Rick Green
Welcome to the Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's Wall Builders and we're taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. And, of course, today is Friday, so it's Good News Friday. We've got a lot of good news coming up for you. The best news I can tell you right off the bat is that we have all kinds of answers to what plagues America. You know, we're all frustrated with the direction of the country, with the chaos at the border, with the economy, with the administration, with the insanity that we see day after day after day and it just feels like whack-a-mole right of all the bad stuff out there. And you try to figure out which battle do I fight? Well, join us at wallbuilders.com. Go to wallbuilders.com today, get signed up, Make sure you're on our email list. Consider coaching one of our Constitution classes. Consider sending your pastor to one of our pastor briefings. Maybe come in this summer to one of our programs over at American Journey Experience. Or maybe sign up as a coach and come to our Coach Congress down at the Patriot Academy campus in Fredericksburg. But get engaged. The answers are all there, folks. The Bible's got answers for everything we're facing in life and when we apply godly principles, when we line up with the laws of nature and nature's God, the blessings are there. When we go against the laws of nature and nature's God, we won't talk about the curses.
It's Good News Friday. I'm Rick Green, America's Constitutional Coach, honored to serve here with David and Tim Barton. Tim's a national speaker and pastor and president of Wall Builders, and David Barton, of course, America's premier historian, and he's our founder here at WallBuilders. So thanks for joining us on this Good News Friday, and it is time to dive into that good news, and I'm looking forward to some good news today. Actually, today we'll just call this. All this good news is answer to prayer. Even though, of course, National Day of Prayer was just yesterday, we're still going to call this answer to prayer because so many people out there are praying for our nation and praying for these very things to happen that we're about to talk about. So, David, what's our first answer to prayer? It's answer to prayer Friday
David Barton
Oh man, I don't know. I would guess that somebody's been praying about the nation getting back to doing the right things and right decisions. So here's a decision from the Supreme Court that indicates that maybe they're moving in the right direction. It's certainly what I would consider a biblical position of accountability cause and effect, doing the right thing and being rewarded for it. And this goes it's a Supreme Court case that was just at the Supreme Court and it's gotten in the last couple years. You can pretty much tell where the Supreme Court's going with a lot of their decisions. By the way the questioning goes. They're not real coy like they used to be five, eight, ten years ago. They pretty much signal where they're going and so it's been pretty reliable predictions for the last three to four years on where they're going with cases, whether it was religious liberty cases, the abortion cases, etc. And when it looked like it wasn't going that way. That's the way the they're starting to do, and I don't know how to say this without revealing a bias, but I'm not a pro-union guy, I believe in the right of association.
Tim Barton
You just revealed your bias, that's what I said.
David Barton
I don't know how to say it without revealing my bias. I'm not pro-union. I think you have the right of association, but you don't have the right to use blackmail when you associate. And that's where unions have been for a while, and so we had a decision. Just a few weeks ago we had on Good News Friday some union guys were trying to strike up in Washington state. They were cement truck drivers and they loaded up their trucks with cement and then they walked off the job, let those trucks get hard with cement destroyed. The trucks destroy everything. And they said that's part of negotiating, that's that's no, that's you destroying private property. You don't have the right to say I'm negotiating and destroy private property and not be held accountable. But the National Labor Relations Board protects those guys.
And this is another thing that disturbs me. In a nation where we get to choose and we have competition and we you don't get that choice. At the government level, only six percent of the nation is union, but like 100 percent of the government is union. So that's why Trump or anybody else that goes in, can't fire people that work for the government, because they're in unions and you can't get rid of them unless you do some kind of random thing, that that doesn't target them. But it's just crazy stuff and you need to be accountable for your behavior. And so here's another union piece that's coming where the Starbucks is now in court over the unions. Starbucks is not unionized per se. I think maybe only five or eight or 10 percent of Starbucks are unions, and the union wants to get Starbucks or unions and the union wants to get more Starbucks. And so what they're doing is trying to make Starbucks look bad.
And so what some employees did was they invited news media in after the shop was closed. They gave them access. It violates all the employee rules. Employees are not supposed to have people in after the shop closes, not supposed to bring media in without corporate head in there.
