PM Show Hr 1 | The U.S. Senate Seat in Texas

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's that time, time, time, time, luck and low. The
Michael Berry Show is on the air.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
It's Charlie from BlackBerry Smother. I can feel a good
one coming on. It's the Michael Berry Show.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Oh, yes, it is, Yes, it is. I think you're
gonna love our show today, I hope. So. I was
just looking at our lists of the affiliates. We have
more affiliates in Texas than anywhere. I think Alabama's number two,
and different states have a different number of affiliates. But
just looking at that list, you're in California, Pennsylvania, Delaware, DC, Florida, Arizona, Washington, Colorado, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky,

(01:11):
Rhode Island. No, not Djibouti, Jibutys. Not in Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma.
Did I say Kentucky? Another, West Virginia. Trying not to
repeat because some of these we have multiple Maryland, Missouri, Mississippi,

(01:32):
just going down the list, Louisiana. So we have been
talking a lot about the US Senate seat in Texas
that in a little over seventy days will begin early
voting and then we'll have in you know, eighty something days,

(01:52):
eighty five eighty six days will have the election day.
And we've put more emphasis on the Texas US Senate
seat than any other show in the country. The reason
is we're kind of similarly and we we're kind of
uniquely situated to talk about it. And unfortunately, whether you

(02:13):
like it or not, how Texas votes on that US
Senate seat is going to have an effect on your life.
We're going to have. It's going to go down to
the wire who has control of the US Senate after
November election and the US House. And I'm going to

(02:33):
tell you, and I know you know this, if the
Democrats take control of the House, all they're going to
do for the final two years of the Trump administration
is impeachment hearings. Nothing else will get done. That will
be all they do. Impeachment hearings, impeachment hearings, impeachment hearings,
and the media will cover every one of them, and

(02:54):
they will they will pass articles of impeachment and they
will send it over to the Senate. Senate will have
to deal with that. And if that Senate is a
Democratic controlled Senate, they will pass impeachment. That's real. That's
going to happen, and so out of those one hundred

(03:15):
Senate seats, there's only one in Texas that's up. You
remember the lower House, the House of Representatives. The members
there are up every two years, the four hundred and
fifty of them, sorry, four hundred and thirty five of them.
But the US Senate they're only up every six years.

(03:40):
So if you lose a seat, you're stuck with a
Democrat in that seat for six years. And if we
start losing what were secure seats, we're in real trouble.
You know, Arizona was a solid red state and then
lost both their Senate seats and then cheated to keep

(04:01):
them and the governor's office. I remember a few years
ago when Roy Moore won the nomination Republican nomination and
the Democrats managed to win that seat. That was a
huge coup for them. It'd be like us winning a
Senate seat Republicans winning a Senate seat in California or

(04:22):
New York states where you expect the Democrats to win,
or more to the point, Oregon or Vermont. So it's
critically important. But it's also critically important because it's a
different sort of race in Texas than it is in
Michigan or even a purple state like Wisconsin. And the

(04:43):
reason is because Texas. Texans have a very independent street,
a very self reliant street. We're the only state that
was its own nation. We're proud of that. You can
laugh at that, but we are proud of that. We're
gun owners. We're more rural and suburban than urbanites. Yes,

(05:09):
we have the big cities of Dallas and Houston and
to a lesser extent, Austin, San Antone. But we are
people who don't want the government making decisions. We are
socially more conservative than liberal Democrats. But the Californians and
the people who want control in this country, the Reid Hoffmans,

(05:31):
the George Soroses, they desperately want to win that Texas
US Senate seat. We had a four term incumbent, John Cornyn,
who was sandbagging the MAGA agenda, and so he was defeated.
He was part of the Lindsay Grahamnesty, John Thune, Mitch
McConnell cabal, and he was defeated by the base. And

(05:55):
so some people say, well, I don't know, this is
tallar Rico. He's a nice guy. And that's how they've
pitched him, But he's pitching socialism just like they are
in Wisconsin, just like they are in Michigan, just like
Mamdani did in New York. But he's pitching a more
palatable socialism. He's rooting it in Christianity. You couldn't do

(06:17):
that in Michigan because they're basically, you know, appealing to
Islam there or secularism in Wisconsin. But it's time that
we have conversations about why we believe what we believe.
So with socialists on the march, and they are on
the march, with democrats, socialism on the rise, especially with

(06:39):
young people. But not just with young people, especially it's
doing well with women. I thought it was time to
go back to our roots and let's explain the difference
between socialism and capitalism and why we are capitalists and
which leads to more just results, which leads to more
Christian results. So I hope you'll you'll hang around.

