Thursday, FNC host Tucker Carlson criticized Democrats in Washington, D.C. for touting an expansion of the number of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, which included an announcement from House and Senate Democrats earlier in the day.
Carlson reminded viewers of the countless times Democrats had opposed such efforts in the past and said such proposals were being made in the name of power.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Eminent epidemiologist, Chelsea Clinton has just called on the social media giant, Facebook to ban this show. Why? Because we asked obvious questions about the coronavirus vaccine. Questions that were vindicated about three hours ago. You can’t make it up, and we are not. We’ve got details for you in just a moment.
But first, tonight, things are changing fast, in case you haven’t noticed. Much too fast, actually. People can’t metabolize change on this pace. It’s not just FOX News viewers or elderly Republican men, it is this whole species.
Human beings are not designed for relentless abrupt changes to the way they live or the way they think, and for most of human history, they did not have to deal with those changes because they didn’t happen much. Societies evolved slowly.
Fourth century France was very much like 14th Century France. For a thousand years, most people in France spent their lives following domesticated animals around the field and living in thatched huts. And then in the 1700s, someone perfected the steam engine, and nothing was ever the same. Life for average people began to change faster and faster, and then exponentially faster.
And this continued on, it continues now to the present day, a moment in which nearly every morning, you awake to a brand-new world. If you are over 40, you may have trouble recognizing your own country. It is just too unfamiliar.
Now, the self-righteous children on social media don’t care to notice this, and when they do, they dismiss any complaints about change, as bigotry. But it is not bigotry. It is human nature.
Abrupt change causes social chaos, always.
Human beings developed customs and habits and generational expectations for a reason. It’s not random. Continuity is comforting to people.
If you eliminate familiar things overnight, societies fracture, populations tend to explode. We have seen that happen. The last Industrial Revolution, in the end, provoked armed revolutions. Hundreds of millions of people died.
Germany got Hitler, Eastern Europe got Stalinism. Yes, we did wind up with antibiotics in the end, you can thank technology for that and we do, but we also got genocide and atomic bombs.
There is a lesson here: if you’re going to change things, go slowly. Choose the incremental over the immediate, explain yourself as you do it. Reassure people, acknowledge the reality of evolutionary biology. It is real. Human beings are not born to be the machine components. You cannot just bang out improved versions of citizens on a 3D printer.
People in real life are complicated and stubborn and hard to control. Even the most open-minded ones get jumpy when suddenly everything is different, obviously, and you would think it would be obvious.
Wise leaders would know that intuitively. If you are going to have relentless technological change, and apparently we are, you cannot inflict relentless social change and expect your society to survive. Things will fall apart if you do that; that is guaranteed.
Yet, that is exactly what our leaders are currently doing. They are changing everything, whether we like it or not. A new language, new values, new Biology, new curricula, new social mores and hiring standards and body types, a brand-new national population.
And then, because that is still not enough change, a whole new system of government, all of that in three months.
What will the consequences of that change — of that revolution be? In your bones, you know the answer, it is terrifying, and it does not have to happen.
What America needs now more than anything is a pause, a moment to catch our national breath, take stock, assess what just happened — a lot happened — and calmly consider the best way forward.
You want unity for the country? We all do, and that might bring us unity. But no, the kaleidoscopic barrage of unending change continues. Yesterday, they informed us, they plan to dismantle the last trusted branch of our government, the Supreme Court.
Here is a Congressman from New York explaining why they are doing it. His name is Mondaire Jones. He is 33 years old. He went to Stanford and Harvard Law School, meaning that in his short life, he has produced essentially nothing.
So none of it is real to him, so he is happy to blow it up. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. MONDAIRE JONES (D-NY): Our democracy is in crisis. The insurrection on January 6 made that clear. This crisis didn’t arrive overnight or by accident. The Supreme Court helped bring us here.
In fact, the court has been actively dismantling our democracy for years. It gutted the protections of the Voting Rights Act and paved the way for a new era of racist voter suppression.
It helped install Donald Trump in the White House, and he returned the favor by appointing more justices who are hostile to our democracy.
We, the People, can break the far-right anti-democratic grip on our democracy. We can expand the Supreme Court, and together, we can finally restore a government by the people, instead of government by the powerful.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, the Supreme Court did the insurrection of January 6, the QAnon court, if you will. I bet you didn’t know that. Mondaire Jones didn’t know it, either he was just reading what they wrote for him on the card.
Who is the “they” by the way? That was a slick video. Did not make it in his basement. It cost money to make that video, so where did the money come from? We’d love to know.
Was it funded by some of the big corporations that have just finished telling us that asking people to show ID when they vote is Jim Crow racism? Possible. We called around today to find out.
We asked the CEO of Coca-Cola, James Quincey and CEO of Delta, Ed Bastian, and longtime head of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Merck CEO, Ken Frazier.
All of those business titans have been happy to weigh in with full force recently on what form of government the rest of us must-have. It’s their business. It’s up to them now.
So, we wondered what their view was of turning our highest court into a legislative body, of making our last officially nonpartisan institution into something that is openly partisan, and therefore trusted by no one.