And they were doing all this and they're saying, hey, this is fair negotiating tactics, and this was just recently into the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court made it pretty clear that no, you don't have a second set of rules just because you belong to a union. You've got to be accountable for your behavior, you have to follow the rules, you have to be employees that can be fired like anybody else, and so for me that's really good, because I don't think people should not be accountable for their behavior. I don't think that just because you belong to a union means that you can act crazy in the government and you can do things in the government and not be fired. You should be fired if you do stuff bad, if you don't follow the rules that you agreed to when you hired on. So I think this decision with Starbucks that's going to be really good news. But in the court hearing they certainly signaled that that's the way they're going.
Tim Barton
Well, I think it's probably worth noting like there could be a good union out there somewhere right.
And if you go back historically, right, the argument for what did there need to be unions? Right, to stop some of the child labor. If you look at this, the bigger problem is not just that unions exist, it's what they have become. Yeah, and it's the manipulation, it's the corruption, it's the greed, it's a destruction that permeates so many unions. I’m saying this when so often we're bashing public schools and there are teachers in public schools and they're like look, we like you guys, but like what? What are you doing? No, like, we know there are good teachers in public school. There are really good people, love God, want to make a difference in education, want to invest in kids' lives, but they're in a really broken system and not every teacher even knows how broken that system is. In fact, most teachers don't know how broken that system is. I would say the same, similar could be with a union. Right, and I'm saying this again because I'm sure there's people out there who we're going to get some emails like hey, I'm in a union, it's really good. Okay, van a good union exist? Yes.
David Barton
And can good people be in a bad union?
Tim Barton
100%
David Barton
There are a lot of jobs that require you to be in a union. Las Vegas is one of those places where, if you work in many of the hotels, you have to be part of the union, and there's a lot of people who don't like that, but they were required to be part of that.
Tim Barton
No doubt. And we have seen a lot of flaws and problems with unions. So I think this is almost like our view of public schools, that can there be a good public school out there? Well, yeah, we actually probably know a couple of good public schools where we know the superintendent and the principal and there's people that actually they still open the day with prayer
Rick Green
And school boards are good.
Tim Barton
I mean, yes, but when we're talking about the brokenness of the public school system, that is, a brokenness of unions in America. This is what we are seeing. And so, dad, to your point, it's great news that you are seeing the Supreme Court say just because you're in a union, doesn't give you carte blanche to do whatever destruction. This isn't California where, as long as it's less than $1,000, you can do whatever you want. That's not how this works and that is great news that the Supreme Court is acknowledging there does need to be accountability for actions, which I can't believe we're in a place that we have to have a Supreme Court ruling to officially determine that, yes, you can hold people accountable for destruction of private property, but because of the craziness of the world we live in, it is great news coming from the Supreme Court
David Barton
And you know it's crazy too.
Why do we have a National Labor Relations Board to enforce union across the nation? Why don't we have a free market competition, free enterprise board in Washington DC to encourage free enterprise across the nation, which is what makes the nation prosperous, not unions make it prosperous? So it's really weird that we put our money into things that are not nearly as productive as what history has shown like the free market to be. But hopefully, someday we'll get there, and that's a great caveat. Tim, thanks for putting the balance in there, because I'm not wanting to throw all the union people under the bus, but nonetheless, the system itself needs to be reformed dramatically, in my opinion, and I think the court's going to help do that
Rick Green
well and, and you know, Tim, you're kind of laughing about the fact that we have to teach a basic principle about, uh, destruction of property.
You know, it's the same thing with the free market, David, to say that we have to teach these basic principles we took for granted for a long time. We kind of knew, hey, government sort of messes things up. We need it, it needs to do the things that only it can do, but it shouldn't be over here creating friction in the market, getting in between employers and employees or in between businesses or telling everybody how to run their business, and we just kind of lost that concept. So these basic principles of, hey, that's your property, if it's damaged, you should be compensated.
The basic principle of we don't need government to tell me how much I should make, or make you pay me a certain amount, or me pay you a certain amount I saw the other day guys, unbelievable they're even saying they're not going to allow you to hire somebody with a specialized skill and have a contract that says, okay, we're going to put you out there in front of all of our people and if you decide to leave us, you know we get a year or two years of a non-compete with our people or whatever, and they're basically saying no, we're going to decide, the government's going to decide that for you and prevent you from being able to do that, which you know is going to cause people to not hire and not pay as much. So, in other words, all the things they think they going to do better, they actually make it worse, and it's because of those basic principles you guys are talking about that we used to teach the principles of liberty. All right. Next piece of good news Tim.
