DC judges are unqualified to advise on foreign affairs (03-02-2025--Hour3)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] Yes, in the last segment, I talked to Marvin, caller Marvin, who wanted to know why we weren't deporting Houthis. And I said that we had bombed the bejesus out of them. And Scott says, technically, the Houthis never had any bejesus in them, so they could not have had it bombed out of them. That's fair. That is a fair point. Perhaps better to say they had the Biala bombed out of them.

[00:00:56] Just so that I got it. All right. That's true. Last hour, we were talking about Trende Aragua and their connections to the Venezuelan government, as explained in the Miami Herald, which did a massive investigation based on interviews with a team that has been working in the intelligence community and down in South America with the partnership of a lot of these countries,

[00:01:24] identifying the TDA gang members and their connections and their connections and their plans, which were to send, like, open up the prisons, release like 20,000 people, and then tell about 1,300 of them that they have to come,

[00:01:36] they have to leave the state, have to leave the country of Venezuela. And then they also trained about 300 operatives to go into Trende Aragua members to go into America and engage in sabotage, drug running, human trafficking, all of that to bring in the money.

[00:01:55] Venezuela is a communist narco state, okay? I don't understand why people in America, particularly on the left, people have this idea that everybody is just like them.

[00:02:07] If you were not disabused of this idea during the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war, right? It is this Western hubris, this idea that our values are shared by other people, because of course they are. No, that's conceit, all right? They have different values. And that's not to make a value judgment to say we're better, you're worse. It's to say they are different.

[00:02:36] And when you are dealing with foreign policy stuff, you have to deal with things as they are. This is not me spinning yarns. This is the Miami Herald, for crying out loud, that did this story. Making all of these connections, spelling it all out. And the Intel, a couple of Intel anonymous sources went to the New York Times and tried to get ahead of the story.

[00:03:00] That's my guess. Tried to get ahead of the story. They knew it was coming. They go to the New York Times anonymously and they're like, we have no connections between, we see nothing between Venezuela and TDA. And then two days later, Miami Herald story publishes, actually, yes. It's all like, they're so interconnected. Again, I'm just giving you the story that the Miami Herald reported. Let me go to the phones here. Let's talk first with Barry. Hello, Barry.

[00:03:30] What's happening, Pete? How are you? Hey, I'm all right. How are you? Good. Good to be talking to you. Yeah, a couple of things about, you know, Marvin was talking about the flights out and I'm more curious about, I think this is all ended now, but during the Biden administration, there were reports of chartered flights coming into the country at weird hours going to strategic locations with foreign nationals that were not documented.

[00:03:56] And they were just kind of like, well, here you are. Do you want to stay here or do you want to go to another city? Welcome to America. We also, remember, saw photos that people were taking in airports of, you know, groups of people with boarding passes and certain paperwork and they would take pictures and post them. And like, here's another plane load of people being flown into America. Oh, my goodness. I didn't know about that. Yeah. Boy, is that. Oh, yeah.

[00:04:25] We saw we saw the this was a Bill Malugin, one of the local TV reporters out in Los Angeles, I believe. And he started getting tips and reporting on the busloads of people that were getting transported around, getting picked up or dropped off at airports and such. And the the the NGOs, right, the non-government organizations that contributed to or organize these trips. Right. They they orchestrated them. They lined up the resources and all of that.

[00:04:53] And those were funded through government programs, which the Trump administration came in and started, you know, started cutting all of the NGO funding. And this is part of that same operation, I would imagine. So it was our our tax money on top of that. Yeah. Insult to injury. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing, the other question I had was regarding the leader in Venezuela. I remember how we handled and well, Noriega. Is that right? In Panama. Yeah.

[00:05:24] Yeah. Turned out he had he had criminal connections and operatives working, working against the, you know, he was a threat to our national security. And it sounds it sounds pretty much like the same deal. So why don't we just go get it? Well, I mean, see, that's the thing. Like, you know, Trump doesn't want to go to war. He ran on a, you know, no new wars platform and promise and all of that.

