entrusting these schools to take care of your kids
while teaching them reading, writing, arithmetic, and history, and and
that's that's what they're supposed to be doing. And instead
they've taken this very I'm sure they think of it
as very proactive and protective, but I would call it
aggressive approach in actively trying to withhold information from parents,
(03:58):
and the kind of information that is really central to
a parent raising a child. I mean, psycho sexual development
of a teenager is something a parent needs to be
there to help a child through. And the schools are saying, no, no,
you shouldn't have a say in the matter. And well,
the U. S. Supreme Court has said in the past
the parents have a fundamental constitutional right to control the
education and upbringing of their children. And so we say
(04:21):
that what the school did violated that constitutional right, and
we've asked the Supreme Court to take that case. Well,
what happened on Monday was that Justice as Alito, Thomas,
and Gorsich issued a dec issued in an order, you know,
it wasn't a ruling, but issued an order saying we
would really like to hear a case like this. There
was another case similar facts to Court decided not to
(04:41):
take the case, but they said, well, we would like
to hear a case along these lines. And they're going
to have to eventually. I mean, as the regulatory state
expands its control, and as the teachers' unions can expand
their control, and as the state increasingly things that it
knows better than you do how to raise your kids,
you're going to find more and more and more of
these conflicts. And there has to be a limit, a
(05:04):
line drawn to protect the rights of parents to raise
their kids.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
And if the Supreme Court decides that now you can't
do they can't keep that sort of stuff secret from
the parents, Will that have tentacles beyond just try and stuff.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Oh oh, definitely it will. And in fact, they've sort
of already did started doing this. So last term, the
Court decided a case about schools that were teaching lessons
to kids about sexuality like same sex, marriages, transsexuals, et cetera,
et cetera. In and this was very young kids. I
(05:35):
don't remember exactly, but you know, elementary and pre elementary's
kids in Virginia. And the question in that case was
do the parents have a constitutional right to opt their
kids out to say, I just don't want my kids
to go through these these lessons? And the Supreme Court
said yes they do. Now, the reason that you do
have that constitution right, and the reason that's important is
because there's been this question among lawyers and judges over
(05:59):
the level of how far does the parent's right to
protect and direct the upbringing of a child, How far
does that extend? Does it stop when you choose what
school to send your kid to, Because that's what a
lot of courts have said, a lot like circuit courts
of appeals have said, well, yes, you have a constitution
right to control the education of your child, but once
you've chosen what school to send your kid to, that's
(06:21):
the end of it. Then it's up to the school
that you know that the you we can and that
makes sense because you can't have parents going in there
and vetoing everything that a public school wants to do
you know, have a Heckler's veto over the entire curriculum
of a school. I can see why they're concerned about that,
but it also it can't be the case that your
parents your rights as a parent end once you send
your kid to the public school and then they can
do whatever they want. And sure enough, in this Virginia case,
(06:43):
the Supreme Court said, no, a parent's rights do not
end at the schoolhouse gate. Well, if that's true, then
that the same applies to these situations where schools are
concealing vital information from parents about how their kids are developing.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
What's that quote you always have from the early twentieth century,
Progressive is about schools?
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And oh yeah, well, you know the progressive thought of
public education as a means of shaping the minds of
of kids. And Woodrow Woodrow Wilson. Am I living through
that right now totally? And Woodrow Wilson, who you know,
he was the only president with a PhD. He was
like a college president before he became President of the
United States. He was a leading progressive intellectual. He has
(07:22):
this speech where he says that the goal of the
school is to make the child as unlike the parent
as possible, and that was so great. It's a very
extreme way of putting it. But you s, what they
were thinking is, well, they were like, the problems, all
the tensions and difficulties that we have in America, those
can be resolved by taking all the kids and putting
them together and teaching them, you know, how to be
(07:43):
good citizens. Which maybe that sounds good to you in
the abstract, but the problem is what do you mean
by good citizens? All right? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:48):
The problem the problem with that, obviously is they have determined,
we have figured out what is best for all of
you know, America, and that's what we're going to teach kids.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
And fortunately there are alternatives. There's school choice programs throughout
the country that parents can take advantage of to get
their kids into schools that are tailor made or a
tailor designed for their kids. And especially in my home
state of Arizona, we have a wonderfully successful program, the
Empowerment Scholarship Account Program, where a parent can decide what
(08:22):
schools to send their kids to and get them out
of failing public schools or public schools that aren't serving
their kids needs, maybe their kids have special needs or
that are abusing their power in these ways, and what
we need is more school choice, more power in the
hands of parents, and less power in the hands of
bureaucrats who again think that they know better than you
do how your kids ought to be raised.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
You and your wife are committed to non child people,
But it would be so awesome if you had kids,
just because I can imagine, I mean, because you get
fired up about this on behalf of other people's kids.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
I can't imagine if your kids. It's a scary thought.
I had not thought of it till you mentioned that.
But you're right, I can't imagine. You mean a school
board meeting. I was, well, I just think about how
I was when I was in school. I was already
a kind of a nonconformist when I was forced to
go to the government schools, and I made life pretty
pretty hell for my parents my teachers when I was
(09:16):
in school, So I can imagine what I would do
if it was my kid.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Well, I promised to get back to the Supreme Court stuff.
But tim was helpful to me and my story of
my son taking a public school American history class and
on day one having to write a land acknowledgment about
the tribe that had owned the land board the school.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Was and how we should all feel so horrible about that?
Who and that tribe probably stole it from some other tribe,
and that tribe stole it from some other tribe. I mean,
I would I just pray for the day when somebody
requires somebody to do a land acknowledgment for the Commanchee,
you know, the most aggressive imperial power in Native America
(09:58):
that just slought or countless other tribes and stole their land.
And yet now you know, and somebody does this land
was once possessed by the commanche you know, And I
would love to see that. Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
They must not do this in Europe, right, the land acknowledgement,
because it'd be impossible if you had a square foot
of France, right or Germany?
Speaker 1 (10:18):
I mean, how in the hell would you do This
land used to belong to Germany and then Russia and
then Germany and then France and then Germany and then Russia.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
And yeah, it would be very, very complicated. What other
Supreme Court cases are you excited about this?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Well, the there's an important gun rights case that's going
to go up there, and and this case is it's
it's kind of tough as an intellectual matter, at least
as I think so. And that is so, the state
of Hawaii passes a law that says you're not allowed
to bring a gun onto private property without the express
permission of the owner. Now, on one hand, that makes
(10:54):
sense to me, because I wouldn't bring a gun into
my friend's house without saying, Hey, by the way, I
have a gun, is it okay with you if I
bring it into the house. But on the other hand,
the reason this law has passed was because most people
are probably not going to put up a sign on
their houses is it's okay for you to bring a
gun on this property something? And so it's kind of
a clever way of preventing people from carrying guns anywhere.
