During the opening monologue of Sunday’s “Life, Liberty & Levin” on the Fox News Channel, host Mark Levin sounded off on the Supreme Court’s deliberations on nationwide injunctions and the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act.
Levin criticized Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, one of the “conservative” members on the court, for her approach regarding those injunctions during oral arguments.
Transcript as follows:
LEVIN: So it’ll be sort of Constitution Day here, but before I get to that, I’m blessed to have these platforms where I hear from millions of millions of people and speak to tens of millions of people every single day, red blooded Americans. I call them Mr. and Mrs. America.
And in the last week, I have noticed, and they have noticed and are concerned and I am concerned of a growing divide, in fact, what appears to be a hostility against Israel by the United States.
I’m confounded by this. I’m truly confounded by this.
You know, last time around, Israel couldn’t have had a better friend and partner than the administration. But in this last trip, it appears that Israel has been cut out of every significant decision, not even being informed, whether it’s the Houthis, whether it’s deals with Qatar, whether it’s deals with Saudi Arabia, all of this affects Israel, because Israel lives in that neighborhood.
And now the Iran deal, and we see all these reports that there’s a divide, and then everybody comes out and says there’s not a divide. Something’s not right. I don’t have any inside information, but I’ve actually never seen anything like this before.
Israel has the unfortunate circumstance is that when they were — the Jews were wandering in the desert, God put them in a place where there’s no oil. You’ve got these tiny little fiefdoms, these monarchies that have hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions of dollars, maybe they have a population of 300,000 or half a million, enormous sums of money like the world has never seen before.
Israel has none of that. It’s a tiny country. It is a working man and a working woman’s country, that’s what it is.
And so they can never compete if the competition is about finances. They don’t have the gifts. They don’t have the resources to lavish on our businesses, to lavish on our government. But what they do have is that what we share with them is that Judeo Christian values and belief systems that bring Jews and Christians and people together, the same faith, indifference faiths the Holy Land. That’s what ties America and Israel.
People say, what do we get out of this? Everything is not transactional. Everything is not a deal. Some things are much bigger than that, much bigger than that.
I feel we need to have a national discussion about this. I feel that the American people have been cut out of this process. We hear about deals. We hear what the Democrats say, the Republicans say, the administration says, the press says, What about We, the People? What about Mr. And Mrs. America?
Do we like Qatar? Do we like Qatar that protected KSM, the mastermind behind 9/11 who murdered over 2,000 of our American citizens, firefighters, police officers, just work a day people? Most Americans despise that country.
How about Saudi Arabia that funded 9/11? How about the 9/11 families? Are they happy with all of this? Has anybody asked them? Nobody has asked them.
What about reparations to Israel? Because Qatar funded Hamas on October 7th? Why don’t they pay Israel reparations rather than pressuring Israel to figure out how to how to handle the result of what Qatar and their puppets, Hamas, have done?
I’m just raising these issues. I want a national discussion, a national debate on this issue. That’s what America is about. That’s what freedom of speech is, that’s what communication is, that’s what republicanism, small r is.
This isn’t an attack on anybody. You and the media, you could twist it any way you want. I say what I mean, and I mean what I say. It can be dismissed. It can be embraced, whatever. But that’s my view. It is time for a national discussion about what our policies are to be. I feel very strongly about that.
All right, let me move on to the Constitution of the United States.
Nationwide injunctions: I listened to this Supreme Court on Wednesday, I think it was in this case, and I was disgusted and appalled by the liberal justice, Justice Jackson talking about, well, national injunctions will bring faster resolution to the issue, because you can get it to the Supreme Court faster. I thought to myself, does she even know how this works?
If I bring a case in a federal district court over and over again, it’s called a federal district court, not a federal national court. I can appeal it to a circuit court. The circuit court can make a decision, and then I can appeal it to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, four justices decide if they’ll take up a case. So how would it be faster if one of these rogue district court judges puts in a national injunction, it’s appealed, and then goes to the Supreme Court, then if that rogue federal district judge actually ruled in the district, then it’s appealed, the Supreme Court makes the decision, somebody can bring an emergency bill.
So I felt to myself, what the hell is she even talking about? So that didn’t make any sense. Then Justice Barrett goes off, and the Solicitor General, who’s really good. She gets off on this issue about, well, now what if the Second Circuit of the circuit court rules against you, aren’t you obliged to comply with it? And the Solicitor General says, overwhelmingly, yes. But there are rare circumstances, rare circumstances. She was upset.
So I want to try and educate Justice Barrett just a little bit. Maybe she heard of the Dred Scott decision. Most people think that was a horrendous decision. It was argued in 1856 and decided in 1857 and precipitated the Civil War. The Supreme Court majority ruled that basically, slavery is here to stay, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it, including Congress.