Tim Barton
All right. Well, this is going to be guys one on basic principles. Again, this is Wyoming, and basic principles in the medical practice used to be do no harm and actually it was should have been, for a higher end is to help as many people as we can, right, do good for people, and somehow in the medical industry it has gone to. When it comes to minors, when it comes to young kids, whether it's because it's trendy, whether it's because, right, it was marketed to them on social media, on TikTok, whether because they have parents that took them to right, whatever kind of a drag show story hour, whatever right, because they have parents that took them to write whatever kind of a drag show story hour, whatever right, whatever it is that they are confused and what used to be known as a mental disorder, right, if you believed in you, you were in somebody else's body. Right, you were a boy and you think you're a girl, your girl think you're a boy. Whatever the reason they arrived at this conclusion was, we have never been to the place where we thought it was appropriate for doctors to intervene, so to speak, on children and do some kind of medical procedure, prescribe some kind of life-altering medication, and it's nonsense when we hear people say, well right, this is fully reversible and it's not. I mean, it is absolutely not. Doctors are very clear on this. This is not reversible. When you start taking some of these hormone blockers, et cetera, it stops the development. You can remove the hormone blockers, but you can't go back and redevelop what wasn't developed to the extent that it would have been developed had you not done this in the first place.
The headline on the article it says Wyoming becomes 24th state to ban gender transition procedures for minors. This came out at this point, maybe a month ago is when this headline was but guys and actually I was looking at this and I think I don't remember if I talked about this one or not, because I have talked about this multiple times this year about states that are coming out banning transition procedures for minors, and this should be again like basic principles. I can't believe I have to teach somebody or we have to talk about this to try to inform people that hey, let's wait and let their bodies develop, because what some of the studies apparently are determining is that so many kids, when they are young and confused, once they hit puberty and have fully gone through puberty, they are not confused anymore and they become embracing of their actual, proper, biological gender, further going down the line when people talk about, well, right, but their mental health? And if we don't give them these procedures their mental health is going to be so bad. Again, the studies have shown, first of all, that doing these procedures does not improve mental health. In fact, from all available evidence, it makes it even worse. Where people are I think the numbers I saw they're four times more likely to have suicide attempts after they've gone through these procedures.
This has not solved the problem and just letting their own natural biology take its course, run its course. Let them go through puberty, let them fully develop into who God intended to create them to be, and it resolves the majority of these problems. So back to basics. Like this should not be confusing. God made them male and female. This is not a confusing thing. It's part of the DNA, the very structure of people's bodies. You can look at skeletal remains of people from thousands of years ago and know if they were male or female by their body. Literally, it's part of their genetic structure.
But it is great, it's really good news that we actually have states saying, hey, we're going to clarify what shouldn't have been confusing, don't do these surgical procedures, don't do these invasive medical procedures to transition children. That's not going to solve any problems. Now again, this is something that if they're an adult and want to do this, I would argue it's morally wrong, it's ethically wrong, but in America at this point, people have the freedom to do really dumb, stupid, morally ethically wrong. But in America, at this point, people have the freedom to do really dumb, stupid, morally ethically wrong things. I don't think that's the right thing to do, but it's at least logical. They're saying let's wait till they're not a minor and then, when they have a little bit better understanding, a little bit better comprehension, then we can make that decision. So, overall, really good news coming from Wyoming.
It's crazy that we don't have this coming from all 50 states, but it's great seeing it come at this point from a lot of the conservative states. Guys, we've talked about it off air maybe on air, I don't recall but one of the things I think is going to be clear going forward, especially over the next couple of years, you're going to see red states getting redder and blue states getting bluer is probably a logical thing we're going to see, because you're going to see conservative states saying we're not going to let this happen and then liberal states are going to say, well, we're going to make sure it happens as early as possible and if parents don't want it to happen, we're going to remove their rights, like we're already seeing in some states. So this is really good news that's happening in conservative states, but certainly the battle is not over. There's a lot of reasons we talked about yesterday, nationally, a prayer.