[00:05:49] But yeah, I mean, at some point when you have a foreign nation that is actively, you know, sending saboteurs and terrorists into your country, at some point you get the Taliban treatment, you know. Which is, yeah, like we'll come and we'll drop a bunch of bombs on you and then we'll leave you all of our military equipment when we flee. Like that's. Barry, I pray. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. I hope it doesn't go that way. Right. Yeah, I do, too. I'm just kidding. I kid. I kid the Biden administration. Barry, I appreciate the call, buddy. Thank you.

[00:06:19] Let me see if I can get Stan on real quick. Hey, Stan. Hi. Pete, how are you? I have a question for you. And basically, the basic question is, it seems like to me that the argument isn't how we, the basic of what the judge is saying is that we can't do something about it because of who sent them.

[00:06:47] And so I want to ask you a question, the Houthis. And so, basically, Trump has the total autonomous authority to keep our shipping going through international water.

[00:07:13] But we can't use the same logic to stop people from stabilizing our own country. Well, I mean, yeah. I would, if you're, what are you talking about? Bombing Venezuela? Well, no, no, no. I'm not talking about bombing Venezuela. I'm talking about just getting rid of them. In other words, we don't have to go down there and destroy Venezuela as long as they're not threatening our shores. Send them by. Right. And so this is the issue that John Yu writes about over at the National Review.

[00:07:42] John Yu, you may recall, he worked for the Bush administration. He was a lawyer in the Bush administration. And he takes a look at, essentially, the powers of the president versus the judiciary. And so I was going to get to this anyway. So after the break, I'm going to come back and go down this path. And I think you're, I think he's going to address your question. Well, and the thing about it is, are we to sit here and say that there's a question as to whether Iran controls Hezbollah and Hamas? No, yeah.

[00:08:12] Right, no. In other words, if Hamas wanted to do something to us, do we have to stop and let them do whatever they do? Because they're just not a nation country state? I guess by the logic of this judge up in D.C., maybe so. Yeah, if we found a bunch of Hamas terrorists in America, we couldn't ship them back to the Gaza Strip. We wouldn't be able to send them back. Right. So it doesn't make sense to me. Yeah.

[00:08:41] Well, I mean, it is a D.C., you know, Democrat judge. So that does make sense. Yeah, I guess that part makes sense. Yeah. Stan, I appreciate the call, sir. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do, too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place.

[00:09:09] So you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description, too. I started using Ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The Blind Spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check.ground.news slash Pete.

[00:09:38] Subscribe through that link and you'll get 15% off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. National Review piece by John Yu and Robert Delahunty, I believe.

[00:10:02] John Yu is a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Civic Leadership and a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas and a whole bunch of other things there. Whatever. Robert Delahunty is a fellow at the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life. Last week, the Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C. agreed to halt the Trump administration's deportation of members of the Venezuelan Trenda Aragua gang.

[00:10:27] While only a temporary order, the two-to-one decision intrudes into the province of the elected branches of government over war and national security. A federal court has never before overruled the decision of a president or Congress that the United States has suffered an attack or an invasion. That's the lynchpin here.

[00:10:52] That the executive branch is saying this is an invasion and the courts are saying prove it, basically. We don't believe you. The Department of Justice has petitioned the Supreme Court for review, which the court should grant. The court should prevent trial judges from interfering with the elected branches authority over war and national security. They write.

[00:11:19] We are presented with the question of whether the Venezuelan government's control over Trenda Aragua and whether international criminal activities can constitute a military threat to the national security. The Russians do this. They call them the little green men. They send them over into a region. They create chaos and havoc. Like, this is a standard blueprint.

[00:11:48] They foment instability. They astroturf public demonstrations. You know, we're Russian. We want to be back in Russia and all of those types of things. And then the Russians are like, well, I guess we got to come in and take this land, you know.

[00:12:06] But the question of the government's control over TDA and whether TDA's activities constitute a military threat, that is a different question from whether the federal courts are the right institution to make that judgment. Okay. So we are presented with this overt question that Venezuela, TDA, is this an invasion? Is it not?

[00:12:36] Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the actual question, according to you, is John, you, not you, you, but John, you. Anyway, the question is whether the courts are the right institution to be deciding that. Judicial review does not extend to every constitutional question.

[00:12:58] The Supreme Court itself has long recognized, going back to the founding, that there are certain political questions which the Constitution itself has committed to the final decision of the president or the final decision of the Congress. Or which have no legal standards that courts could even apply. Right? So these are three different instances.

[00:13:25] The judiciary cannot review, for example, impeachment. Right? The complete power of impeachment that the Constitution grants is to the Congress. The Supreme Court has also found that the Constitution provides no legal standards for the judiciary to apply to partisan gerrymandering. We know about that here in North Carolina, do we not?

[00:13:52] Everybody was all outraged on the left and in the media, but I repeat myself, that, oh my gosh, you can't protect the democracy. But there's no jurisdiction for us to do so. This is outside of our constitutional realm. And you're trying to kind of daisy chain these different arguments together to get us from, you know, one place where the Constitution doesn't give us the power to this point where you want to have the power.

[00:14:18] Now, in Marbury v. Madison, oh, hang on a second, before I get to Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court says nothing on the gerrymandering issue, right? And when the court recognized these limits to the judicial role, they were not participating in some sort of dereliction of their duty. In fact, they were following the law, which is their duty.

[00:14:44] In the Marbury v. Madison case, the very case that first declared the power of judicial review, Chief Justice John Marshall admitted, quote, The president is invested with certain important political powers in the exercise of which he is to use his own discretion.

[00:15:05] For his decisions, he is accountable only to his country in his political character and to his own conscience. His choices cannot be questioned in court because the subjects are political. These issues respect the nation, not individual rights and being entrusted to the executive. The decision of the executive is conclusive.

[00:15:32] One area that the authors write about that has long sat at the top of this list of political questions is war. The Constitution vests the president with the role of commander in chief of the armed forces. While it gives Congress the power to declare war and to raise and fund the armed forces.

[00:15:55] The courts have no power, none, to direct the president in the exercise of his wartime authority. None. The court has found that the president holds an unreviewable authority to decide whether an invasion has happened. It goes back to one case, the 1795 Militia Act and the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.

[00:16:25] But in JGG v. Trump, the D.C. Circuit ignored the judiciary's traditional deference on questions of war. Judge Karen Henderson's opinion displayed little modesty in rejecting the claim that TDA's conduct qualified as an invasion. Based on her review of the history of the 1798 Act, she concluded that an invasion,

[00:16:53] quote, required far more than an unwanted entry. To constitute an invasion, there had to be hostilities. She observed that in every instance, in the Constitution, in laws and debates of the time, invasion is used in a military sense. And the same goes, she said, for predatory incursions.

[00:17:17] On this ground alone, the U.S. Supreme Court should grant emergency review of this case because federal judges do not have the capability, they do not have the understanding, nor do they have the access to the information to make sensitive decisions on whether a foreign actor represents a national security threat or not. Here's a great idea.

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[00:19:08] and then the three-judge panel have the authority to intervene in foreign affairs because that's what they are doing. These judges cannot judge the harms that could arise from action that they may take or inaction that they may take or action or inaction that the president might take. They are ignorant. They are ignorant of all of the details, all of the facts.

[00:19:38] You're dealing with foreign policy and the president is elected to do that job. And now you got a judge saying, well, I have a clearance. I can look over your stuff. No, you can't. That's not your job. American courts hear legal disputes governed by formal, codified, legal rules that generally seek to determine whether past conduct by a defendant

[00:20:06] has harmed the legal rights of a plaintiff. Courts are not designed to make policy decisions involving probabilities and risks, which are characteristic of war and national security. Right? When you get that gig as POTUS, you have to weigh, is the juice worth the squeeze? What is the harm? What is the benefit? What are the costs?

[00:20:35] Like all of these things come into the equation. That's why you surround yourself with all of the different advisors. The judge doesn't have those advisors. They don't have national security teams around them and all of the, you know, the billions of dollars worth of agencies and intelligence and such. Analysts and investigators assert that the Maduro regime in Venezuela has purposely sent TDA, Trenda Aragua, to the United States to destabilize our political system.

