Carrie Severino joins the Guy Benson Show to discuss Affirmative Action, student loans, the Constitution, and the Colorado Web Designer

Listen to the full interview below:

Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network and co-author of the best selling book Justice on Trial: The Kavan augh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court, joined guest host Scott Reinhold to discuss all of the latest SCOTUS rulings.

Severino said this about Affirmative Action:

“Equal protection of the law means the law is applied to everyone equally… let’s look at the content of an individual’s character.”

Full Transcript Below:

Scott Reinhold: I’m going to bring on Carrie Severino. She’s the president of the Judicial Crisis Network, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. And, Carrie, welcome to The Guy Benson Show. Thank you for joining me today.

Carrie Severino: Great to be here. And it is a good day, right? Great decisions.

Scott Reinhold: I mean, they’re great decisions. And I find it funny that the left and we kind of just talked about Roe v Wade and how they love the 14th Amendment. They try to use it in every single one of the Supreme Court cases. And they kind of just don’t understand how the Constitution works. But we saw and let’s just start right now with what happened today. If you don’t mind. And I want to of course, we’re going to get to the student loans. We’re going to talk about the Colorado designer as well. And I’m sorry, the affirmative action. But I want to get to the student loans, what in anyone’s mind. And we played a clip from Nancy Pelosi where she said Congress is the only one who really controls the purse strings, that there’s no way this is going to happen. And I always say this was a pandering thing. But what did the Supreme Court look at and say, hey, this is right.

Carrie Severino: Yeah. I mean, it was just like when President Obama admitted he didn’t have the authority to create Doc out of thin air. He doesn’t have the authority here. And they they did it with Obamacare. Like, you can’t just re rewrite things yourself. Turns out it turns out the Constitution still applies. And what happened is the president wanted to. He wanted to singlehandedly write a check for half a billion to one billion to unilaterally forgive student loans. And it turns out, no, you can’t do that. It’s pretty straightforward. He was trying to use a 2003 law that was passed in the wake of 9/11 to try to help people who are affected under national emergencies like that. If they needed to have a deferral or something on a loan. And they’re trying to shoehorn one of the largest expenditures in U.S. history into something it simply wasn’t designed for and say it’s because of COVID, which, you know, clearly this is that was not designed to make people whole after, but it was designed to fulfill President Biden’s campaign promise to try to forget broad student loan forgiveness. He’s welcome to do that if he can get Congress to vote for it. He couldn’t. And the Supreme Court says, sorry, that means you don’t get to do an end run around Congress.

Scott Reinhold: Yeah, and there was a time where, you know, COVID was a national emergency and that’s where he tried to take advantage of the situation. Do you think he would have had a better chance if he didn’t go in there and say, hey, the national emergency is over?

Carrie Severino: Well, that might have helped a little bit. But look, again, the law designed to make people whole. And that’s one of the things that came up during the oral arguments of the case. This goes way beyond make people whole from COVID. If he had said, you know, I would have say this emergency was there for two years, we’re going to we’re going to defer all this debt for two years. We’re going to even cancel two years worth of debt, whatever you want to say. You know, people who got COVID, something that was related to the actual emergency he’s trying to shoehorn this into, but that’s not what he did. He went to something that we all know he ran on, he was trying to do before, and he tried to just make it fit into this into this national emergency package. And again, doing it, you know, well after the emergency is already over and after he already argued to the Supreme Court in a different case having to do with the border. Like, oh, no, no, it’s over. Okay. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have it over when you want to admit, you know, thousands of migrants streaming across the border. But it’s not over if you want to use that as an excuse to forgive student loan debt. You can’t have it both ways.

Scott Reinhold: Yeah, absolutely. You cannot have it both ways. And, you know, the same thing goes for the ruling from yesterday that we need to talk about, because I think this is going to be the big one. The student debt thing is going to kind of fall apart because that’s a progressive idea. But everybody on the left seems to be behind affirmative action. And I’ve been or a business owner. And the first thing I did when I decided to open up and I owned a restaurant, I took off two things of my application: your race and your sex. I didn’t care. All I want is somebody who’s able to do the job. And then when we hear about somebody like Kentaji Brown Jackson, we hear obviously Michelle Obama. She’s chiming in and of course, the VP. But when I go to Brown Jackson, when I listen to Kamala Harris, I say, of course, therefore, this they are both put in a position based on the color of their skin and not the content of their character, as far as I’m concerned. And it sure seems that they can’t handle these jobs and they’re not doing the job. But this was the right decision. This is fair. And it really does fight racism based on what they’re trying to say, which is once again using the 14th Amendment that guarantees racial equality.

