Steven Crowder, host of The Blaze’s “Louder with Crowder,” released part two of his “Change My Mind” series over the potential confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett on Wednesday.
Crowder set up on the campus of Texas Christian University and invited students to try and convince him that Barrett should not be confirmed to the Supreme Court. The roughly 40-minute part-2 video features Crowder conversing with two students over Barrett’s potential confirmation. (Watch part-1 of the series here.)
One student, who said she came in with an “open mind,” seemed to be coming around to Crowder’s view that Barrett should be confirmed to the Supreme Court when the segment ended. The next student, a political science major named Kit, argued with Crowder for most of the video that Barrett should not be put on the court, and that the Supreme Court should be “packed.”
First, Kit argued that Barrett should not be added to the court because of what the Senate, led by GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), did to former President Barack Obama’s nominee during the last year of his presidency. Crowder pointed out that there is nothing contradictory between what McConnell did then — declining to confirm the nominee of a president from the opposite party — and what McConnell is doing now, putting a nominee from a president of the same party to a vote. Each scenario has multiple examples of precedent throughout history.
After the two agreed that the president and Senate have full authority to place Barrett on the Supreme Court, Crowder moved the discussion to court packing. Kit appeared to argue that the court as it is now is not representative of the will of the people. Supreme Court justices should also represent the “will” of the president who appoints them, Kit said.
“The president represents the majority vote of the Electoral College. And so, therefore, when they elect a Supreme Court justice, if they get appointed, that will be reflective of that specific, whoever the … that will be representative of whatever the people were feeling, or believing, at that specific time. And so the justices actually are, if you just get your head around that, the justices are representatives of the people,” Kit said. “Being that they are representatives, it’s their job to represent the will of whatever administration that may have been, which, in turn, is a representation of the majority at that specific time.”
Crowder proceeded to deconstruct Kit’s argument and assert that what Kit argued was not only wrong, but dangerous.
“What you have just expressed is very scary for a litany of reasons, and those reasons are, when combined with your idea of court packing and this notion that the job of a Supreme Court appointee is to exclusively represent the view of the executive who nominated them, that is why it is not simply an executive who actually elects them,” Crowder said, later adding: “He can nominate and it can be confirmed by the Senate because the Supreme Court is not meant to be a governing body. It is meant to be, exclusively, separate and apart from the House of Congress, from the Senate, from the United States presidency, to be impartial.”
“It is not meant to represent the majority will of the people. It is meant to interpret the Constitution,” Crowder continued. “If you have this ill-conceived notion, I would argue, that their job is to represent [the will] of the executive who nominated them, and that we should increase the number of these people under, what? The authority of an executive who would nominate more, that is an absolute recipe for an authoritarian regime.”
Watch part-2 of Crowder’s “Change My Mind” series on Barrett’s confirmation below: