No, the immigration issue is not a "culture war" (06-24-2024--Hour3)

[00:00:00] I do you want the Attorney General to be pushing back against a federal government that is either overreaching into the state's domain or refusing to act and leaving states twisting in a chaotic setting? I'm thinking specifically about the immigration debate.

[00:01:29] You've got attorneys general across the country that have been suing the federal government because the feds refuse to enforce the law. And so when the states try to enforce the law, they try to take matters into their own hands to protect their citizens.

[00:01:46] Then the federal government comes in and says, you can't do that. So there is this tension, right? There are these legal frictions between the federal and the state governments. And I would submit that is as the founders intended, not this particular manifestation

[00:02:03] of it, but as intended, you've got states and federal government that are vying for power. And that was what the founders believed would be the check and balance on one of them getting to be too powerful.

[00:02:21] Same thing with, you know, cities and counties and states versus states and all of that is that you have these people that get elected and they are interested in protecting their jurisdiction and their powers. And so when another entity starts trying to assert dominance in a particular area,

[00:02:39] the founders believe that those elected officials at the state level would then push back against the federal overreach. That's completely appropriate, regardless of the issue and the merits of the issue, whatever. And just like just the principle of the matter. That's what the founders envisioned.

[00:02:57] So law and order is what Dan Bishop, Congressman Dan Bishop is running on. That's his campaign law and order for the state's quote, top cop. Jeff Jackson is painting Dan Bishop as a radical extremist.

[00:03:18] I have no doubt that Jeff Jackson will be an attorney general that is very much like Josh Stein, very much like Roy Cooper. And he's positioning himself as that. Right. He is he makes that explicit in his debate performance on Friday at the Charlotte Convention

[00:03:37] Center in front of the North Carolina State Bar Association. It was broadcast on Spectrum News and it was moderated by Tim Boyum from Spectrum News who did a good job, I thought. My understanding is that the questions came from the bar.

[00:03:53] I don't know how that I don't know what the process was, but each of them got two minutes to answer a question. There was no rebuttals or anything like that. One of the questions was about crime and it was related to crime in North Carolina.

[00:04:07] And it was about the the state law that was the raise the age law. Right. North Carolina was one of the last states in America to to pass this kind of a law which did not send.

[00:04:23] Well, if you're a juvenile and you commit a crime, you're arrested for a crime. Right. It would not automatically send it to the adult courts. It would send you to juvenile courts. But there were some problems with the law.

[00:04:38] And you've got now repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat juvenile offenders and they keep they keep getting. Oh, it's not sidetracked, but diverted away from the the Superior Court or district courts there. They're not going to adult court.

[00:04:57] They're going to juvie and then they keep getting released. And this has become such a problem. You got police chiefs that are blowing the whistle on this stuff. And so they're asked about this raise the age law revision that the General Assembly passed and that the governor vetoed.

[00:05:14] So Jeff Jackson said he liked there. He said there are two parts to this. The second part is like the that you can charge an adult if they're enticing a teenager to commit crimes. He said he liked that part. That's a good part of the law.

[00:05:28] And he said that. But the first part created another issue. There is a real problem. And the problem is this. If you're arrested as a 16 year old, say you've been arrested five times prior for stealing

[00:05:40] five cars and you're arrested for stealing your sixth car, you are not brought before a judge. You are going to be immediately released. That's a problem because you're probably going to steal another car. And juvenile crime has risen. And a huge piece of that is car theft.

[00:05:56] I mean, if you factor out juvenile crime, the crime levels in North Carolina are actually in a pretty good place. Juvenile crime in particular has been a major problem. This is a big piece of it.

[00:06:09] We need to authorize judges to be able to see the criminal record first, to have juveniles brought before them, because right now that often is not happening. Then they need to be able to see their criminal record.

[00:06:20] And if we have a clear repeat offender, someone who is a threat to public safety, then the judge needs to be authorized to keep that person in secure custody. By the way, you're not doing that teenager any favor by releasing him or her knowing

[00:06:33] that it's likely that they're going to be involved in another crime and pick up another charge. Now, Dan Bishop said it's really not that complicated. Jeff just said if a juvenile stolen five cars, he ought not be able to steal the sixth one and be released.

[00:06:49] I don't know. I think all this is more common sense than it is what he said. He says partisanship. I don't think anybody should be stealing five cars and have no record, have no consequence of significance.

[00:07:01] And what that bill did is for the most serious felonies, it reversed raise the age. It said they're going to be presumptively bound over rather than the district attorney having to go through the process of binding them over to trial. And characteristic to fashion, Roy Cooper vetoed it.

[00:07:17] I don't even know if Jeff said he's for the bill. Heard a long answer. So that's a simple matter. That bill should have been signed by the governor. It will be, his veto will be overridden, I'm confident, and it will be part of what

[00:07:32] the bill will be done. And Johnny Jennings, the chief of police in Charlotte is no radical right winger. And he's told us if you watch the events in Romare Bearden Park last New Year's Eve,

[00:07:42] if you watch the melee among juveniles last July 4th, if you're noting that the number of homicides in Mecklenburg County is up a third in the first quarter and it's continuing to go up and the most often or frequent participants are juveniles, that's got to stop.

[00:07:59] And law and order is the key. He then addressed, which Jeff Jackson kept referring to how Dan Bishop refused to certify the 2020 election. And so Bishop then pivoted to address this attack on him about the certification of the elections. Although he doesn't, well, you take a listen.

[00:08:24] Jeff's attacked me because people rioted at the Capitol on January 6th. What I wrote to the public is what Judge Harvey Wilkinson, you know, radical Harvey Wilkinson on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said, let's understand the strategy that is being deployed here.

[00:08:39] Our country is now plagued with the proliferation of pre-election litigation that creates confusion and turmoil and threatens to undermine public confidence in the federal courts, state agencies and elections themselves. That was a dissent. And that was exactly the set of circumstances that affected multiple states that were swing

[00:08:59] states. Right. So when Dan Bishop had questions because the rules got changed in the middle of the election, see, I've been saying this for years, when all of this stuff started happening and Josh Stein was entering collusive settlements with litigants in order to get adopted changes

[00:09:19] in the election law that they could not otherwise get adopted via the legislative branch. And they started using the courts to start writing different election law while the election was going on. Right, people were early voting.

[00:09:33] That's where the thumb was being put on the scale, not just in North Carolina, but in a lot of these other states, particularly the swing states. Guys like Mark Elias were filing lawsuits in swing states. They were targeting swing states. Why? Why would you otherwise do that?

[00:09:51] Why not target New York or California? Right. No, you're targeting these just these particular swing states. And that undermines confidence. And when the election turns on ten thousand votes or something in a state, then people

[00:10:05] have all sorts of questions and then the conspiracy theories run wild and such. And so when people raise questions about, whoa, what just happened here? And so Bishop is like, I don't want to certify this because I got questions. So that makes him a radical extremist.

[00:10:20] Let me get to some more audio, because this here is the this is one of the central themes of Dan Bishop's campaign. He's tying everything or almost everything he can back to this, the border crisis.

[00:10:30] And it's smart from a campaign standpoint because it's become a major issue of concern among voters. And it also happens to be true. The impact that illegal immigration is having on all facets of our society is definable, describable. And there are negative consequences to these actions.

[00:10:56] Or inactions, I guess, at the federal level. All right. So. Dan Bishop starts off by saying that law enforcement has always cooperated with federal authorities that were seeking to control illegal immigration until recently. Jeff has opposed securing the border.

[00:11:13] He's secure, opposed the legislation we passed over a year ago in the House to do that. He voted against that. But locally, the answer is also clear. Right now, there is a bill in the House of in the North Carolina legislature that will

[00:11:28] require sheriffs to cooperate with ICE. That should have been done years ago. But Jeff opposed it in 2022 when it came up and he appears to oppose it today based on his comments. I would do that.

[00:11:43] And I do, as I said, one of the top roles of the attorney general is to coordinate and focus law enforcement and to help them get their job done. And their job is to preserve order, to be in support of law enforcement authorities

[00:11:57] across the country's criminal justice infrastructure. That includes ICE seeking to enforce a border. Jeff's also been in favor of sanctuary city policy, refused to clamp down on that from the General Assembly consistently. And the chickens have come home to roost.

[00:12:14] It is not time to persist in the course of action that has led us to where we are. It is time to turn. So Jackson then rolls out the line of attack, quoting Dan Bishop's support for dismantling the FBI.

[00:12:28] That's a lot of law and order talk from someone who said, quote, We must smash the FBI into a million pieces. That's who we're dealing with here. And I get that he has found some political attacks, but you need to understand who the

[00:12:41] actual extremist is on the stage. It matters that I. All right, so I understand. You can be for law and order and want the FBI dismantled in its current form, you know why? Because they're not engaged in an impartial administration of justice, right?