Speaker 4 (06:58):
Let's get back to basics today. Plush Limbaugh used to
talk about the fact that his audience were like university students,
and this will appeal and apply to many of you.

Speaker 3 (07:17):
And he would often refer to the fact that that
most of his listeners like him, never went to college.
They weren't quote unquote educated. But there was a time
before universities. It was a time before formal education. And
like most everything else, weddings, funerals, bar Mitzvah's Kinsinetta's graduations, proposals,

(07:44):
things take on a life that's much bigger than the
actual thing itself. Is it so important to go to
the university? I don't know, it's pretty cool. I mean,
Booker T. Washington lost his mind at the thought of
getting to just sit and read all day. We take
that for granted. In this country. We have to beg
our kids to read, right, you have to beg your

(08:05):
kids to read and to study and all that. In
most countries, you're put to work at a very young
age as soon as you can start contributing, because you're
a drain on the resources of the family. So start contributing,
and before you know it, you wake up in the
morning and you're working, whether you want to or not.
Usually you don't. It's a drudgery, and you have just

(08:29):
enough food to sustain you. And in order to dull,
to kill the pain, the anguish, the sense of drudgery,
you pick up some sort of a weed you can
smoke or chew in India, a beatlenut, a drink, some

(08:50):
sort of drugs, something to escape from the reality of
your hell. But the university was designed to be a
place to read and to study and to share ideas.
If you didn't have that experience, don't think you're not educated,
because whatever you did in lieu of instead of during

(09:12):
that time is also your education. You have an education.
You've raised children that in and of itself, there's a course.
You've fixed things, you've failed. You've tried, you've worked, You've
had to comply with laws and taxes and everything else.

(09:33):
You've had to comply with a code of ethics by
which we exist. You've had to watch some people fail
and some people succeed. You've had to deal with death
and life obligations and responsibility commitments. These are all your education.
And you learned more on the streets in life than

(09:54):
you would have in a university. And I can say
that as a guy who got a four year degree
in undergraduate, a three year law degree, and then another
degree in England in another law degree. So let's dispense
with the notion that there's an educated and an uneducated,
but we can say that when you were being taught
a lot of important things in life, you might not

(10:15):
have paid attention. You wouldn't be alone. So you find
yourself noticing that the kind of people who were pushing for, say,
socialism and communism are nut jobs. And you say, well,
I don't agree with that. I like capitalism. I just
I can't articulate it. Let's see if we can't improve
on that. Antonin Scalia is my all time favorite Supreme

(10:39):
Court justice. I had a very fortunate opportunity. I was
working for a law firm in Washington, DC called Hymen,
Phelps and McNamara. They were an FDA law firm Food
and Drug Administration, and what they did is they took
drugs to market. At the time this was a mid nineties,
they had brought tagamet MD to market. My very first

(11:01):
project I worked on was an attempt to bring some
consistency and structure to the idea of calling something kosher.
And at the time, there were over one hundred different entities,
including individual rabbis, who were putting a stamp of kosher

(11:21):
on a product. There are the The partner who was
giving this to me was a very prominent Jewish lawyer
in the country, and so what they were trying to
do was get the FDA to agree that before you
can stamp kosher on something, it has to meet certain

(11:42):
standards that by rabbinical law would make it kosher. That's
where you get the term keeping kosher. It's proper. Certain
foods don't touch other foods is a big one. And
of course you can't. You can't have anything bacon related,
any pork products, which is also true of Muslims, but

(12:03):
for Jews that was the case. And anyway, so as
a baby lawyer, I had a friend who was a
prominent journalist thinker, ended up editing the Wall Street Journal
opinion pages. He wrote books named Rich Miniter, and he
was a member of the University Club. And as a

(12:24):
member of the University Club, he went to the board
and asked they had just a handful of rooms upstairs
from the club, which was next door to the Russian Embassy,
and a guest could stay there overnight or a few nights.
He spoke for me and he got me where I
could rent a room at the University Club for the summer,

(12:44):
and I did, and so every night I would go
downstairs and you could smoke cigars inside. It was the
coolest thing ever. It was old fashioned men's club for
dinner and cigars and telling stories. And it was in DC,
and it was a power structure there, and Clarence Thomas
would come there in Intident's Leah would go there, and
I got to meet both of them, which was the
neatest at a smoking dinner that was held. And I

(13:07):
have long admired anton In Scalia for the things he wrote,
for the things he said, for the way he said them,
for the strength of his conviction. So what I thought
we would do today is let's have a little university course,
not taught by me, taught by Intident Scalia. So set