We can only guess what they think about that because they did not get back to us. Apparently, they are no longer so worried about democracy. Whatever Biden wants, just don’t take our money. And they know where Joe Biden stands because a few days ago, the White House formed something called the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.
The job of that Commission was, and we are quoting now, “Principal arguments in a contemporary debate for and against Supreme Court reform.” It is the last phrase that matters, “Supreme Court Reform.” It is not court-packing, it is not what FDR did, it is Supreme Court reform. And the White House says, it just wants to study the subject objectively. Right?
The purpose, obviously, is to signal that court-packing now has the endorsement of the Biden White House, and at a press conference this afternoon, some of the most powerful Democrats in the Congress made it very clear they have received that message.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. JERROLD NADLER (D-NY): Some people say we are packing the court, we are not packing it, we’re unpacking it.
Senator McConnell and the Republicans packed the court over the last couple of years as and Senator Markey outlined. So this is a reaction to that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “Some people might say we are packing the court. No, we’re unpacking it.” Woo, props to the 23-year-old communications aide who thought of that line. That was Jerry Nadler of course, of New York. He is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, kind of a big job when you’re talking about courts.
But he wasn’t there alone this afternoon. Hank Johnson was there — of Georgia. Remember Hank Johnson? He is the Congressman/amateur geologist who once speculated in a committee hearing that the island nation of Guam might capsize due to overpopulation. That’s Hank Johnson. He is the best.
And Hank Johnson today offered his assessment of how big the Supreme Court should be.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. HANK JOHNSON (D-GA): But this natural expansion stopped after the Civil War, leaving us today with the historical oddity of 13 Circuit Courts of Appeal and only nine Justices. I believe it is time to go back to this tradition and have at least 13 Justices.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, at least. We’ve got to go back to before the Civil War says Hank Johnson. It is time to, quote, “go back to tradition.” Really? You wonder what other antebellum traditions Hank Johnson wants to bring back to the United States. Sadly, he did not tell us.
Until now, Hank Johnson’s party had us completely convinced that all earlier American traditions were white supremacy. But somehow, the one that isn’t is 13 members on the Supreme Court. That is what Hank Johnson just told us.
Now, these people are genuinely radical. The good news is, they are also stupid.
Ed Markey, who served in Congress for like 40 years stood up and repeated the same line, only by packing the Supreme Court full of partisan Democrats can we — it’s hard to read this — can we restore the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. ED MARKEY (D-MA): And I am disappointed to say that too many Americans question the court’s legitimacy. The consequence is that the rights of all Americans, but especially of people of color, women, and our immigrant communities are at risk.
We have a stilted, illegitimate, six to three conservative majority on the court that has caused this crisis of confidence in our country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Now, first of all, it is kind of hard to take Ed Markey, who is like pushing a hundred years old very seriously, when he is talking about how we need to empower women and people of color when he is occupying a Senate seat in an overwhelmingly Democratic state.
Hey, Ed Markey, why don’t you resign this afternoon and give that seat to a female person of color? Oh, you don’t want to do that? Because you are a liar.
But the best part was, people don’t think the court is legitimate and that is why we need to pack it with Democrats who is standing in front of a sign that said “Expand the Court.”
He wanted you to forget it wasn’t that long ago that he was telling us, quote, “We need nine.” That meant nine justices. Do you remember that? No, they don’t want you to remember that. And that’s not the only thing they don’t want you to remember.
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, Ed Markey was one of so many Democrats who urged Republicans to respect her dying wish. Quote: “Mitch McConnell has steamrolled through a confirmation hearing, going against precedent and against Justice Ginsburg’s dying wish.” That is what Ed Markey told us.
So even from the grave, Supreme Court Justices get to determine who replaces them. But now, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, rest in peace, is no longer useful to people like Ed Markey, so they want you to forget what she herself said about court-packing about a year before she died.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RUTH BADER GINSBURG, FORMER ASSOCIATE JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT: I have heard that there are some people on the Democratic side who would like to increase the number of judges. If anything, it would make the court appear partisan. It would be the one side thing, when we are in power, it was only to enlarge the number.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Now, at the time, it was, I think a federal law that all Democrats had to agree with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so Joe Biden did.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), THEN-CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I would not get into court-packing. We add three justices, next time around, we lose control, they add three justices. We begin to lose any credibility that the court has at all.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: We can go on and on. We’ve got a lot of tape. These are all sound bites we can play you of Democrats telling you, “No, no, no we need nine justices.” But we are not going to.
Brazen hypocrisy is starting to bore us. Yes, they are liars with no principles, will say anything for power. Got it.
Now, in real life, the bill that we are talking about may not pass, but the sad thing is, it does not matter whether or not it does because the damage has already been done.
We’ve just watched people who are paid to care about the country prove that they don’t. They wrecked the place as long as they have got control of it. That is not a reassuring message. A lot of Americans are highly anxious right now. They are distrustful, some are paranoid. They don’t think that anything, none of their institutions is on the level.
But instead of reassuring them that everything is going to be OK, leading Democrats just showed them that they have every reason to feel the way they do.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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