Dr. Ronald Pestritto

speaker

40 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Mar 2025

Dr. Ronald Pestritto’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Charlie Kirk Show · Another Promise Kept: Abolishing the Department of Education · 20 Mar 2025 podcast

Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

Thanks for that welcome, Charlie. It's good to see you.

Well, there's a little bit of recent history on this, actually. And to be honest, I think Republicans have to look in the mirror a little bit because back when we got the Obama administration came into office and was not able to get its program through the Congress, they decided to go very aggressive with administrative power.

And the Republicans at that time, instead of using the powers constitutionally that Congress has, instead of fighting the Obama administration itself, especially through the budget process, the power of the purse, Instead, the Republicans ran from that and decided to go crying to the courts. So they took the Obama administration to the courts.

Now that's been a practice in both Republican and Democratic administrations since then. been ramped up massively now that we have the second Trump presidency. But it's really a practice that unfortunately probably even Republicans have relied upon too much instead of using the Article I powers that they do have.

No, he does not. And the federal courts have been, including the Supreme Court historically, have been very, very reluctant to involve themselves in any kind of question that might involve foreign policy or what one might say are even some of the core discretionary powers of the executive under Article II. And so that's why some of the...

taken by some of these district court judges, ordering the turning around of airplanes or instructing the Department of State to disperse funds even while they're just taking a pause, the $2 billion funding order that we had recently reviewed by the courts. These things are typically way out of bounds for federal courts. And I have to say, I do think that

A good amount of this will ultimately end up being reversed at the Supreme Court level or at the higher court level. But the question is, how long is that going to take and how much trouble and harm to our country is going to be done while we wait for the Supreme Court to get into the ring?

We heard Chief Justice Roberts come out just recently and make the case that, hey, the impeachment isn't appropriate kind of language to use. The appellate process is the way in which we handle potentially rogue district court judges. And in one sense, he's right about that. But if his own court is going to be so reluctant to police the lower courts, then he really is almost—

setting the situation up for this kind of rhetoric. And the other thing that I haven't heard mentioned very much is, of course, there's a layer of courts in between the district court level and the Supreme Court level, and these are the courts of appeal.

And where most of these cases are being brought, and they're being brought here for obvious reason, they're being brought in the District of Columbia. And the appeals court in the District of Columbia, the federal appeals court, is the one that was notoriously stacked with Democrats by Harry Reid.

And so it's not as if once these district court decisions get up to the appellate court level, there's not likely to be a terribly sympathetic hearing there either. And so these are really matters that should be in front of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court should be policing this. You saw four justices in the case on the USAID funding. get really quite angry.

Justice Alito was quite angry at the court for not intervening in that case sooner. So it'll be a matter of when the Supreme Court wants to get involved.

Well, I think ultimately the most likely recourse is there being overturned by a higher court and especially by the Supreme Court. That's the most likely. Now, you know, we have heard talk of impeachment and I'm certainly not not opposed to impeachment for judges who knowingly betray their judicial duty. The problem is it's simply not a realistic remedy.

Impeachment requires a supermajority vote in the Senate that is simply never going to happen. And so it's just, to my mind, not a very practical remedy. And the leftists know this. They know how to judge shop. Quite frankly, the Republican lawyers, when President Obama and President Biden were in office— they knew how to judge shop as well. It's very easy to do at the district court level.

There are 90 some odd district courts and you only need to win in one of them, right? That's the great problem with a lot of these universal injunctions is you can go district court to district court to district court and lose, lose, lose. And then if you find just one district court judge who's willing to enjoin the government, then that's it. They only have to go for one out of 94, essentially.

And it's not hard to do. It's like getting an indictment. You know, a prosecutor getting an indictment, you can indict a ham sandwich. And getting an injunction in district court, especially in D.C., if you can't do that and you're a Democratic attorney, you should consider a new line of work.

You bet. And in one sense, it is illegal under existing Supreme Court precedent, under the Humphrey's executor precedent from 1935 that you just named. And of course,

The Trump administration knows that, and one has to guess that the very reason that they have decided to go after these officers from the FTC is they know that that will put the question squarely before the Supreme Court of the United States.

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