(11:15):
Oh okay, right. And so the question presented in the
case is to what level can the state manipulate this
sort of baseline rule, this the default rule of whether
you're allowed to with with as long as nobody forbids you,
or whether you're not allowed to unless you get express permission.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
And that's a tough question. Opt in opt out stuff
always drives me crazy. Who decides which which it's going
to be right.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
And so now the court has been pretty good about
protecting gun rights, but there are some contray examples. There
have been some cases that where the court has not,
you know, been as aggressive in protecting these rights as
I would like. And so I do worry about them
setting a decision here that's gonna weaken the right to
possess firearms. But on the other hand, property rights, I
(11:59):
have a right to decide whether some sure the property
brings it out of my property or on.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
The course of course, I got questions about that and
other stuff with Tim sanderf for coming up on and
tell you about price picks. You know, the NBA season
is getting underway, obviously, NFL is as hot as it's
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Speaker 1 (12:16):
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Speaker 2 (12:19):
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Speaker 1 (12:23):
Turn it into cash with price picks. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Price picks now offers stacks meanings, meaning that you could
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on Price Picks to make money.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
This is what you do.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
You download the Price Picks up today, use the code
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your first five dollars lineup. That code is Armstrong to
get fifty dollars in lineups after you play your first
five dollars lineup Price Picks. It's good to be right,
and you can stick around for a little while time. Yeah,
look forward to that.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
All on the way stay here are Strong and.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Tim Sander is thankfully committed to sticking around for a
little while talking about these Supreme Court cases or various
state cases.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
But we're just discussing.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
One of the reasons I think Tim is a fan
favorite has been for many years on The Armstrong and
Getty Show is your ability to explain these complicated cases
in a way that's normal people like us can understand.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
You know. I think part of the reason for that
is that I was never a very good student in school,
and so the teacher would get up there and lecture
about something I wouldn't get it, so I'd have to
go out and learn it. Myself, so I would pull
down the book and read it myself, and that's how
I got it. And so I know how I learned
this stuff, and so when I explained it to other people,
I tell them the way that I figured it out
(13:40):
as opposed to the way that it's normally talked about
in other circles. And I think that might be part
of the reason that is really interesting. Have you ever
thought about teaching in the law school. I have taught
a couple classes. I've taught a class at McGeorge and Sacramento.
I taught a class at George Mason in Virginia. I
just taught a class two years ago at Arizona State University.
So I have taught a couple times and all bit
(14:02):
the students loved it. Well, I don't know, you have
to ask them, but it was a lot of work.
That's the thing. I felt sorry for my law professors
in retrospect because I had not realized when I was
a student how much work it really is. That you
have to just do it.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Once and then you're written, and then you could keep
doing the same spiel for the next.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, thirty years. Yeah, I suppose you could, you know,
just update your outline as you go. That is true.
But on the other hand, you would think that speaking
for two hours is twice as hard as speaking for
one hour, and actually it's like fifty times. How I
want speaking for an hour. It's keeping the students' attention
and not being boring. That's the thing I just dread
being boring.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, tell me about it. We call that
flop sweat in radio business, when you start feeling, Okay,
this is not working. So how did vaping become a
court case?
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Look at? So? One of the things that makes the
Goldwater Institute where I work, unique is that we try
to focus on state constitutions, on the rights that are
protected by your state constitution, which a lot of people
forget about. They'll talk about the Bill of Rights and
they forget about the fact that your state constitution protects
more rights typically than does the federal Constitution. So we
like to go to state supreme courts to defend state
(15:08):
constitutional rights. And we have a case pending in the
Oregon Supreme Court. In fact, it was just argued a
couple of days ago about the freedom of speech under
the state constitution, and it involves a state law that
makes it illegal to package vaping products in a manner
that quote might be attractive to miners end quote. And
that term whatever might be attractive to miners is determined
(15:30):
by a government bureaucracy, because you know, a whole bunch
of middle aged bureaucrats and a government entity. They really
have their fingers on the pulse of youthful America.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
And so we say this violates freedom of speech. Our
client runs a vaping shop. Kids aren't even allowed in
his shop. Nevertheless, under this law, he cannot even put
a picture of a cherry on a box full of
cherry flavored vaping liquid. The state has said that that
is illegal. Well, that obviously violates your freedom of speech.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Right, and it could be you know, you could just
trapolate that to so many other things.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Yeah, you can't put you can't say what, you can't
say a truthful message about what's in the contents of
a package. And if this isn't even I mean, if
the if the constitution doesn't protect your right to speak
the truth, you've got some real problems there, right. And
the bureaucracy there when they when we sued they can't,
they came back and said, well, you you're not allowed
to sue yet because we haven't written the regulations. We
(16:23):
haven't told you yet what is attractive to minors, which
is just that's crazy. I mean, the idea that bureau
bureaucrats can be empowered to decide what speech you are
and aren't allowed to express, and then that you're not
allowed to challenge it until they write the rules is wild.
So we went up to the Oregon Supreme Court just
a few days ago and one of my colleagues, John Thorpe,
(16:46):
argued that case and it went pretty well. I think,
you know, I got my fingers crossed about that case. Cool.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Would people like you I others who like smaller government,
would we rather were living under more state constitution rules
than federal constitution rules?
Speaker 1 (17:07):
In some ways yes, and in some ways no. So
it is true that state constitutions tend to protect freedom
more broadly than the federal Constitution does. But you can't
just leave it to the states. We have to have
that federal protection against states. So think the Fourteenth amendmentant
that prevents the state from violating your federal constitutional rights
is crucial in protecting that. But for the most part,
(17:27):
of course, these decisions should mostly be made at the
state level. Political decisions generally, and constitutional rights should be
understood mostly at the state level because state judges, for
one thing, they typically are either elected or we have
retention elections, so you have more control over them, and
they're more attuned to the history and culture of that state,
and they know what the constitution means.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
I have more questions about that, and we're going to
talk about more Supreme Court cases coming up with Tim Sandfer,
who works with the Goldwater Institute and has been a
fan favored of the Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
For how many years? Oh, it's been at least a decade.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
No longer than that. Yeah, Yeah, we've been doing this. Yeah,
so it's sad to think about.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Really. So we got a lot on the way.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
I hope you can stay with us if you missed
a segment or now we get the podcast Armstrong and
Getty on demand.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Stay with us Armstrong and Getty. We're talking with Tim
Sander of the Goldwater Institute.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Anything nice you want to say about Goldwater Institute before
I start asking you questions.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
We're a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting individual rights in
courts and in legislatures. Across the country. We're defending your
right to Our greatest achievement really is Right to Try,
which is a legislation that was signed by President Trump
in his previous term that protects your right if you
are a terminally ill patient to access medicine that has
(18:43):
been approved for safety but not yet fully approved for
sale by the FDA. And now we're branching out into
Right to Try two point zero, which is an effort
to legally protect your right to access tailor made medical
treatment that's designed just for you.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
I'm glad you guys did that. It's insane that it
wasn't already the case. I mean, it's just close my mind.
For years that we've been talking about this.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
It really is. Well. We were just talking about how
bureaucrats think they know better than you do about how
to raise your kids. A lot of the time, bureaucrats
think they know better than you do what medicines you
ought to be allowed to even choose from, even when
you're a patient with a terminal illness that can't be
cured anyway, and you there's an opportunity to take this
investigational medicine that might improve things for you, and then
(19:25):
some bureaucrat comes in and says, no, no, we're not.
You can't do that.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
One of my favorite phrases from that whole thing was
you might give them false.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Hope, false hope. That's right. Well, no hope is false.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
How about I'm allowed to, in my final days alive
as a human being, to have some false hope, you
son of a bitch.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, right, and some and some authority over my own decision.
That's crazy.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
How before we get to a specific case, how left
are law schools in general across the country.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
They are so much worse than you could possibly imagine
the entire legal is right. Well, there's a number of
historical reasons, I'm sure. I mean, part of it, I
think is the romanticism of the sixties, you know, the
hero the heroism of Brown versus Board of Education that
(20:14):
then spread after that into this notion that the civil
rights lawyers were the champions of social justice and so forth.
And that was part of it, even though even when
that got sidetracked into these crazy left wing notions that
have nothing to do with justice. But I think the
biggest problem is the very phrase social justice. Law schools
are not very good on philosophy, and they teach a
(20:37):
corrupted notion of what justice means. They think a lot
of people think justice means equality. Justice does not mean equality.
Justice and equality, in fact, have very little to do
with one another. Justice means ensuring that every person gets
what is his or her own, and equality is about
distributing to things to people according to some set formula.