[00:13:00] And that's what Dan Bishop believes, that the FBI has been weaponized and in its current form, it is anathema to law and order. Right, but Jackson makes an assumption that the FBI has been behaving perfectly when we know it has not. The evidence is ample.

[00:13:18] All right, back to his answer. Score in the top five percent for most bipartisan members of Congress and he scores in the bottom five percent. That's not anyone's opinion. That's objective. It matters that his first endorsements were Matt Gaetz and Warren

[00:13:31] Boebert, that that's who he hangs out with in Congress. We've never had someone like that. Now, let's talk about the border because he talks tough on the border. Don't buy it. We had a way to secure the border, which we should do if for no other reason than

[00:13:49] we're a sovereign nation, sovereign nations should have control over their border. There was a bipartisan proposal that wasn't perfect. We needed to work on it. But instead of working on it in the House, the far right, led exactly by folks like my opponent, decided to kill it.

[00:14:06] Why? They want the problem. They want the border to be a mess. Precisely so that it can use it in the exact political attack we just saw and watch the ads that he is going to run this fall. Of course, they're going to be about the border.

[00:14:22] You could write them right now. You know exactly what those ads will say. He can't afford to solve the border because he needs it for his campaign. Yeah, maybe you guys should have, I don't know, signed on to the bill that they passed

[00:14:36] then. Right, because the House passed a bill. The Senate then wrote up its own different bill, which was terrible. And we're supposed to just say, OK, keep doing what we're doing. But now we have a bill that takes it off the table for the campaign.

[00:14:49] See, he needs the Senate bill to give him cover to make that exact argument to. Don't buy it. The Senate bill was trash. It didn't actually fix the problem. He even acknowledges wasn't perfect. No, of course it wasn't perfect.

[00:15:06] It still allowed massive migration on a daily basis until it hit what, five thousand? It's just absurd. We broke down all of the BS inside that bill, the very bad border bill. You can go pull the podcast. It's at the Pete Kalanick show dot com.

[00:15:23] Let's go to the phones again. Here is walking Bob. Hello, Bob. How are you, sir? I'm doing fine. Just out here enjoying the global warming today. Yeah, stay hydrated, man. I am. I always bring three diet Cokes with me on my walk.

[00:15:38] That's not you talk in the past about that. You have not voted for a Republican or Democrat president in years, ever, possibly ever. Yeah. Yeah. And if my memory is correct, the reason for it was cheaply is that none of them seriously addressed the debt.

[00:16:04] Is that fair to say? Yeah, well, I would put it. Yes, that is that's one of the primary reasons. It's all under sort of an overarching umbrella of reigning in the executive branch. Yeah. OK, I got you there.

[00:16:17] You know, it seems like the main arguments and topics and division points, frankly, of the day are these different nebulae of issues and like global warming. The activists will have you turn your thermostat up 10 degrees to hopefully keep the

[00:16:40] earth from warming a tenth of a degree, a degree in the next 10 years. That seems nebulous to me. We we have a terrific argument on the right about immigration because it's not nebulous

[00:16:55] at all. It is very clear to many people, I think, that the policies that we adopted a few months ago as a country or as an executive order, I should say, are really coming back to bite us now.

[00:17:14] And the debt is one of these nebulous points that has hurt the right for a long time in that nobody is explaining why we should reduce the debt. And it always has been a little bit nebulous to me because we've seen the debt grow and

[00:17:37] grow and grow and grow and with little apparent issue. But common sense would tell you that there is a breaking point, and I think we're coming to that breaking point. But nobody talks about it.

[00:17:53] The only time we talk about cutting money is when it's the other side's program that we want to cut and we want to spend money on our. Bob, I don't know what. Well, now just stopped. No, I don't know what that sound is.

[00:18:10] It is it's like a crackling, scratching sound. I don't know what it is. It's terrible. But I think I got your point. I appreciate the call, Bob. It's good to hear from you. But the connection there is I don't know what's going on with

[00:18:21] the phone line there. The but I think so. Your point is that we don't ever talk about cutting unless it's the other team. And I get that. And it's nebulous and I get that, too.

[00:18:32] But I don't think people are interested in making changes until it's painful in everything. Right. People don't have their moments of clarity when things are going well. And like right now, you see everybody like celebrating their student loan, quote, forgiveness that Joe Biden gave them.