(13:28):
aside your sense that you're not educated. You're about to be.
Anton In Scalia died February thirteenth, twenty sixteen. He was
at a hunting lodge in Texas, a very prominent Texan.
Bring prominent people there, and you have these exotic hunts.
And his seat on the nine member Supreme Court, nominated

(13:51):
by the President confirmed by the Senate, has never been
filled and never will be. The number two justice, in
my opinion, greatest justice on the Court at that time
was Clarence Thomas, who himself then ascended to be the brains,
the leader, the thought leader of this court in the
national conversation. It is now Clarence Thomas who has taken

(14:14):
the role of talking about getting back to the foundation
of what made our nation special. Right, Well, what we're
going to do today is explore a lecture by a
Supreme Court justice who was a thinker, a writer, a Christian, Catholic,
a father, an American. And what you're going to hear

(14:37):
here you couldn't hear from Elena Kagan are Katanji Brown Jackson,
for that matter, John Roberts. You're going to hear his
worldview in a speech he gave to a Christian group
and the topic was is capitalism or socialism more conducive

(15:03):
to Christian virtue? And I think you're gonna like this.

Speaker 2 (15:08):
This is DJ Higgs of your fight in Texas, Aggies.
You're listening to my uncle Zar Michael Berry. So let's
talk about.

Speaker 3 (15:18):
Christian virtue now leaving a side when we have the
conversation is socialism or capitalism more suitable to Christian virtue?
Leaving a side that in this country there is an
onslaught of Islam. We've seen that in Michigan, We've seen
it in Moga issue Minnesota. Hell, we've seen it in Massachusetts.

(15:40):
We're seeing it in Texas, and so we've got real
challenges as to what kind of country we're going to be.
But this was a speech by Intonentskalia that I really
wanted to focus on today because I think we spend
so much time on this new story, in this new
story and this true story, that sometimes we have to
step back and say, what do we believe in? Why

(16:01):
do we believe this? And Rush did a good job
of that, and so that's what we do today. Antonin
Scalia gave a speech. It was a lecture and it
was fortunately recorded in twenty thirteen. It's not great audio,
but it's good enough. He's speaking on the subject of
is capitalism or socialism more conducive to Christian virtue?

Speaker 2 (16:23):
And the very.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
First argument he makes, and this is Scalia, is that
the question is not terribly relevant and stay with us.
A Christian, he says, should no more choose a government
based on which saves souls than he should choose his
toothpaste on that subject. On that basis, government is not

(16:46):
meant for saving souls. It is meant for protecting life
and property, and then he lands the line that stops
the room.

Speaker 5 (16:56):
Hear this, Having finally the fine my topic, the first
thing I wish to say about it is that I
do not believe it is terribly relevant. That is to say,
I do not believe that a Christian ought to choose

(17:17):
his form of government on the basis of which will
be most conducive to his faith, any more than he
ought to choose his toothpaste on that basis. To be sure,
there are certain prohibitions. A Christian should not support a
government that suppresses the faith, or one that sanctions the

(17:38):
taking of innocent human life, just as a Christian should
not wear immodest clothes. But the test of good government,
like the test of well tailored clothes, is assuredly not
whether it helps you save your soul. Government is not

(17:59):
meant for saving souls, but for protecting life and property
and assuring the conditions for physical prosperity. Its responsibility is
the here, not the hereafter, and the needs of the
two sometimes diverge. It may well be, for example, that
a governmental system which keeps its citizens in relative poverty

(18:24):
will produce more saints. The rich, as Christ said, have
a harder time getting to heaven, but that would be
a bad government. Nonetheless, this recognition of the separate spheres
of church and state is not just the teaching of
the First.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Speaker 5 (18:43):
It is also, I think the teaching of Jesus Christ,
who spoke of rendering to Caesar the things that are
Caesar's and who is not regarded as having indicated any
preference about government except one he did not want the
people to ma Kim King.