[00:21:05] That Venezuela, as I went over last hour, has trained 300 TDA members for that work. And it has assumed operational control over this gang. Such judgments lie in the area of prediction and probability characteristic of national security and foreign policy affairs. Not the legal standards of courtroom trials. The courts have no means to measure

[00:21:33] and evaluate whether foreign enemies are conducting covert and hybrid attacks on the U.S. Right? Let's say, for example, and I don't know this to be true, but let's just spitball it, okay? Let's just pretend for a moment that Trenda Aragua, as one of their core tactics, was going out and shooting transformers at substations in order to knock out power to sufficiently large enough areas

[00:22:01] of the American populace in order to destabilize and demoralize to conduct this kind of terroristic activity. What the hell can the judges do about that? Like, honestly, like, what benefit does that lawyer in a robe bring to the table in this discussion? Nothing. Nothing.

[00:22:29] You're not involved in any of the briefings. You're not looking at the intelligence. You're not vetting the sources and methods and all of that stuff. The administration is tasked with doing that. And the president is the final decision maker. Not the judge. The administration is justified on another ground, by the way, for seeking to maintain the confidentiality of its deliberations. Right? When the judges are like, well, you know, if you want to bring us into this,

[00:22:59] we could take a look at what you've got. Like, the judge Bo Asperg, that's what he said. He's like, I got clearance. I can look at this stuff. No. You're unqualified to do so. Somebody's got a bit of a delusion of grandeur. Right? The administration told the courts that if it were to disclose these sources and such, that would jeopardize

[00:23:27] its diplomatic efforts in Venezuela, El Salvador, other countries, and it would risk scuttling delicate international negotiations. Right? There is great harm that can come with disrupting what the Trump administration is doing. Sending TDA members to detention in El Salvador may have been an essential move in a high-stakes diplomatic game with Venezuela. Like, if you're doing that in order to apply pressure

[00:23:57] on Venezuela and you're doing it in order to get closer to El Salvador, maybe you're doing it in order to show good faith with El Salvador's neighbors who are also battling TDA. And now they want, you can use this to get South American nations closer to us. There is a larger issue at play. The judges are completely ill-equipped and unqualified to be a part of that debate and that discussion. Nobody elected you to your current seat

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[00:25:25] since 1997. Located in Mint Hill, just off 485. Mail orders are accepted too. Get all the details at createavideo.com. Here's a message from Jay. For the life of me, I can't understand why anybody, regardless of political party, would argue to keep these criminals in our country. It's as if they are purposely trying to destroy us just to spite the other side. Where is the desire for the common defense of our country? I don't get it. Have we fallen so far down we haven't forgotten

[00:25:54] where we came from? I'll be listening to hear your expert explanation. Well, I will tell you what I always say, which is, the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. Right? There is a reason why destabilizing America, even if you present, and look, I had a call earlier in the show. He didn't stay on the line, but he told my call screener what he wanted to say. I don't know if he would have actually said it,

[00:26:24] but when I was going over the Miami Herald investigation based on the work of intelligence agents over a decade that have connected the Venezuelan government to the Soles cartel and that they have assumed operational control over Trinidad, Aragua, and our old friend Tony called in and said that Pete's imagination is running wild today. Right? There is

[00:26:53] a willful ignorance. Right? A purposeful obtuseness. This refusal to accept the information being presented. I understand skepticism, but I just saw this. Breaking news. 40 suspected Trendy Aragua gang members and affiliates were arrested in a massive operation near Austin, Texas. Oh, but they're not all Trendy Aragua.

[00:27:23] I'm sure that's what the left would say. Right? Because Donald Trump has broken so many people's brains and when I say that it means the ability to think for yourself. Just because Trump says something or his administration does something doesn't automatically make it not true. And so this immediate rejection of information because it came from Trump or on the other side of the spectrum people who immediately believe everything he says

[00:27:52] even if it was in conflict with what he just said a moment ago and they're going back and forth trying to follow his lead and they just do not let Donald Trump's speech and actions dictate your own thinking. Anything anything along those lines whether it's super pro-Trump and he you know everything he says you agree with and if he says it it must be true versus the other end of that spectrum where anything he says has to be false.

[00:28:21] That's what I call Trump derangement syndrome. It can affect both sides. Okay? And for the left destabilization is the point for a lot of leftists not liberals leftists they want to see America dare I say it fundamentally transformed. You don't do that to a country that you love. You do not fundamentally

[00:28:50] transform anything that you love. Why would you? If you love it then it is what it is and this is the thing not to say you don't make improvements you can't improve things but if you're talking about fundamentally that word means something fundamentally the foundations of it the very core of what the thing is has to be transformed. That means you don't like the core of what the country is and a lot of leftists do not. They hate every aspect of it.

[00:29:22] I make no apologies for being anti- commie. They suck. Okay? Communism sucks. I'm sorry to use the word but in times like this I feel like I have to and it is warranted. Right? They got a hundred million body bags on them. Like they that is an evil and corrupt theology. It is beyond an economic system. It's not. It's evil. It is evil. And that's

[00:29:51] why leftists always connect themselves with other evil philosophies and ideologies and religions. They can like for example why is it that you see leftists beating the drums literally for Islamists? Doesn't make any sense right? Gays for Palestine. Like guys that's so stupid. Do you

[00:30:21] understand what happens to you if you go to Palestine? You go to the Gaza Strip they're going to fling you off of a building because you're gay because the issue isn't the issue. The issue is the revolution. The revolution against free market capitalist republics. That's the purpose. And we are as you know they call us over in the Middle East we are the great Satan. You know George Bush was not completely incorrect when he said they hate us for our freedoms. There was an element

[00:30:51] of truth to that. Of course it was said in the George Bush style so everybody mocked it and whatever but yeah because that is the opposite of communism. Free market is you. The free market is me making our own decisions. And there are a lot of people that do not want you to do that because you're going to decide wrong. Wrong being something that they don't agree with. Anyway back to the piece at the National Review. from the administration's perspective

[00:31:21] the lower courts are meddling in its efforts to extract important concessions from Venezuela. Venezuela is in a position to damage U.S. interests in the Caribbean region. Did you know that? With Cuba China has long been a silent ally of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. its support for him and before him it was Hugo Chavez. It's been

[00:31:50] indispensable in keeping the Venezuelan dictatorship in power. Are the courts going to weigh in on all of that? Is a judge, is a D.C. circuit judge qualified to be making those types of foreign policy decisions? All of the different pieces that are in play and moving around the board. Does he see all of that? Does he get all that intel? I guess we need to have Bo Asberg sit in on the

[00:32:20] daily briefings so he can be completely up to speed on all of the geopolitical problems and how they all intersect or don't intersect and whatever. I guess he needs all of that intel like the president gets and then he'll decide. The court should not get entangled in these negotiations which are exclusively for the executive branch. They also directly concern security in our hemisphere.

[00:32:51] The founders expect Congress not the courts to check any presidential abuse of war powers. See, but the left has gone so far off the rails on this. They're so far off the rails. They look at Trump as this existential threat and so we can't restrain him in Congress because those Republicans won't hold him to account. So they can't restrain him. We can't do it. So we're going to use the courts. And it doesn't really matter to

[00:33:21] them if you actually can use the courts wearing the robes that are going to go along with it because it's an existential threat. See, when something threatens your very existence almost anything goes. And that's where the left is now. They have catastrophized Trump and MAGA and Republicans to such a degree that

[00:33:51] almost anything goes. Why do you think we're seeing the attacks on Tesla cars and owners and dealerships because everything's an existential threat with these people. I mean, yes, there's some mental illness obviously going on with a lot of them, but they view it as an existential threat. So anything goes. Even if it means I have to blow up a car that was purchased six years ago by one of my fellow lefties.

[00:34:21] Even if it means we got to take some for the team. That's why James Lindsay from new discourses dot com. You can read his stuff over there and watch his videos, his lectures and all. James Lindsay actually argued they mistakenly put him on the wrong team, but he said, keep me in this position because I'm going to argue this point at the Oxford debates or whatever. And his position was whether the left

[00:34:51] can go too far. They had some liberals on one side saying no, the left hasn't gone too far and then some conservatives on the other side saying the left has gone too far. They mistakenly put James Lindsay on the liberal team. He said, keep me here. I want to argue this point. And

[00:35:48] for