[00:18:51] Right. And they think that, oh, it's just a forgiven loan, but it's not a forgiven loan. Joe Biden didn't write that loan. He's not eating that cost. I said this the other day, you know, in any forgiveness scenario, somebody has to bear

[00:19:03] the price. And Joe Biden isn't bearing that cost. He's pushing it off on taxpayers. So these very same idiots that are like, oh, I don't have to pay anything. Yeah, but you do. You will be.

[00:19:14] And you're going to be paying way more because you couldn't be bothered to pay more than ten dollars a month towards your student loan. So the issue of the debt is not and deficit spending downstream of that.

[00:19:27] The. I don't think it gets addressed in any kind of real way until things get really, really bad. Because it's easier to buy the votes and it's easier to get yours, it's

[00:19:39] easier for me to be happy about a program that I like and I benefit from and I think is doing good and all of this. You know, talking from a limited government and fiscal restraint position is a

[00:19:55] difficult sell versus somebody who's offering what Rush used to say, you know, you're running against Santa Claus was promising all of these things to all of the people and then the other one's offering you nothing. I give you no.

[00:20:10] Perks, I give you no presents, you get no money from me, right? That's a tough sell. It's and it is. It's just one of those things in life, I think it's just human nature, it's the ant in the grasshopper, you know.

[00:20:26] Let me get back to some of this audio from the debate here that was between Jeff Jackson and Dan Bishop. They were asked, how do you handle cases if you're the attorney general and you're the lawyer for the state? How do you handle cases that you disagree with?

[00:20:43] And this is really important because if the attorney general is a Democrat like Jeff Jackson and the legislature is Republican, he's going to be charged with going into court and arguing to defend laws passed by the General Assembly that he disagrees with.

[00:20:59] And as we have seen with Josh Stein and with Roy Cooper, my good friend Ray, right, they refuse to defend the state. It's why the legislature actually had to pass laws to allow them to intervene in litigation because their own lawyers wouldn't do it.

[00:21:19] And so when asked about this, Jackson gave the shortest answer of his of the of the morning at this debate. The attorney general serves not just as the top law enforcement officer, top prosecutor, but also the top legal adviser to the state.

[00:21:33] One of the core functions of the attorney general is to represent in court all of the state agencies. I fully expect that that will involve representing a state agency and making a decision that I don't personally agree with. There's a 100 percent chance that that happens.

[00:21:50] And that's the job. You're duty bound to do that as attorney general. There is an outer limit to it, and the outer limit is the state and the federal constitution, because you take an oath to both of those constitutions when you become

[00:22:04] attorney general. So barring a clear violation of the Constitution, I would be duty bound to represent the state even in matters in which I personally disagree. All right. Dan Bishop said basically don't believe Jeff Jackson. That's not what he's told audiences all over North Carolina.

[00:22:21] He's told audiences that he disagrees with the General Assembly's moderate 12 week ban on abortion, for example. I do. And he's told them that he's going to fight that as the attorney general. Anybody sitting in this room knows the current state of the constitutional law. It does not ban.

[00:22:37] It does not bar the the the General Assembly's statute. But he said he's going to oppose it. He is consistently opposed, like the last two attorneys general have consistently opposed voter ID in North Carolina, something that 80 percent of in every poll indicates are

[00:22:54] supported that has been passed in a constitutional amendment by the people of North Carolina. He opposes it. And he and he says he's going to continue to fight those things that he says are election suppression.

[00:23:05] And as the attorney general of North Carolina, he's setting himself up as a legislative policy opposition point to the legislature. And that is unworkable and it is wrong. By the way, something else we ought to address is he just said that the attorney general

[00:23:23] is the state's top prosecutor. That's not correct. The prosecutors are the district attorneys around the state. The role in the criminal justice system that the attorney general's office, other than informally and from bully pulpit and coordination supplies, is criminal appeals to the

[00:23:40] courts of appeal and the Supreme Court. Just never been in an appellate court in North Carolina, no appearance whatsoever. And not only that, but the attorney general's office, if you look at, for example, their last year's report, it devotes 80 percent of its lawyer time to civil litigation.

[00:24:02] Most of the controversies that the attorney general's office handles are civil. Jeff says his experience is superior as a prosecutor for three years handling misdemeanors, traffic cases, all on pleas with the exception of one case that he tried two cases, felony cases that I understand he tried.