Speaker 3 (19:03):
So this is hard for people to understand because people
who are not particularly deep thinkers will say, scale didn't
want us to be Christians. That's not what he said.
Many people will jump to conclusions not based on what
you said, but I'm based on their fears, based on

(19:25):
their inability to take two plus two and see four.
They see two plus two and they're confused, and they say,
you're saying two hundred and twenty. No, No, that's not
what we're saying here. What Scalia is talking about, and
let's take capitalism versus socialism, which is really the subject

(19:46):
he undertakes, is leave people to themselves. Less government is
better government, less is more this is an originalist position.
This what is the position of our founders, the majority
of them when they created our constitution. Remember all these

(20:08):
rights that were enumerated, which means written down the First Amendment,
the amendment to speak, to press, to gather to worship
that wasn't in the original Constitution. The Second Amendment, the
ability to keep in bare arms, the ability to defend
yourself with a tool that you need. Whether you're a

(20:30):
little old lady or a young person, you're tiny, you're infirm,
you still can have, as given by God, the power
to defend yourself. The Third Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the
Fifth Amendment, third and fourth dealing with issues related to
win our means of law enforcement or investigating crimes. How

(20:54):
far can they go? How many of our rights can
they abridge? And what rights do we have to keep
them from just kicking in our door and digging through
our house to see if maybe we committed the crime,
because there's always going to be a temptation to do that.
How about the fifth Amendment. How about we put you
up on the stand and we say were you at

(21:16):
that house? And you know that if you say yes,
it looks like you did it. But it's so much
more complicated than that. So that was another the sixth Amendment,
the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth, the tenth
saying those powers not given to the federal government will
be reserved to the state. Why did we need these
first ten? There were actually twelve that were proposed, but

(21:37):
two fell off. Only ten were passed, nice clean number,
which came to be known as the Bill of Rights.
That is because our founders in seventeen eighty seven believed
that our rights didn't come from government. And this is
what Scalia is talking about. Our rights didn't come from government.
Our rights came from God. That's why they're called natural rights.

(22:01):
Are they exist in nature? A human being comes into
this world with the right not to be abused, not
to be murdered, not to be tortured, not to be enslaved,
not to fill in the blank. A human being comes
into this world with natural rights. You don't have to

(22:24):
spell those out to have them. You necessarily limit government
because government is in the business of taking rights, not
giving them. Do you see in the state of California
they're giving rights. The only thing they're giving is free
stuff to illegal aliens to come here so they'll vote
for them. They are constantly in the process of taking

(22:44):
your light, your rights. You don't want to take an
experimental jab that will shoot your skyt your spike proteins
up and potentially kill you, called a clock shot. Will
they take away your ability to defend against that. They're
constantly taking away your ability to run your air conditioning,
to idle your car at the intersection so it doesn't die,

(23:05):
to buy the kind of gasoline you want. So what
Scalia is talking about here is that government should not
be in the business of and this was the separation
of church and state. Government was not like the King
of England the Anglican Church. I declare myself the king
because the Catholic Church won't let me in all my

(23:26):
marriage and I want to take on a new wife.
And this is Beckett and this is his, his time
for choosing, and his his great conscience, and and the
the the Canterbury, the conscience of Canterbury, saying I will
not be part of that. So the Americans, and this
is the tradition that Scalia is from. And make no mistake,

(23:48):
I don't care what little what little mauv aoc or
ilhan omor any of these little Democrats Socialists say our
system is great and that is why it has lasted.
And Scalia is true to that heritage and that tradition,
and we'll explore more of that.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
Michael Berry show good not.

Speaker 3 (24:12):
So Antident's Scalia the Justice, the greatest justice of all time,
my favorite justice as well, is directly addressing a crowd
of Christians in front of him, and he's challenging them,
He's not pandering to them. The argument the question was
is socialism or capitalism more amenable to Christian virtue? And
this is this is funny word. The reason I brought

(24:34):
this up is that James Talerico, the Democrat candidate for
Senate Senate in Texas, says that the Bible wants us
to be socialist. No, it doesn't. The argument that socialism
is the more Christian system because it means well, it
says nice things, because it cares about the poor, and
rich people and business owners they don't care about the poor.

(24:56):
He says that's not supported by the evidence, and then
he it gives you the evidence in one sentence. I
know of no country, he says, in which the churches
have grown fuller as the governments have moved leftward. In fact,
the opposite. The churches of Europe are empty, the most

(25:18):
religious country, the most religious country in the Western world
by every standard. Belief in God, church membership, church attendance
is the one that has been, as he puts it,
least diluted by socialism, or deluded. You could say, as
in a delusion. And the reason is, well, let him

(25:40):
tell you. Listen, it is hard to understand that attraction.
Surely it does not rest upon the teachings of experience.
I know of no country in which the churches have
grown fuller as the governments have moved leftward. The churches

(26:00):
of Europe are empty, the most religious country in the
West by all standards. Belief in God, church membership, church
attendance is that bastion of capitalism, least eluted by socialism,
the United States. When I say least eluded by socialism,
you must understand that I say it in a modern

