Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro reacted to three massive Supreme Court rulings that came down in favor of conservatives on Friday, one on birthright citizenship, one on LGBT children’s books, and the third on a Texas pornography law.
“The three biggest decisions all came down in favor of President Trump,” Shapiro said in his video reaction to the news on Friday.
In the first case, the Supreme Court cracked down on lower courts trying to hamstring President Trump’s agenda, ruling that Trump may end birthright citizenship in some parts of the country while legal challenges against his order proceed in others. Previously, courts in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington state had issued nationwide injunctions that blocked Trump’s order from taking effect across the country.
The ruling did not address the question of birthright citizenship itself, which is the practice of granting automatic citizenship rights for babies born on United States soil, regardless of their parents’ citizenship status.
Nationwide injunctions by courts blocking Trump’s agenda have been a “massive problem” for his administration since he took office, Shapiro said in his response.
“The basic issue here is that there is nothing in the history of the U.S. judicial system that suggests universal injunctions from district courts are a thing,” the host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” said. “You can’t just randomly make up universal injunctions and then start applying them without any sort of limitation.”
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Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who penned the court’s majority opinion, blistered Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent.
“The court goes out of its way to smack down Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent, which is truly a crazy dissent,” Shapiro noted. “I mean, her dissent in this case essentially says that because she feels like it, any district court judge should be able to issue any nationwide injunction against the Executive branch.”
“As the court points out, that’s kind of crazy,” Shapiro said. “For the Left, the answer always and forever is more power to whatever branch is useful to them. There is no actual through-line to their jurisprudence. This has always been the problem with constitutional jurisprudence from the Left.”
The second decision the Supreme Court handed down on Friday was in favor of a group of religious parents who sued over their Maryland school district barring them from opting their children out of LGBT books in the classroom.
Justice Samuel Alito penned the court’s majority opinion, writing that the school district burdened the parents’ First Amendment rights.
The Maryland parents who sued included Catholics, Muslims, and Ukrainian Orthodox.
The controversial LGBT books included “Prince and Knight” about a prince who falls in love with a knight instead of a princess, and “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” about a girl’s uncle who marries another man.
“So basically they were just going to force kids to listen to LGBTQ plus, minus, divided-by sign agitprop without notifying parents or allowing them the possibility of opt out,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro remembered how his own parents were able to opt him out of sex education in middle school.
“That’s an extraordinary thing,” he said. “I remember, when I went to public middle school, we reached the age where [Los Angeles Unified School District] decided that it was necessary that you be taught sex ed, and my parents, who had already taught me about sex, did not wish to have a bunch of left-wing agitprop shoveled into my brain by a bunch of public school educators, and so they opted me out. And they were allowed to opt me out because religious freedom and all that. Well, this particular school district said no, you cannot opt out no matter what you do.”
“Justice Alito goes into excruciating detail, pointing out what exactly happens in these books that are being taught to extremely small children, about sexual fluidity, gender identity, same-sex marriage, and all the rest,” Shapiro noted. “It is very, very obvious, very clear, of course, that the goal here is not just to teach what the law is nationally in the United States that men can marry men and women can marry women. The idea here is that it’s supposed to be upheld as a moral good, and you can’t opt out.”
“If you are teaching third graders that it is a positive good, an excellent positive good for boys to marry boys and girls to marry girls, boys to be girls, girls to be boys, and all the rest, that of course is what Justice Alito calls a chilling vision of the power of the state to strip away the critical rights of parents to guide religious development of their children,” Shapiro said.
In Friday’s last major decision, the Supreme Court voted to uphold a Texas law requiring users to verify their age before viewing pornography, ruling against a trade organization for the porn industry.
“It is not some gigantic burden for somebody who is above the age of 18 to type in their age. That’s the basic finding,” Shapiro said. “The fact that, again, the three liberals on the court found this to be some sort of violation of core First Amendment liberty is insane.”
Shapiro added that he would have “gone further.”
“Pornography should not be covered by the First Amendment,” Shapiro said. “The notion that the Founding Fathers were sitting around talking about the necessity of accessing pornography when they wrote the First Amendment is insane. In fact, there were pornography laws on the books of I believe every state at the time of the founding.”
Shapiro emphasized that all three decisions tie back to Trump’s 2016 election.
“If he had not won the 2016 election, you would have had a left-wing bench cramming down the worst form of left-wing radicalism imaginable via the Supreme Court,” Shapiro said.