Where do you go to fix that? That’s the Supreme Court. So I would ask Justice Barrett, should that decision have been honored? Is that okay with you? You see, the courts aren’t always right. In fact, the Supreme Court is often wrong. Ask the people who were put in internment camps in the United States, the Japanese Americans under FDR in the Korematsu decision when your court upheld it or ask all the people who had to deal with segregation in the Plessy case in 1896 because your court ruled separate, but equal as equal.
Now, you eventually got around to Brown versus Board of Education to fix it. But for the about 60 years, in the intervening period of time, people suffered as a result of the Supreme Court decision.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, Barrett has it all wrong. She’s worried about power. See this, I’m not going to discuss it today, I have too much power. What I heard about this nationwide injunction stuff was the court, the liberals in the court, demanding that the power of the lower courts have seized, they should be able to keep, destroying our separation of powers and our balance of powers.
Well, we’re going to fight that. We’re going to fight this on this program. We’re going to fight it on my radio show. There should be no national injunctions. One judge, one lawyer in a black robe who you don’t know anything about. That’s not the consent of the governed. That’s not representative government.
You know, up until 1963, you didn’t have national injunctions. Now they’re coming out of our ears because Donald Trump is President and they’re trying to cripple his presidency. We know what they’re doing. These are left wing judges with left wing litigants, cherry picking these courts and getting the decisions they want.
Is that what the court wants? Well, the court might want it, but the rest of us don’t.
Now let’s get the birthright citizenship. Where’s the phrase birthright citizenship in the Constitution? It doesn’t exist. Birthright citizenship? They take the 14th Amendment, and that’s the amendment through which they try to drive their agenda, whether it’s trying to keep Trump off the ballot, whether it’s trying to spend endlessly without any kind of caps on the debt, whatever it is.
The 13th and 14th Amendments were simple. They said Black people have rights too. The Civil War is over. They are free. Their children are free. They have due process rights, they have equal protection rights, they have the right to vote. They are full citizens. That’s what those amendments were basically about.
Oh, and their children? The children they have now, and the children they have in the future? They’re citizens, too. Now why did they do that? Because you still had some states that were saying, no, they’re not, and so we amended the Constitution and said, oh, yes, they are. And when you amend the Constitution, you need what? Three-fourths of the states to sign off. So the overwhelming majority of the states agreed.
The word “immigrant” or “foreigner” came up once in the 1866 Civil Rights Act that was passed by the Republicans that essentially did what the 14th Amendment did, but they had a problem. Andrew Johnson was the president.
Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. So what did he do? He vetoed it. So they said, you know what, we’re going to amend the Constitution. We’re going to change all of this.
So the same authors of that Civil Rights Act wrote the 14th Amendment, and it was understood, jurisdiction thereof, what that meant. That didn’t mean some foreigner walks into the country, they have a baby, oh, that’s a citizen. Nobody believed that. They weren’t crazy like we are today. There was no discussion of that.
The 1866 Act that they passed specifically said no to foreigners, so they just assumed the understanding and the intention and the purpose of the day that everybody would understand that. And this is why the proponents of birthright citizenship take jurisdiction thereof that language, they either ignore it or they twist it to mean if somebody puts their foot in the United States and as a baby, that’s a citizen, that’s a jurisdiction.
They were never talking about geographic jurisdiction. The idea that a foreigner could confer upon themselves all the rights and liberties of the United States, including citizenship, simply by coming into the country and having a child would have been the most alien idea they ever had, so they have to twist the text of the Constitution.
Now, for 30 years after that amendment was ratified, what I’m telling you was the interpretation of the 14th Amendment. Then came a case in 1898 where all the chuckle heads on CNN and MSNBC and the leftists on the court point to, with the court in a very activist decision, understandable because the Chinese were being horribly discriminated against by Congress. That court twisted the language and held what? Essentially legal immigrants who have children in the United States, those children are American citizens.
Did you hear what I said? Legal immigrants. The Supreme Court has never ruled that the children of illegal aliens are citizens of the United States. As a matter of fact, show me a statute where Congress has passed a law that says the children of illegal aliens are citizens of the United States.
The Supreme Court has never said it. The Constitution doesn’t say it. Congress has never said it, and here we are. Why? Because the bureaucracy decided to treat it that way.
And so when I hear Justice Kagan going on and on, saying, you brought this case, you know you want it to be about national injunctions. You brought the wrong case, because substantively, you don’t have a leg to stand on, says Kagan. Says Kagan.
So this decision about birthright citizenship really is going to have nothing to do with the Constitution. It’s going to have nothing to do with the law. It’s going to have nothing to do with our history. It’s going to be a political/policy decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, and they’re going to say, I pray not, but I think so that the jurisdiction language either means for everybody who is born here, other than tourists, other than diplomats. I guess they’ll have to figure out how that works, but they’ll come up with some phony language. They’re going to have to do that.