(20:59):
And so justice inequality of very different things. But nobody
talks about this in law school, and so people emerge
from law school thinking they're deeply educated with these perverse
notions about what justice even means to begin with.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
So if the legal education system in this country is
way left, what is the result of that.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Do we turn out a whole bunch of left lawyers?
Speaker 3 (21:18):
We do.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
We have tons and tons of left lawyers and left
judges who often, I think, have never seriously even considered
the alternative. And so they've been kind of gobsmacked by
the rise of the federalist society and the backlash against
what we lawyers call the New Deal Settlement, that the
way that constitutional law has been interpreted since the nineteen
(21:40):
thirties or so. There's been this effort to push back
against that, and I think It really surprised a lot
of legal intellectuals. Lawrence Tribe, who you know, very famous
law professor, refused even to publish the second volume of
his treatise on Constitutional Law because he said he no
longer understood constitutional law. Well good, because the constitutional law
he's been p's in practicing is kakame Ma.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
And then you were talking about Goldwater Institute gets involved
in state constitutions a lot. What what couple of states
have the wackiest constitutions?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Oh? Wow, Well, Montana's is pretty bad. It's written in
the nineteen seventies and it has all sorts of sort
of lefty notions in it. But I and Hawaii's my
favorite thing. Hawaii. Actually the law of the splintered Paddle
is part of their constitution. Nobody knows what the law
of the splintered paddle means, but it's an ancient thing
that dates back to Kamema, so it's in the constitution. Okay,
(22:31):
But I think the general consensus is that Alabama has
the worst state constitution. It's been amended so many times
that it's several hundred pages long, and it has every
little last detail of state law on embedded in it.
And it's just too complicated for words. I mean, California
is pretty lousy. California is a bad has a lowsy constitution,
(22:51):
but it's not quite that bad. Wow, that is really interesting.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
But the laboratories of democracy, you know, at least we
get to see how it works out.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
You have a lot of crazy experiments in some of
those laboratories. I mean, you're experimenting on human beings. But
that that's consent, right, true.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
You do have the opportunity to leave the state if
you want to. What other case the Supreme Court's taking
up your interest to do it? Well.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Of course, the biggest case on the horizon as far
as I'm concerned, is the tariff case that we're talking
about Federal Constitution now and the Federal Supreme Court, and
that is the constitutionality of President Trump's tariffs, which are
I know, totally unconstitutional, totally illegal.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
I know nothing about this, but the idea that one guy,
any guy Trump, or anybody else could make that sort
of a decision for America in the world just doesn't
seem on its face correct.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
You would have floored the authors of the Constitution of
the United States, who had lived through the American Revolution
and had experienced exactly that and wrote a constitution to
prohibit exactly that thing from happening. Of a single person
imposing taxes on the whole nation in the amount that
he chooses, for whatever reason he wants, for as long
as he decides that's that's wild. And but I don't
(23:59):
think that the I'll get to the constitutional issue in
this case. I think they'll probably decide this on statutory grounds.
And what I mean by that is the teriffs are
supposedly in accordance with a statute called AEPA, which stands
for something I don't remember, and AYIPA does not actually
allow for tariffs. What it says is that the president
can in a case in an emergency, the president can
(24:20):
regulate or seize products from foreign countries in commerce and
things like that. It's designed to freeze assets and capture
things so that people aren't sending bad stuff to the
enemy in wartime and stuff. The statute is not designed
to allow for these tariffs that are just designed or
formulated however the president wants. So I think the court
(24:41):
is going to say that they don't satisfy it. But
shouldn't they have taken that up like last week, given.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
The fact that I mean we're threatening one hundred percent
tariffs on everything from China starting November first.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Yeah, it would be nice if some of these things
are faster. But to know, in their defense, there's so
much stuff that's been coming at them, There's so much
unconstitutional stuff that's been going on that's been thrown at
their heads. You know, there's only so much time that
they can resolve these cases, do they.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
I know, sometimes you prioritize things and move them up,
like you know, deciding on uh, you know, Nixon and
Watergate and all kinds of things that where you just decide,
we got to have an emergency session.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
But right in general, you just let it come down,
like when it comes down the pipe. So here's the thing.
So the the Feds said, because the plaintiffs in that
case said, well, you need to resolve this really quickly
for all the reasons you just said, and the Trump
administration said, no, no, there's no hurry because we can
always refund people the taxes if these things are declared
to league, that wouldn't be complicated at all. And then
(25:39):
at the same time, the administration is putting out these
press releases saying, we have to keep these tariffs in
place because it would be economic chaos if they get
struck down, because then we'd have to refund everybody's money.
They were literally saying the opposite thing simultaneously. I know
that that is ordinary nowadays, but to me that's still
shock us.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
Lay people don't fully understand that. You know, these things
have to work their way through courts, through a low
lower level all the way to the higher level, and
it takes its time or everything like that.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
But there's so many.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Examples, like the can a fifteen year old boy participat
in girls sports in high school?
Speaker 1 (26:10):
It just seems like this is gonna get to the
Supreme Court. Can we just do it now and decide?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Or the same thing, can you be a sanctuary city
and just decide we don't agree, Well, you just decide
these now.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Part of the reason I mentioned now the court takes
only one percent of the cases and fewer every year.
A part of the thing is I think some of
the conservative justices have wanted the Supreme Court not to
decide these questions. They sort of tend to want lower
courts to resolve these questions. The problem with that is,
of course, the lower courts disagree with each other sometimes,
but I think that the Supreme Court sees itself as
(26:42):
they're worried that they don't because they follow this no
nonsense idea of a judicial restraint. We don't want unelected
judges controlling everything, which scares everybody else but doesn't scare me,
because I'm worried about judges getting things wrong, whether they
get it wrong by being too active or too passive,
I'm worried about them getting the wrong. I'm not worried
about being activists. I'm worried about them being wrong. Those
(27:04):
are two completely different things. I think it's a very
bad thing when the Court stands back and says, we're
not gonna we're not gonna interfere, We're gonna let the
government violate your rights and we're not going to do
anything about it, because we don't want to have activist judges.
I think that's a terrible idea. Anyway. What I think
we're seeing is that the Supreme Court is trying to
offload some of its work to these lower courts, and
so they are taking fewer of those cases and not
(27:26):
necessarily deciding them as quickly as as otherwise. They just
don't want to have their fingerprints on it. Yeah, and well,
because they they buy this notion that unelected judges shouldn't
have all this power. Okay, and again I of course,
of course nobody should do things wrong if they're in government.
But the idea that that judicial activism is a serious
threat is wildly overbrown, overblown. Congress and the President violate
(27:50):
your rights on an hourly basis in this country. I'm
far more worried about them than I am about the courts.
The courts are so they have very little power or
all they can do is pronounce what the law is.
The Congress and the president can resist them very powerfully.
But when the Congress does stuff and the President does stuff,
the violate your rights, and the Court folds its hands
(28:11):
and says, we're not going to do anything about that
because we don't want to be activist judges. That's a
breakdown in our constitutional system that was never intended to
be that way.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
How often, and then, obviously this is a complete opinion,
a judgment opinion, But how often does the Supreme Court
make mistakes?
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Do you think, oh, they get it wrong, Yeah, they
get things wrong very frequently. But oh, nowadays I would
say I think they get things wrong about Oh, I
guess forty percent of the time. But I guess it
depends on whether you mean get things wrong by not
doing things that I wish they would do, as opposed
to doing things that I wish they wouldn't do. I mean,
(28:50):
there's a lot of stuff where like I'm, for instance,
I'm not an originalist. You know. The originalism is this
big popular trend right now where these judges are like, well,
what the Founding's fathers thought that the Constitution meant is
what it'll meant for all time, And that sounds plausible
at first, but when you get down to it, it's
just not how language really works. And so you know,
for that reason, I also find myself disagree with a
lot of people on my own side. I love Justice Thomas,
(29:11):
for instance, but I find that I disagree with him
about a lot of things. I don't think that, you know,
our constitutional rights should be interpreted in accordance with what
the Puritans thought when they landed in Massachusetts, and this
we do you call what you are? I don't know.