Carrie Severino: Yeah, it was so strange that they’re trying to argue the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, but not when it says just exactly what they equal protection of the law. I mean, everyone has to the laws that apply to everyone equally. So that means whether you are race I like or race I don’t like, you know, I have to have to treat you the same. And they’re trying to say, well, we’re using racism in a nice way because we’re trying to help people based on the race. Unfortunately, in college admissions, it’s a zero sum game. You can’t say, I’m going to give these people a leg up in my race because what turned out was it means you’re going to have to admit, in this case, a ton fewer Asian students because you got to make up the difference somewhere and that it’s simply not fair to say that someone you know, you have to give these scores to get into Harvard if you want to race in these scores, if you’re a different race, they’re absolutely free to still look at, you know, did you overcome adversity? Did you have to deal with discrimination? You’re like, all of those things are still fair game. But it’s so interesting. You mentioned Michelle Obama, President Obama, when he was running for office, he said, I don’t think my daughters I don’t think Malia and Sasha should have been given a leg up because they did have a lot of privileges. Right. And that’s exactly right. You shouldn’t be giving someone just because of their color of their skin when, you know, maybe a white kid in Appalachia also, you know, overcame a lot of adversities. But because he checked the different box, you know, the Obama’s kids should get advantage over him better. I think we need to try to make sure we’re looking at it and get it actual as an individual and what that individual dealt with. And not simply you get you get a check, a certain box. And so I pretend that that really tells me everything I need to know about who you are.

Scott Reinhold: Carrie Severino joining me here on The Guy Benson Show. She is the president of the Judicial Crisis Network and also a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Let me ask you this, because I am in Atlanta. I know that Clarence Thomas also from I love the documentary they did about Clarence Thomas. I love the fact that we have a statue, even though they want to tear it down here in Atlanta. It’s amazing. This man is such a good, good man. And I know you worked for him. He he made sure and I think he’s the exact example of somebody who, based on merit, is where he is today.

Carrie Severino: Absolutely. I mean, look, he was he was admitted as one of the first black kids admitted to schools when that wasn’t a plus. That was a minus when, you know, he grew up in the Jim Crow South. And but he also experienced the other side of it where, you know, a lot of people and they still do. They’ve been doing this recently. And it’s the anticipation of this decision has said, oh, well, you know, he’s only there because he’s black. He’s not there because the you know, actually he was one of the top students in class when he was in white schools, as well as when he was in a segregated school in the South. So he people are discounting him because of his race. And he he realizes that’s one of the side effects of of trying to look at people through a racial lens. It’s perpetuating that racism rather than saying, let’s be a society that’s moving past this and let’s actually go live Martin Luther King’s dream and let’s look at the content of our character, which incidentally, he’s actually really popular. That’s like a 70% issue across the country. And it’s very popular among Democrats as well as Republicans. So it’s really frustrating to me to see people trying to make race the central story when what we really want to be is a country that is bigger than that and that wants to offer equal opportunity across the board.

Scott Reinhold: Yeah, because it’s kind of funny to me because in real life and I think it was Kentaji Brown Jackson, she said deeming race of relevant and law does not make so in life. But it seems outside of politics, I know in my life and a lot of people realize today I was at a fire station and the crew there was completely a diverse crew and there was no any there was no anxiety. No, there’s nothing sports we see at work. You know, I don’t know anybody in my life that I’ve ever come across where racism comes into play. It only seems like it’s a political issue to these people and it’s something for them to stand on.

Carrie Severino: Yeah. And unfortunately, you know, it’s so politically advantageous to some people. Do they all have an incentive to be like just like people were kind of pretending that COVID wasn’t over, to try to pretend that, you know, that racism is still the same today as it was again, like when Justice Thomas is growing up in the Jim Crow South. And the good news is it’s not has has every problem of racism been solved in our country? Of course not. We all still struggle with…. And that’s you know, that’s not just any one race. All of us need to work on that together, but that it focusing on it more isn’t what’s going to get us past that. I think that’s what the Congress that passed the 14th Amendment to the Constitution knew that trying to take you know and say we’re going to go forward and apply the laws evenly regardless of your race. That is the way you know, if you know that they were dealing in the reconstruction era with a very racially divided country. Right. And they understood that trying to just treat people equally actually is going to do a better job of. And it wasn’t perfect then. No, but we have come a long way. And I think we have a long ways to go. And I think the way to do it is not to focus on race more, but to try to say, hey, let’s focus on the rule of law and equality. And then, you know, I think America is moving in the right direction. It can keep moving that way.