Or, I suppose they’ll also say, in one way or another, look, this has been the practice of the United States for decades and decades and decades. We’re really not in a position to reverse it, all the tumult it would create, and so forth and so on. That’s probably what they’re going to do. I’m sorry to tell you.
Let’s move on to the other issue that I wanted to discuss, the Treaty Clause. Mark, the Treaty Clause?
You know, I’m really tired. The Executive Branch, whether it’s Obama or Carter or anybody else, pushing through negotiations and agreements with foreign governments and not presenting them to the Senate.
I want you to look at Article II Section 2 Clause 2: The President shall, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties provided two-thirds of the senators present concur.
Wow. They must have meant that. Not a simple majority, but two-thirds. So, I went back and I studied it, I looked at it. So there were debates at the Constitutional Convention. Maybe just the president should do it. You know what? They said, no.
Then they said, well, maybe we should include the Senate and the House in a simple majority. They said, no, that’s unmanageable. There will be too many members of the House. You know, there have to be ways to get a treaty.
So they said, all right, the Senate and the President. The President proposes the treaty, and it has to be ratified, not by a simple majority two-thirds. Why? Because arrangements made with foreign powers have an enormous effect on the people of the United States, and we want the entire body politic involved and knowledgeable about the decision making process.
No deals, no side deals, none of that. Open, transparent the involvement of the Senate. That’s what they said. You are framers of the Constitution. So what did Obama do with the first Iran deal? He fought like hell to get around it. The Republicans fought like hell and said, it’s a treaty. You present it to us. It’s a treaty.
The vast majority — Rand Paul always sort of an outlier, he demanded, it is a treaty. The warmongers, treaty. The RINOs, treaty. The Reaganites, treaty, all the Republicans except a few like Bob Corker no longer in the Senate from Tennessee, so they cut a deal with Obama, sort of a screwy statutory deal that the Senate would only step in if they disagreed with a decision related to the nuclear deal with Iran, and so forth and so on.
I objected strongly. I was on Fox. I objected. I objected on radio. I wrote about it, that this is outrageous. When you’re dealing with a hostile nation and nuclear weapons, that should be treated as a treaty. Now there’s a lot of gobbledygook on this. We’ve had a President that use executive agreements, no question about it.
You are commander-in-chief, sometimes you’ve got to go ahead and make a decision and make these agreements. That’s understandable. We’ve had other agreements, climate agreements, so forth and so on. But when the Constitution used to work and when we had public officials who wanted it to work, this is the process that was used.
I can remember during Reagan, there were a couple attempts to get legislation or treaties passed and the Senate rejected. I can remember when the other side would propose the same thing. Law of the Sea was one of them that comes to mind, and it was rejected mostly by Republicans in the Senate.
So we should embrace representative government. We should embrace transparency. We won’t always have the presidency. There will be future Obamas and so forth and so on. So what am I saying?
I want to urge and encourage the President, whatever this deal is with Iran, to present it to the Senate as a treaty, or at least to present it to the Senate for some kind of a statutory approval and involvement so elected representatives beyond the Executive Branch and We, the People can hear the debates. We can see what’s taking place. We know all the intricacies of the deal.
There’s a lot of debates about spinning centrifuges. I talked about it last night. I don’t think Iran should have any centrifuges, because any centrifuges means that they’ll have the capacity for a nuclear weapon. I don’t care how much of existing nuclear material is removed, how many inspectors you have. I’m not worried about us, I’m worried about them. They lie, they cheat, they kill.
Why? Because they’re terrorists. That’s who they are.
I know Qatar sort of is a character representative for Iran, which is pretty hilarious, but nonetheless, I don’t care what Qatar thinks. It’s more important to know what the American people think and what our United States Senate thinks than what Qatar thinks, Saudi Arabia thinks or anybody else thinks.
So my advice, maybe it will fall on deaf ears — my advice to the body politic in Washington, D.C., to the ruling establishment in Washington. D.C., We, the People, Mr. and Mrs. America, from sea to shining sea in the Midwest, North and South, East and West, we want a role in this. And the way we get a role in this is for it to be presented either for statutory approval or really treaty approval.
I want you to read Federalist 75 if you have the time by Hamilton. It’s a long discussion about the treaty clause. It was a crucially important clause, as far as our framers were concerned about foreign entanglements. It’s a good idea. It’s a good practice to get back to.
We’re arguing the Constitution when it comes to judges. We’re arguing the Constitution when it comes to upholding our immigration laws. We’re arguing the Constitution every day, and thank God we have this administration that stands for the Constitution. Here’s just another example where I’m arguing for the Constitution.
Follow Jeff Poor on X @jeff_poor