(26:21):
context in which we are all socialists and the United
States that battle was fought and decided with a new deal.
No one, even in the most conservative quarters of American society,
now denies that there should be a so called safety
net provided by the government for our citizens. The only

(26:42):
real argument is over how many services that safety net
should provide and how poor must one be in order
to qualify. Few of us even understand anymore what a
truly non socialist mentality was like. Does none of us

(27:03):
understand anymore what a truly non socialist mentality looks like,
because we've been in the water so long we can't
imagine dry land. He found it by accident, researching sovereign
immunity as a young law professor, the idea that the
government can't be sued because they're the government, they are

(27:24):
the sovereign right. He came across a debate in the
Massachusetts legislature from the seventeenth century. A woman had been
seriously injured through the negligence of a state employee. Legislators
argued against compensating her, but not on legal grounds. On
moral grounds. It was morally wrong, they said, to use

(27:48):
public funds for private benefit, for a purpose that did
not benefit the public at large. The commonwealth owed this
woman nothing in law, and to agree to pay her
out of public funds would be in effect a private gift.
And this antonin Scalia notes, for a woman the state

(28:09):
itself had harmed, He says, you can imagine what their
attitude would have been toward dispensive public funds to the poor,
because the poor had not been harmed by the state.
So if someone harmed by the state is not due
money from the state, which is the people, for a
harm done by a representative of the people, then why

(28:32):
on earth would the people give money for the private
benefit of someone who is poor when that person hasn't
even been wronged.

Speaker 5 (28:44):
I happened to encounter it by accident many years ago
when I was a young law professor doing research for
an article on sovereign immunity, the legal doctrine which says
that the state cannot be sued without its consent. I
came across debate in the Massachusetts legislature during the seventeenth

(29:04):
century concerning a proposed bill that would provide compensation to
a woman who had been seriously injured through the negligence
of one of the agents of the state, a policeman
or a fireman, or whatever. Those members of the Massachusetts
legislature opposing the legislation argued that they had no right,

(29:27):
that it was morally wrong to use public funds for
private benefit for a purpose that did not benefit the
public at large because.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Of the doctrine of sovereign immunity.

Speaker 5 (29:41):
They said, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts owed this woman nothing
in law, and to agree to pay her out of
public funds money that was not legally owed, was in
effect to use public.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
Funds for a private gift. And this, I point out, was.

Speaker 5 (29:57):
A woman who had been injured by the commonwealth. You
can imagine what their attitude would have been towards dispensing
public funds to the poor.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
In the United States, a remnant of.

Speaker 5 (30:09):
That non socialist attitude lasted into the present century. Our
federal Constitution, you may recall, gives Congress not a general
power to expand funds, but only the power to expend
funds quote for the general welfare clothes quote. Until the
triumph of the New Deal, there were many who thought

(30:32):
that that text prohibited the expenditure of funds for any
private assistance, neither to the rich nor to the poor.

Speaker 3 (30:42):
But that fight, as I have said, is over. So
imagine the mindset that it is not we take money
from fifty percent of the people. It's about fifty percent
of the people who pay taxes. And it turns out

(31:02):
the rich pay way more, a much higher percentage. But
we take money from about fifty percent of the people
who paid, that's the people who pay taxes, and we'd
redistribute it to the fifty percent of the people who don't.
And the reason for that is that's how the Democrats
get elected. If you ended every redistribution of wealth, and

(31:24):
that's what welfare is. You take money from X and
you give it to why they take money from you
and they give it to someone over here. If you
did away with that program, Democrats would never win another election.
It's just that symbol. If you kept every illegal alien
from voting, Democrats would never win another election. There are

(31:45):
certain things that are the lifeblood of the Democrat Party,
without which what great example, the Democrat Party is bankrupt
right now. They've had to put their headquarters up as
collateral to take a loan to fund their campaigns right now.
Do you know why, Well, it corresponds to Elon Musk

(32:08):
exposing that the USAID funds were not going to the
needy or the poor or anyone else. They were going
to Democrat causes, newspapers and NGOs and organizations that were
the life buld of the Democrat Party. See, the Democrats
are always talking about helping people, but what they're really
doing is getting rich off of it themselves. And sadly,

(32:30):
poor people are just gullible enough to keep believing this nonsense,
because why wouldn't they. At least one party is telling them,
I'll pay your bills. We're not even telling them that.
We're saying work harder and make more money like the
rest of us did. And unfortunately, for a lot of
poor people, that's not a message they want to hear.