I have to That's the best word that I've been
able to find for what I am. Okay, yeah, Yeah,
I'm hoping to figure this out. I have a big
paper that's coming out later this year that we're all
(29:33):
talk about this, and maybe that'll help me figure out
what the title is.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Yeah, So on the how often do they get it wrong?
It reminds me of the like when they do the
right track wrong track? You know, is the country going
the right direction wrong direction? And the number's really high, Well,
half the people want it to be further left, and
have the people want to be further right, So it
doesn't really tell you anything that's right.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
That's why the government should have less power over our lives,
because we don't want those crazy people over there, whoever
they might be, to control oh what I get to
do with my life. And that's the whole benefit of
limited constitutional government is that you get to decide your
own life in your own way, and other people don't
get to come in and tell you how to live
what they think is your proper life. And unfortunately neither
(30:13):
party today believes in that. Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
The less the government is involved, the less it matters
whether they get it right or on.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Because they're not deciding for me. The people sometimes say, well, yeah,
I've had this happen to me. But Tim, yeah, you
believe in freedom, but that's an optimistic view of human nature.
You think people are good and that they're going to
do good things with freedom. No, it's exactly the opposite.
I believe in freedom because I don't trust other people
to be to make the right decisions from my life.
(30:40):
I think other people are often ignorant, they're very foolish.
Sometimes sometimes they're corrupt, they're bribed, they don't know what
they're doing, and they'll make mistakes. So their mistakes should
be confined to their own lives. They shouldn't be allowed
to inflict their mistakes on my life. That's the argument
for freedom. That's a good point to end on.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Another excellent point from Tim Sandffer, as he's done where
we figured it out like twenty years yes on the
Armstrong and Getty went a year as we all enter
the winter of our lives.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
So thanks for your time, Tim, Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Police say two suspects ambushed to Florida couple at gunpoint
near Tampa. Almost two months later, please say they've now
caught the attackers thanks to something very small taped under
the victim's vehicle.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
The search of.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
Their vehicle, our detectives did find that Apple AirTag. The
Hillsborough County Sheriff's offices records tied that hidden Apple AirTag
to twenty six year old Luis Enrique Charles, who was.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Arrested last week.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Apple's website spells out how people can get alerts about
nearby tracking devices like air tags.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Typically, it's on your settings whether you can be notified,
whether the AirTag pops in on your phone or not. Yeah,
it's interesting the Apple AirTag.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
I mean, when I was a kid, the idea of
owning a tracking device that you could have put on
somebody's car or luggage or whatever would have been so
James Bond and crazy. Yeah, and scary and dangerous. And
now everybody's got access to one. But I keep forgetting. Yeah,
you there's a setting and I should do this on
my phone. There's a setting where you can see if
(32:10):
there are Apple tags nearby.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
I have it turned on. Yeah, all women should. Nobody's
trying to get to me.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Uh but never no, but yeah, it'd be it's good
to know if somebody has decided. God, I would think, yeah,
if you're a woman, you got to have it turned on, Yeah,
the idea every time you leave a night nightclub, the
concern that the guy that kept asking to dance and
you kept saying no is slipped an Apple tag into
(32:42):
your car or purse or whatever. H Oh my god,
brave New world. We're talking about scams a little bit earlier.
And it wasn't just for the web route commercials that
were regularly doing to try to deal with getting hacked
and whatnot. It just we're all confronted with this so
many times per day. Every one of us gets up
(33:05):
and deletes like ten emails that are clearly attempts to
steal from us, or texts on your phone or whatever else.
Got this text id theft. There were three student loans
opened in my name that I've been trying to clear
for over a year. I've filled out and submitted copious
amounts of paperwork, and the latest request from the lender
(33:28):
is for a copy of my high school to diploma
to prove who I am. I don't know about you,
but I can't lay my hands on my high school diploma.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Oh geez.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Yeah, this person said, I'm sixty five years old and
I'm not doing the footwork to acquire a copy of
my effing.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
High school diploma.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Since I don't need to care about my credit score,
I'll die with these loans of my credit report. Oh
and my credit has been supposedly frozen for years in
order to avoid such an occurrence. That's what they always
tell you, freeze your credit thing if you're worried about
your stuff being hacked.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
But it's funny.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
We had to do this the other day for our
company insurance where we had to prove all kinds of
different things and I needed to come up with birth
certificates and marriage certificates and various things that I didn't
know where they were, but I finally laid my hands
on them.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yeah, I'm trying to find those things.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
It's you never think about where they are until it's
like down to the wire. Well, some of y'all are
very like my mom always was super organized and no
always knew where everything was all the time.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
But I'm not that person. That's a pain in the ass.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
I was great talking to Tim the lawyer, always is
and I always like his points when he gets to
stuff like he did there At the end, that it
all comes down to, we want the government involved in
our lives. As little as possible because they're so susceptible
to being well to being human beings, and human beings
(34:48):
can either have poor judgment, be corrupt, become corrupt, whatever
the situation is, be wacky ideologically in a way that
you don't agree. So you want and you know you
want them making decisions for you as little as possible.
And that's what it all comes down to, if you
lean right in my opinion, you want the least amount
(35:10):
of local, state, federal government involved in making decisions for
your life, other than in cases where you know it's
keeping you from harming someone else. But that is not
the direction that the country seems to be going as
we add more and more to our tax code and
more laws and federal laws and all these different sorts
(35:30):
of things. What's that There's a saying out there and there,
I think somebody even wrote a book how many federal
laws the average person violates on a daily basis, Multiple
federal laws that you violate on a daily basis, because
there are so many. And then you get into the
world of just find me the man and I'll find
the crime if you want to get somebody, and law
fare and that sort of thing. At all levels of government.
(35:51):
Just fantastic.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Anyway, We're going to.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Talk to Katie's dad in an hour three for the
oddest of reasons. It's not because he used to be
a judge. It's because he used to being an embalmer.
He used to embalm dead bodies and then dress them.
I just have questions about that, among other things on
the way if he missed the second the podcast Armstrong
and Getty on demand Armstrong and Getty
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio the George
Washington Broadcast Center. Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty arm Strong
and Gatty and he Armstrong and Getty. You don't know,
(00:24):
how's it going? Glad you're here. And we mentioned a
couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
October means the Supreme Court's back in session. First Monday
in October they start back up again. I've already had
questions about that. We welcome to the studio. Actually in
the studio, Tim Sanderfer of the Goldwater And so.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Now I have to admit the only reason I came
down to the studio was for your life size cardboard
cutout of Taylor Swift, which we do have. Yeah. No,
it's great to be back. It's been a long time
since I've been in here. It's nice to see it.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Why does the Supreme Court take a break? Why don't
they work year round? And they had so many cases
between June and October this year. Why don't they just
stay in session year around like other people with jobs.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
In one sense, they do. They do sort of work
all year round because they're always on call for emergency
cases and things like that. But the term that begins
in October and ends in late June. Right before the
July fourth break is when they hear oral arguments and
issue decisions, and they try to get all of the calendar,
all the decisions that on the calendar issued by the
(01:26):
end of that of that session. And most state Supreme
courts do not do that. The most, like California Supreme
Court is always in session. But it's just an old tradition.