[00:24:18] False, Dan. Well, he'll clear it up. I'll clear it up now. But we'll. But right. Well, when you have your time, I know you're in favor of the rules. Your time is up, sir. Sorry to interrupt. I'll clear it up now.

[00:24:28] There you go. So he interrupts him, takes his last 10 seconds. All right. OK, if you're listening to this podcast, you are obviously paying attention to the world around us. You also have really great taste, I might add.

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[00:25:26] All right. Couple more soundbites real quick. These are short ones. From the debate between the two candidates for attorney general, Jeff Jackson, the Democrat and Bishop, the Republican. They were asked about opioids and the settlement money and all of that and fighting opioids. And Bishop came back.

[00:25:44] He said the main cause is the border. You cannot oppose sheriffs cooperating with federal law enforcement on immigration and then say, oh, we'll work together on this. And Jackson doesn't understand the role of the attorney general, Bishop says, as he mentioned before, it's not the top prosecutor.

[00:26:02] Everything we just know that's Jeff. Here. And when Jeff said he's a prosecutor, I've never prosecuted anything. I thought, well, look into that. Here's what the state's computer system says. General trial court appearances of record during our careers for me.

[00:26:15] 220 for Jeff for appearances in the business court by me. Twenty four. Jeff zero. Court of Appeals 50 to zero. Supreme Court of North Carolina. Twenty two to zero. Appearances in the federal court system for me in this district court. Sixty. Jeff one bankruptcy court. Twenty. Jeff one.

[00:26:37] Court of Appeals six to zero. All in total, four hundred two appearances to six. That seems like a pretty big gap. They will come back to this. Dan Bishop on the next question about how he intends to work with the General

[00:26:55] Assembly and the judiciary, he comes back around and hits Jackson again on his record. In addition to my experience at the bar, which dwarfs Jeff's. And in fact, I don't think it's fair to say he's had any significant experience in

[00:27:09] practicing law. He did for those three years in Gaston County take at serve as the complainant, according to court records in twenty eight traffic cases, forty three misdemeanor pleas and two felony pleas. And I understand from other sources that he tried one low level drug felony case.

[00:27:28] Dan, come on. Dan, you think that's how it works at the district attorney's office? And and let me take my time. Then you take yours. I understand. I would be on the defense about this, too, because this is stark as it can possibly be. You're just misleading.

[00:27:39] It has not. Well, then you can tell what the answer is. But spending three years taking pleas in criminal court does not make you a practicing lawyer in a way that you can handle the complex work of the attorney general's office.

[00:27:53] OK, so Jackson gets his chance at responding about why his record is what it is. I think we have some prosecutors in the room. I think you folks understand that that office means that you are getting in a tremendous amount of volume, that you are swamped with cases.

[00:28:11] That was my experience. I have no idea what computer record he is consulting. But honestly, we've spoken like someone who's never prosecuted a single case in their life. And the idea that we would treat our state's top prosecutor as an entry level position. I mean, folks, come on.

[00:28:28] Someone who's never worked with law enforcement, someone who's never worked with victims. I've prosecuted major sex offense cases. How many major just major? How many domestic abuse? How many how many felonies have you taken to a jury trial?

[00:28:41] I have had over a dozen jury trials and I've had several hundred bench trials. And you have had zero ever. So take a step back. Oh. Notice when Dan asked him how many felonies have you taken to jury trial, he just said, I have a dozen jury trials.

[00:29:06] He didn't say felonies. I don't know if that matters. Maybe he meant felonies, but I'm not sure. As for the the the court system, the computer system, that's where Bishop said he was getting the information from. They track that apparently.

[00:29:23] I don't know that to be true or false, but it seemed like he had a record he was reading from from the court system, computer files. And Jackson did not he didn't deny those records.

[00:29:36] But I also then don't understand why he would say that this that the attorney general. If a position shouldn't be an entry level position, Bishop clearly outlined all of his experience with the 400 plus cases to six.

[00:29:52] So he obviously has the experience at the appellate level, federal level, like he's got this experience that is directly applicable to the job. Probably more so than just jury trials. Right. Even if Jackson had a very large volume of jury trials, again, this is to

[00:30:11] Bishop's point. You're not hiring a top prosecutor because he's not going into court to argue criminal cases against people. All right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that

[00:30:25] advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete Callender show

[00:30:34] dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.