Scott Reinhold: Yeah, and hopefully we do, because we look nobody’s perfect. I don’t think anybody. Well, there’s one man maybe that was perfect and that was Jesus Christ. Besides that, I don’t think anybody else has ever been perfect. I’m not perfect. I consider myself a bad person all the time. I try to be better than most, but I know I’m a bad person at times as well. When Joe Biden too, he was talking about this with the MSNBC people and Nicolle Wallace. And one of the things he said was, and this is where they’re so misguided based on what they think this court is supposed to do or what their real I mean, that they’re supposed to uphold the Constitution. When he talked about take a look at the decision today and take how it’s ruled on a number of issues meaning the court that are have been it’s so hard to even read his quotes that are I have been president for 50 to 60 years some times. I talked about it before we went to break and before you came on the 14th Amendment and how Roe v Wade and the Dobbs decision that was a main part of the 14th Amendment. And I kind of want to talk to you about that, because what what in this decision with Roe while in court originally Roe and Casey kind of argued that there is a right to privacy and that it’s derived from the 14th concept of personal liberty And they were using the due process clause saying that it was enough to encompass a right to an abortion. And the Dobbs Court, though, then explains that whether the Constitution confers or a right to an abortion, the due process clause can guarantee some rights not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. Well, they went on to explain that it’s inescapable conclusion is that a right to an abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions. And then, in fact, the majority knew that abortion was prohibited in three quarters of the states when the 14th Amendment was adopted, and 30 states still prohibited the procedure when Roe was decided. I think people don’t understand why it was returned to the states. But that’s the reason, because the states already made the decisions. Whether this was. Am I correct in that?

Carrie Severino: Yeah. I mean, so the Constitution sets certain limits in the government, but the stuff that’s not given to the federal government in the Constitution is and always has been left to the states. So there’s a role to make sure that that anything violates the Constitution the states can’t do along with the federal government. But that’s that’s when a court goes beyond that. It’s like they’re amending the Constitution themselves. You know, there’s something that’s not of the Constitution, that they’re just making up rules. So you can’t do that either. You can’t It’s like when I leave my my kids in charge of each other, they start making up new rules. You know, I’m a parent. I make the rules. You don’t get to add new things on it. That’s what the Constitution was doing in in Roe. They’re saying, oh, also, you can’t do this. No, the 14th Amendment says some things clearly. One of the things they said is equal protection of law. So that is one thing you can’t do, right? You can’t unevenly if you’re you. And so you can’t apply different standards to black kids and white kids and Asian kids and Hispanic kids. So the key is not should states decide all issues or should the federal judge government title issues? No. The issues that the the Constitution says go have to be, you know, governed by the federal law or have to be at least not violate certain federal principles. Those ones that have to step in and make sure the states are following. If it’s not in there, then the states actually get to make the laws. And, you know, that’s when people act like that’s some kind of crazy. No, no. The states are also like Republican governments. And they’re I mean, in terms of their they’re. Public where you’re elected by by you’re individuals like this is it’s not saying, well, the federal government’s not running. It’s going to be thrown into anarchy or it’s going to be thrown into some sort of tyrant. No, it’s been given to a different legislature, and that’s your state legislature. So if you want your laws to look a certain way, you go and you vote for your your state representatives, you vote for your governor, and you’re going to get the kind of laws that you want in your state. The federal Constitution is just not there to come up with every single answer that people might want to see. And that’s that’s fine. That’s one of the beauties of our country, is you can have different laws in Georgia than Texas, than New York, than California. It’s a it’s a free country that way.

Scott Reinhold: Absolutely. Carrie Severino, thank you so much for joining me. I could have talked to you all day about this. I love the thought about it. I love that the Democrats don’t understand the Constitution, don’t ever want to go back to it. But thank you for keeping us up to date on it. I appreciate you joining us today.

Carrie Severino: Have a great day.