I think the justice is like their summer vacation time
they get to go on these junkets to foreign countries,
or they teach classes for some law school that hosts
an event in Spain, and you know, it's kind of
a just the way they've done things, and you know
(01:48):
in the law, if they've done things for a long time,
that becomes legal. Right.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Interesting, So this particular Supreme Court session, what are cases
that you're excited about? And as you always point out,
what cases they decide to take as big as the rulings.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yeah, that's right. And because they don't have to hear
every case, they can choose to take a case or not,
and in fact, they only take about one percent of
all the cases that they are asked to decide. Yeah, yeah,
and fewer every year, really, And how do they vote
on that? Is that just a majority five for it's
four justices, so there's nine of them. If four of
them say they want to hear a case, then they
go ahead and together the case on the theory that
(02:26):
you might swing one vote one way or the other.
But the one good point, the one that really stood
out just this week is on Monday, the Supreme Court
said that they want to hear a case, well, a
few justices said they want to hear a case about
parental rights, and in particular these cases that are popping
up all over the country of schools deciding to transition
(02:48):
a student from male to female or female to male
and then conceal that information from a parent. And we
at the Goldwater Institute, in fact, are litigating one of
these cases. We file the petition the Supreme Court that
we're waiting for them to decide whether to take this
case or not. Out of Maine, where a school district
in Maine decided to take our client's child and give
(03:12):
this child a a device to restrain her breast so
that she would look male when putting a shirt on.
Was a teenager and gave this child two of these
and then said to the to the child, well, we
don't we won't tell your parents, and you don't have
to tell your parents. And then and so this would
(03:35):
lose my mind. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? These
are these schools are supposed to be You're supposed to
be entrusting these schools to take care of your kids
while teaching them reading, writing, arithmetic, and history, and and
that's that's what they're supposed to be doing. And instead
they've taken this very I'm sure they think of it
as very proactive and protective, but I would call it
aggressive approach in actively trying to withhold information from parents,
(03:58):
and the kind of information that is really central to
a parent raising a child. I mean, psycho sexual development
of a teenager is something a parent needs to be
there to help a child through. And the schools are saying, no, no,
you shouldn't have a say in the matter. And well,
the U. S. Supreme Court has said in the past
the parents have a fundamental constitutional right to control the
education and upbringing of their children. And so we say
(04:21):
that what the school did violated that constitutional right, and
we've asked the Supreme Court to take that case. Well,
what happened on Monday was that Justice as Alito, Thomas,
and Gorsich issued a dec issued in an order, you know,
it wasn't a ruling, but issued an order saying we
would really like to hear a case like this. There
was another case similar facts to Court decided not to
(04:41):
take the case, but they said, well, we would like
to hear a case along these lines. And they're going
to have to eventually. I mean, as the regulatory state
expands its control, and as the teachers' unions can expand
their control, and as the state increasingly things that it
knows better than you do how to raise your kids,
you're going to find more and more and more of
these conflicts. And there has to be a limit, a
(05:04):
line drawn to protect the rights of parents to raise
their kids.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
And if the Supreme Court decides that now you can't
do they can't keep that sort of stuff secret from
the parents, Will that have tentacles beyond just try and stuff.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Oh oh, definitely it will. And in fact, they've sort
of already did started doing this. So last term, the
Court decided a case about schools that were teaching lessons
to kids about sexuality like same sex, marriages, transsexuals, et cetera,
et cetera. In and this was very young kids. I
(05:35):
don't remember exactly, but you know, elementary and pre elementary's
kids in Virginia. And the question in that case was
do the parents have a constitutional right to opt their
kids out to say, I just don't want my kids
to go through these these lessons? And the Supreme Court
said yes they do. Now, the reason that you do
have that constitution right, and the reason that's important is
because there's been this question among lawyers and judges over
(05:59):
the level of how far does the parent's right to
protect and direct the upbringing of a child, How far
does that extend? Does it stop when you choose what
school to send your kid to, Because that's what a
lot of courts have said, a lot like circuit courts
of appeals have said, well, yes, you have a constitution
right to control the education of your child, but once
you've chosen what school to send your kid to, that's
(06:21):
the end of it. Then it's up to the school
that you know that the you we can and that
makes sense because you can't have parents going in there
and vetoing everything that a public school wants to do
you know, have a Heckler's veto over the entire curriculum
of a school. I can see why they're concerned about that,
but it also it can't be the case that your
parents your rights as a parent end once you send
your kid to the public school and then they can
do whatever they want. And sure enough, in this Virginia case,
(06:43):
the Supreme Court said, no, a parent's rights do not
end at the schoolhouse gate. Well, if that's true, then
that the same applies to these situations where schools are
concealing vital information from parents about how their kids are developing.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
What's that quote you always have from the early twentieth century,
Progressive is about schools?
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And oh yeah, well, you know the progressive thought of
public education as a means of shaping the minds of
of kids. And Woodrow Woodrow Wilson. Am I living through
that right now totally? And Woodrow Wilson, who you know,
he was the only president with a PhD. He was
like a college president before he became President of the
United States. He was a leading progressive intellectual. He has
(07:22):
this speech where he says that the goal of the
school is to make the child as unlike the parent
as possible, and that was so great. It's a very
extreme way of putting it. But you s, what they
were thinking is, well, they were like, the problems, all
the tensions and difficulties that we have in America, those
can be resolved by taking all the kids and putting
them together and teaching them, you know, how to be
(07:43):
good citizens. Which maybe that sounds good to you in
the abstract, but the problem is what do you mean
by good citizens? All right? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:48):
The problem the problem with that, obviously is they have determined,
we have figured out what is best for all of
you know, America, and that's what we're going to teach kids.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
And fortunately there are alternatives. There's school choice programs throughout
the country that parents can take advantage of to get
their kids into schools that are tailor made or a
tailor designed for their kids. And especially in my home
state of Arizona, we have a wonderfully successful program, the
Empowerment Scholarship Account Program, where a parent can decide what
(08:22):
schools to send their kids to and get them out
of failing public schools or public schools that aren't serving
their kids needs, maybe their kids have special needs or
that are abusing their power in these ways, and what
we need is more school choice, more power in the
hands of parents, and less power in the hands of
bureaucrats who again think that they know better than you
do how your kids ought to be raised.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
You and your wife are committed to non child people,
But it would be so awesome if you had kids,
just because I can imagine, I mean, because you get
fired up about this on behalf of other people's kids.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
I can't imagine if your kids. It's a scary thought.
I had not thought of it till you mentioned that.
But you're right, I can't imagine. You mean a school
board meeting. I was, well, I just think about how
I was when I was in school. I was already
a kind of a nonconformist when I was forced to
go to the government schools, and I made life pretty
pretty hell for my parents my teachers when I was
(09:16):
in school, So I can imagine what I would do
if it was my kid.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Well, I promised to get back to the Supreme Court stuff.
But tim was helpful to me and my story of
my son taking a public school American history class and
on day one having to write a land acknowledgment about
the tribe that had owned the land board the school.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Was and how we should all feel so horrible about that?
Who and that tribe probably stole it from some other tribe,
and that tribe stole it from some other tribe. I mean,
I would I just pray for the day when somebody
requires somebody to do a land acknowledgment for the Commanchee,
you know, the most aggressive imperial power in Native America
(09:58):
that just slought or countless other tribes and stole their land.
And yet now you know, and somebody does this land
was once possessed by the commanche you know, And I
would love to see that. Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
They must not do this in Europe, right, the land acknowledgement,
because it'd be impossible if you had a square foot
of France, right or Germany?
Speaker 1 (10:18):
I mean, how in the hell would you do This
land used to belong to Germany and then Russia and
then Germany and then France and then Germany and then Russia.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
And yeah, it would be very, very complicated. What other
Supreme Court cases are you excited about this?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Well, the there's an important gun rights case that's going
to go up there, and and this case is it's
it's kind of tough as an intellectual matter, at least
as I think so. And that is so, the state
of Hawaii passes a law that says you're not allowed
to bring a gun onto private property without the express
permission of the owner. Now, on one hand, that makes
(10:54):
sense to me, because I wouldn't bring a gun into
my friend's house without saying, Hey, by the way, I
have a gun, is it okay with you if I
bring it into the house. But on the other hand,
the reason this law has passed was because most people
are probably not going to put up a sign on
their houses is it's okay for you to bring a
gun on this property something? And so it's kind of
a clever way of preventing people from carrying guns anywhere.
(11:15):
Oh okay, right. And so the question presented in the
case is to what level can the state manipulate this
sort of baseline rule, this the default rule of whether
you're allowed to with with as long as nobody forbids you,
or whether you're not allowed to unless you get express permission.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
And that's a tough question. Opt in opt out stuff
always drives me crazy. Who decides which which it's going
to be right.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
And so now the court has been pretty good about
protecting gun rights, but there are some contray examples. There
have been some cases that where the court has not,
you know, been as aggressive in protecting these rights as
I would like. And so I do worry about them
setting a decision here that's gonna weaken the right to
possess firearms. But on the other hand, property rights, I
(11:59):
have a right to decide whether some sure the property
brings it out of my property or on.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
The course of course, I got questions about that and
other stuff with Tim sanderf for coming up on and
tell you about price picks. You know, the NBA season
is getting underway, obviously, NFL is as hot as it's
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Speaker 1 (12:16):
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Speaker 2 (12:19):
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Speaker 2 (12:26):
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You download the Price Picks up today, use the code
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five dollars lineup Price Picks. It's good to be right,
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look forward to that.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
All on the way stay here are Strong and.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Tim Sander is thankfully committed to sticking around for a
little while talking about these Supreme Court cases or various
state cases.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
But we're just discussing.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
One of the reasons I think Tim is a fan
favorite has been for many years on The Armstrong and
Getty Show is your ability to explain these complicated cases
in a way that's normal people like us can understand.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
You know. I think part of the reason for that
is that I was never a very good student in school,
and so the teacher would get up there and lecture
about something I wouldn't get it, so I'd have to
go out and learn it. Myself, so I would pull
down the book and read it myself, and that's how
I got it. And so I know how I learned
this stuff, and so when I explained it to other people,
I tell them the way that I figured it out
(13:40):
as opposed to the way that it's normally talked about
in other circles. And I think that might be part
of the reason that is really interesting. Have you ever
thought about teaching in the law school. I have taught
a couple classes. I've taught a class at McGeorge and Sacramento.
I taught a class at George Mason in Virginia. I
just taught a class two years ago at Arizona State University.
So I have taught a couple times and all bit
(14:02):
the students loved it. Well, I don't know, you have
to ask them, but it was a lot of work.
That's the thing. I felt sorry for my law professors
in retrospect because I had not realized when I was
a student how much work it really is. That you
have to just do it.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Once and then you're written, and then you could keep
doing the same spiel for the next.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, thirty years. Yeah, I suppose you could, you know,
just update your outline as you go. That is true.
But on the other hand, you would think that speaking
for two hours is twice as hard as speaking for
one hour, and actually it's like fifty times. How I
want speaking for an hour. It's keeping the students' attention
and not being boring. That's the thing I just dread
being boring.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, tell me about it. We call that
flop sweat in radio business, when you start feeling, Okay,
this is not working. So how did vaping become a
court case?
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Look at? So? One of the things that makes the
Goldwater Institute where I work, unique is that we try
to focus on state constitutions, on the rights that are
protected by your state constitution, which a lot of people
forget about. They'll talk about the Bill of Rights and
they forget about the fact that your state constitution protects
more rights typically than does the federal Constitution. So we
like to go to state supreme courts to defend state
(15:08):
constitutional rights. And we have a case pending in the
Oregon Supreme Court. In fact, it was just argued a
couple of days ago about the freedom of speech under
the state constitution, and it involves a state law that
makes it illegal to package vaping products in a manner
that quote might be attractive to miners end quote. And
that term whatever might be attractive to miners is determined
(15:30):
by a government bureaucracy, because you know, a whole bunch
of middle aged bureaucrats and a government entity. They really
have their fingers on the pulse of youthful America.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
And so we say this violates freedom of speech. Our
client runs a vaping shop. Kids aren't even allowed in
his shop. Nevertheless, under this law, he cannot even put
a picture of a cherry on a box full of
cherry flavored vaping liquid. The state has said that that
is illegal. Well, that obviously violates your freedom of speech.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Right, and it could be you know, you could just
trapolate that to so many other things.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Yeah, you can't put you can't say what, you can't
say a truthful message about what's in the contents of
a package. And if this isn't even I mean, if
the if the constitution doesn't protect your right to speak
the truth, you've got some real problems there, right. And
the bureaucracy there when they when we sued they can't,
they came back and said, well, you you're not allowed
to sue yet because we haven't written the regulations. We
(16:23):
haven't told you yet what is attractive to minors, which
is just that's crazy. I mean, the idea that bureau
bureaucrats can be empowered to decide what speech you are
and aren't allowed to express, and then that you're not
allowed to challenge it until they write the rules is wild.
So we went up to the Oregon Supreme Court just
a few days ago and one of my colleagues, John Thorpe,
(16:46):
argued that case and it went pretty well. I think,
you know, I got my fingers crossed about that case. Cool.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Would people like you I others who like smaller government,
would we rather were living under more state constitution rules
than federal constitution rules?
Speaker 1 (17:07):
In some ways yes, and in some ways no. So
it is true that state constitutions tend to protect freedom
more broadly than the federal Constitution does. But you can't
just leave it to the states. We have to have
that federal protection against states. So think the Fourteenth amendmentant
that prevents the state from violating your federal constitutional rights
is crucial in protecting that. But for the most part,
(17:27):
of course, these decisions should mostly be made at the
state level. Political decisions generally, and constitutional rights should be
understood mostly at the state level because state judges, for
one thing, they typically are either elected or we have
retention elections, so you have more control over them, and
they're more attuned to the history and culture of that state,
and they know what the constitution means.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
I have more questions about that, and we're going to
talk about more Supreme Court cases coming up with Tim Sandfer,
who works with the Goldwater Institute and has been a
fan favored of the Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
For how many years? Oh, it's been at least a decade.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
No longer than that. Yeah, Yeah, we've been doing this. Yeah,
so it's sad to think about.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Really. So we got a lot on the way.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
I hope you can stay with us if you missed
a segment or now we get the podcast Armstrong and
Getty on demand.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Stay with us Armstrong and Getty. We're talking with Tim
Sander of the Goldwater Institute.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Anything nice you want to say about Goldwater Institute before
I start asking you questions.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
We're a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting individual rights in
courts and in legislatures. Across the country. We're defending your
right to Our greatest achievement really is Right to Try,
which is a legislation that was signed by President Trump
in his previous term that protects your right if you
are a terminally ill patient to access medicine that has
(18:43):
been approved for safety but not yet fully approved for
sale by the FDA. And now we're branching out into
Right to Try two point zero, which is an effort
to legally protect your right to access tailor made medical
treatment that's designed just for you.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
I'm glad you guys did that. It's insane that it
wasn't already the case. I mean, it's just close my mind.
For years that we've been talking about this.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
It really is. Well. We were just talking about how
bureaucrats think they know better than you do about how
to raise your kids. A lot of the time, bureaucrats
think they know better than you do what medicines you
ought to be allowed to even choose from, even when
you're a patient with a terminal illness that can't be
cured anyway, and you there's an opportunity to take this
investigational medicine that might improve things for you, and then
(19:25):
some bureaucrat comes in and says, no, no, we're not.
You can't do that.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
One of my favorite phrases from that whole thing was
you might give them false.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Hope, false hope. That's right. Well, no hope is false.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
How about I'm allowed to, in my final days alive
as a human being, to have some false hope, you
son of a bitch.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, right, and some and some authority over my own decision.
That's crazy.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
How before we get to a specific case, how left
are law schools in general across the country.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
They are so much worse than you could possibly imagine
the entire legal is right. Well, there's a number of
historical reasons, I'm sure. I mean, part of it, I
think is the romanticism of the sixties, you know, the
hero the heroism of Brown versus Board of Education that
(20:14):
then spread after that into this notion that the civil
rights lawyers were the champions of social justice and so forth.
And that was part of it, even though even when
that got sidetracked into these crazy left wing notions that
have nothing to do with justice. But I think the
biggest problem is the very phrase social justice. Law schools
are not very good on philosophy, and they teach a
(20:37):
corrupted notion of what justice means. They think a lot
of people think justice means equality. Justice does not mean equality.
Justice and equality, in fact, have very little to do
with one another. Justice means ensuring that every person gets
what is his or her own, and equality is about
distributing to things to people according to some set formula.
(20:59):
And so justice inequality of very different things. But nobody
talks about this in law school, and so people emerge
from law school thinking they're deeply educated with these perverse
notions about what justice even means to begin with.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
So if the legal education system in this country is
way left, what is the result of that.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Do we turn out a whole bunch of left lawyers?
Speaker 3 (21:18):
We do.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
We have tons and tons of left lawyers and left
judges who often, I think, have never seriously even considered
the alternative. And so they've been kind of gobsmacked by
the rise of the federalist society and the backlash against
what we lawyers call the New Deal Settlement, that the
way that constitutional law has been interpreted since the nineteen
(21:40):
thirties or so. There's been this effort to push back
against that, and I think It really surprised a lot
of legal intellectuals. Lawrence Tribe, who you know, very famous
law professor, refused even to publish the second volume of
his treatise on Constitutional Law because he said he no
longer understood constitutional law. Well good, because the constitutional law
he's been p's in practicing is kakame Ma.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
And then you were talking about Goldwater Institute gets involved
in state constitutions a lot. What what couple of states
have the wackiest constitutions?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Oh? Wow, Well, Montana's is pretty bad. It's written in
the nineteen seventies and it has all sorts of sort
of lefty notions in it. But I and Hawaii's my
favorite thing. Hawaii. Actually the law of the splintered Paddle
is part of their constitution. Nobody knows what the law
of the splintered paddle means, but it's an ancient thing
that dates back to Kamema, so it's in the constitution. Okay,
(22:31):
But I think the general consensus is that Alabama has
the worst state constitution. It's been amended so many times
that it's several hundred pages long, and it has every
little last detail of state law on embedded in it.
And it's just too complicated for words. I mean, California
is pretty lousy. California is a bad has a lowsy constitution,
(22:51):
but it's not quite that bad. Wow, that is really interesting.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
But the laboratories of democracy, you know, at least we
get to see how it works out.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
You have a lot of crazy experiments in some of
those laboratories. I mean, you're experimenting on human beings. But
that that's consent, right, true.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
You do have the opportunity to leave the state if
you want to. What other case the Supreme Court's taking
up your interest to do it? Well.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Of course, the biggest case on the horizon as far
as I'm concerned, is the tariff case that we're talking
about Federal Constitution now and the Federal Supreme Court, and
that is the constitutionality of President Trump's tariffs, which are
I know, totally unconstitutional, totally illegal.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
I know nothing about this, but the idea that one guy,
any guy Trump, or anybody else could make that sort
of a decision for America in the world just doesn't
seem on its face correct.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
You would have floored the authors of the Constitution of
the United States, who had lived through the American Revolution
and had experienced exactly that and wrote a constitution to
prohibit exactly that thing from happening. Of a single person
imposing taxes on the whole nation in the amount that
he chooses, for whatever reason he wants, for as long
as he decides that's that's wild. And but I don't
(23:59):
think that the I'll get to the constitutional issue in
this case. I think they'll probably decide this on statutory grounds.
And what I mean by that is the teriffs are
supposedly in accordance with a statute called AEPA, which stands
for something I don't remember, and AYIPA does not actually
allow for tariffs. What it says is that the president
can in a case in an emergency, the president can
(24:20):
regulate or seize products from foreign countries in commerce and
things like that. It's designed to freeze assets and capture
things so that people aren't sending bad stuff to the
enemy in wartime and stuff. The statute is not designed
to allow for these tariffs that are just designed or
formulated however the president wants. So I think the court
(24:41):
is going to say that they don't satisfy it. But
shouldn't they have taken that up like last week, given.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
The fact that I mean we're threatening one hundred percent
tariffs on everything from China starting November first.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Yeah, it would be nice if some of these things
are faster. But to know, in their defense, there's so
much stuff that's been coming at them, There's so much
unconstitutional stuff that's been going on that's been thrown at
their heads. You know, there's only so much time that
they can resolve these cases, do they.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
I know, sometimes you prioritize things and move them up,
like you know, deciding on uh, you know, Nixon and
Watergate and all kinds of things that where you just decide,
we got to have an emergency session.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
But right in general, you just let it come down,
like when it comes down the pipe. So here's the thing.
So the the Feds said, because the plaintiffs in that
case said, well, you need to resolve this really quickly
for all the reasons you just said, and the Trump
administration said, no, no, there's no hurry because we can
always refund people the taxes if these things are declared
to league, that wouldn't be complicated at all. And then
(25:39):
at the same time, the administration is putting out these
press releases saying, we have to keep these tariffs in
place because it would be economic chaos if they get
struck down, because then we'd have to refund everybody's money.
They were literally saying the opposite thing simultaneously. I know
that that is ordinary nowadays, but to me that's still
shock us.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
Lay people don't fully understand that. You know, these things
have to work their way through courts, through a low
lower level all the way to the higher level, and
it takes its time or everything like that.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
But there's so many.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Examples, like the can a fifteen year old boy participat
in girls sports in high school?
Speaker 1 (26:10):
It just seems like this is gonna get to the
Supreme Court. Can we just do it now and decide?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Or the same thing, can you be a sanctuary city
and just decide we don't agree, Well, you just decide
these now.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Part of the reason I mentioned now the court takes
only one percent of the cases and fewer every year.
A part of the thing is I think some of
the conservative justices have wanted the Supreme Court not to
decide these questions. They sort of tend to want lower
courts to resolve these questions. The problem with that is,
of course, the lower courts disagree with each other sometimes,
but I think that the Supreme Court sees itself as
(26:42):
they're worried that they don't because they follow this no
nonsense idea of a judicial restraint. We don't want unelected
judges controlling everything, which scares everybody else but doesn't scare me,
because I'm worried about judges getting things wrong, whether they
get it wrong by being too active or too passive,
I'm worried about them getting the wrong. I'm not worried
about being activists. I'm worried about them being wrong. Those
(27:04):
are two completely different things. I think it's a very
bad thing when the Court stands back and says, we're
not gonna we're not gonna interfere, We're gonna let the
government violate your rights and we're not going to do
anything about it, because we don't want to have activist judges.
I think that's a terrible idea. Anyway. What I think
we're seeing is that the Supreme Court is trying to
offload some of its work to these lower courts, and
so they are taking fewer of those cases and not
(27:26):
necessarily deciding them as quickly as as otherwise. They just
don't want to have their fingerprints on it. Yeah, and well,
because they they buy this notion that unelected judges shouldn't
have all this power. Okay, and again I of course,
of course nobody should do things wrong if they're in government.
But the idea that that judicial activism is a serious
threat is wildly overbrown, overblown. Congress and the President violate
(27:50):
your rights on an hourly basis in this country. I'm
far more worried about them than I am about the courts.
The courts are so they have very little power or
all they can do is pronounce what the law is.
The Congress and the president can resist them very powerfully.
But when the Congress does stuff and the President does stuff,
the violate your rights, and the Court folds its hands
(28:11):
and says, we're not going to do anything about that
because we don't want to be activist judges. That's a
breakdown in our constitutional system that was never intended to
be that way.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
How often, and then, obviously this is a complete opinion,
a judgment opinion, But how often does the Supreme Court
make mistakes?
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Do you think, oh, they get it wrong, Yeah, they
get things wrong very frequently. But oh, nowadays I would
say I think they get things wrong about Oh, I
guess forty percent of the time. But I guess it
depends on whether you mean get things wrong by not
doing things that I wish they would do, as opposed
to doing things that I wish they wouldn't do. I mean,
(28:50):
there's a lot of stuff where like I'm, for instance,
I'm not an originalist. You know. The originalism is this
big popular trend right now where these judges are like, well,
what the Founding's fathers thought that the Constitution meant is
what it'll meant for all time, And that sounds plausible
at first, but when you get down to it, it's
just not how language really works. And so you know,
for that reason, I also find myself disagree with a
lot of people on my own side. I love Justice Thomas,
(29:11):
for instance, but I find that I disagree with him
about a lot of things. I don't think that, you know,
our constitutional rights should be interpreted in accordance with what
the Puritans thought when they landed in Massachusetts, and this
we do you call what you are? I don't know.
I have to That's the best word that I've been
able to find for what I am. Okay, yeah, Yeah,
I'm hoping to figure this out. I have a big
paper that's coming out later this year that we're all
(29:33):
talk about this, and maybe that'll help me figure out
what the title is.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Yeah, So on the how often do they get it wrong?
It reminds me of the like when they do the
right track wrong track? You know, is the country going
the right direction wrong direction? And the number's really high, Well,
half the people want it to be further left, and
have the people want to be further right, So it
doesn't really tell you anything that's right.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
That's why the government should have less power over our lives,
because we don't want those crazy people over there, whoever
they might be, to control oh what I get to
do with my life. And that's the whole benefit of
limited constitutional government is that you get to decide your
own life in your own way, and other people don't
get to come in and tell you how to live
what they think is your proper life. And unfortunately neither
(30:13):
party today believes in that. Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
The less the government is involved, the less it matters
whether they get it right or on.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Because they're not deciding for me. The people sometimes say, well, yeah,
I've had this happen to me. But Tim, yeah, you
believe in freedom, but that's an optimistic view of human nature.
You think people are good and that they're going to
do good things with freedom. No, it's exactly the opposite.
I believe in freedom because I don't trust other people
to be to make the right decisions from my life.
(30:40):
I think other people are often ignorant, they're very foolish.
Sometimes sometimes they're corrupt, they're bribed, they don't know what
they're doing, and they'll make mistakes. So their mistakes should
be confined to their own lives. They shouldn't be allowed
to inflict their mistakes on my life. That's the argument
for freedom. That's a good point to end on.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Another excellent point from Tim Sandffer, as he's done where
we figured it out like twenty years yes on the
Armstrong and Getty went a year as we all enter
the winter of our lives.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
So thanks for your time, Tim, Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Police say two suspects ambushed to Florida couple at gunpoint
near Tampa. Almost two months later, please say they've now
caught the attackers thanks to something very small taped under
the victim's vehicle.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
The search of.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
Their vehicle, our detectives did find that Apple AirTag. The
Hillsborough County Sheriff's offices records tied that hidden Apple AirTag
to twenty six year old Luis Enrique Charles, who was.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Arrested last week.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Apple's website spells out how people can get alerts about
nearby tracking devices like air tags.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Typically, it's on your settings whether you can be notified,
whether the AirTag pops in on your phone or not. Yeah,
it's interesting the Apple AirTag.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
I mean, when I was a kid, the idea of
owning a tracking device that you could have put on
somebody's car or luggage or whatever would have been so
James Bond and crazy. Yeah, and scary and dangerous. And
now everybody's got access to one. But I keep forgetting. Yeah,
you there's a setting and I should do this on
my phone. There's a setting where you can see if
(32:10):
there are Apple tags nearby.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
I have it turned on. Yeah, all women should. Nobody's
trying to get to me.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Uh but never no, but yeah, it'd be it's good
to know if somebody has decided. God, I would think, yeah,
if you're a woman, you got to have it turned on, Yeah,
the idea every time you leave a night nightclub, the
concern that the guy that kept asking to dance and
you kept saying no is slipped an Apple tag into
(32:42):
your car or purse or whatever. H Oh my god,
brave New world. We're talking about scams a little bit earlier.
And it wasn't just for the web route commercials that
were regularly doing to try to deal with getting hacked
and whatnot. It just we're all confronted with this so
many times per day. Every one of us gets up
(33:05):
and deletes like ten emails that are clearly attempts to
steal from us, or texts on your phone or whatever else.
Got this text id theft. There were three student loans
opened in my name that I've been trying to clear
for over a year. I've filled out and submitted copious
amounts of paperwork, and the latest request from the lender
(33:28):
is for a copy of my high school to diploma
to prove who I am. I don't know about you,
but I can't lay my hands on my high school diploma.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Oh geez.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Yeah, this person said, I'm sixty five years old and
I'm not doing the footwork to acquire a copy of
my effing.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
High school diploma.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Since I don't need to care about my credit score,
I'll die with these loans of my credit report. Oh
and my credit has been supposedly frozen for years in
order to avoid such an occurrence. That's what they always
tell you, freeze your credit thing if you're worried about
your stuff being hacked.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
But it's funny.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
We had to do this the other day for our
company insurance where we had to prove all kinds of
different things and I needed to come up with birth
certificates and marriage certificates and various things that I didn't
know where they were, but I finally laid my hands
on them.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yeah, I'm trying to find those things.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
It's you never think about where they are until it's
like down to the wire. Well, some of y'all are
very like my mom always was super organized and no
always knew where everything was all the time.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
But I'm not that person. That's a pain in the ass.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
I was great talking to Tim the lawyer, always is
and I always like his points when he gets to
stuff like he did there At the end, that it
all comes down to, we want the government involved in
our lives. As little as possible because they're so susceptible
to being well to being human beings, and human beings
(34:48):
can either have poor judgment, be corrupt, become corrupt, whatever
the situation is, be wacky ideologically in a way that
you don't agree. So you want and you know you
want them making decisions for you as little as possible.
And that's what it all comes down to, if you
lean right in my opinion, you want the least amount
(35:10):
of local, state, federal government involved in making decisions for
your life, other than in cases where you know it's
keeping you from harming someone else. But that is not
the direction that the country seems to be going as
we add more and more to our tax code and
more laws and federal laws and all these different sorts
(35:30):
of things. What's that There's a saying out there and there,
I think somebody even wrote a book how many federal
laws the average person violates on a daily basis, Multiple
federal laws that you violate on a daily basis, because
there are so many. And then you get into the
world of just find me the man and I'll find
the crime if you want to get somebody, and law
fare and that sort of thing. At all levels of government.
(35:51):
Just fantastic.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Anyway, We're going to.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Talk to Katie's dad in an hour three for the
oddest of reasons. It's not because he used to be
a judge. It's because he used to being an embalmer.
He used to embalm dead bodies and then dress them.
I just have questions about that, among other things on
the way if he missed the second the podcast Armstrong
and Getty on demand Armstrong and Getty
Hosts And Creators
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
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