This is one of those issues we should continue to have on your prayer list. If you don't have a prayer journal, man, make a prayer journal. Every morning, pray, every evening, pray whatever is the best time for you to get a little time, but this is certainly something we need to pray for kids. Pray for the heart and soul of the nation for clarity. But bravo, kudos to Wyoming for becoming the 24th state to ban gender transition procedures for minors.
Rick Green
You know, guys, as we go to break, I can't help but think that we're turning a corner on this one. You know, we've had so many good news stories. So many people are talking about how evil and wrong this stuff has been, that were silent before. Many more pastors, entertainment people, sports, athletes, all kinds of people are finally acknowledging just how bad this is. I'm not saying we're turning the corner to reverse it yet, but the fact that we're getting to critical mass of people finally being willing to speak up is a really, really good sign. And then, as you said, 24 states already taking action. So good stuff. We've got a quick break. We'll be right back. It is Good News Friday and you're listening to the WallBuilders Show.
Break.
Rick Green
We're back on WallBuilders Good News Friday, and David Barton's got our next piece of good news, David
David Barton
David, I have a piece here from President Joe Jackson or wait a minute, Andrew Biden, I'm not sure which Andrew Jackson.
Tim Barton
Now people are really confused.
Rick Green
We're going to have to share the uh, share the link today of the program. I don't know, a month ago, when you guys were first releasing uh Building the Republic and uh and it was, we went into Andrew Jackson quite a bit and so they will understand much better. If they miss that show, they need to go back and listen.
David Barton
Yeah, Andrew Jackson was the first president that overtly didn't care what the Constitution said. He said I got elected, people elected me. Therefore they want my agenda and I'm imposing my agenda. And so he imposed his agenda and in many places it was not constitutional. But he's the first president to make the office of the presidency a referendum on what the people want for policy, rather than who they want as their leader to uphold the Constitution. He took that and said no, it's not the Constitution, they want my policies.
And so when people often don't understand why they say every single treaty with Native Americans is broken by the government, no, that's not always the case at all. Matter of fact, it's usually not the case. But what is the case is you'll have a president like John Quincy Adams who will uphold those laws, and then Andrew Jackson comes in and says well, I disagree with those laws, I'm overturning them. So the government upheld it, but Andrew Jackson broke it. So you know that that's the kind of thing. It's more nuanced than what those simple things are. It's whether the president wants to uphold the laws or not.
In this particular case, Joe Biden, a ruling has just come down, three years after this went into effect, that deals with the border wall. So as soon as Biden got in, one of his very first orders was that he is not going to build that wall. And he took the 1.4 billion dollars and he redirected them toward things he wanted to spend that money on. And so I love the ruling of this federal judge. Federal judge said he can't do that and it says whether the executive branch must adhere to federal laws is not an area left to discretion. You don't get to choose which laws you pick and choose and what to follow. And so this was passed by a, by Congress. It is a federal law. It is passed into law that says 1.4 billion is to be spent in building that wall. That is a federal law.
And Biden came in and said well, I disagree with that federal wall, I am not going to uphold that. And so now, three years later, the court has said no, no, no, you cannot do that. You don't get to pick and choose which laws you're going to execute. You took an oath to faithfully execute the law and to faithfully uphold the Constitution, and you don't pick and choose. So it's a real good decision. It's way late in the game. We're three years now with no enforcement at all at the wall.
But it is the right decision for the court to say hey, presidents don't get to pick and choose what they want to do. They took an oath, and so this really is very reminiscent of Andrew Jackson and what he did. That moved the nation in a very bad direction. He was the first Democrat president, and there's just too many Democrats that have done the same thing. A lot of liberal Republicans have. You always like it when someone will uphold the laws they swear to uphold, and in this case the courts have said the president is supposed to do that. I hope he does, but at least we've got a great decision from the court.
Rick Green
Yeah, so that's multiple good decisions from the court so far today.
Tim Barton
Well, this is one similarly dealing with the Biden administration, specifically Ken Paxton, the attorney general for Texas. The title of this headline, or the title of this article. The headline says Texas AG victorious after court rules Pelosi led Congress's one point seven billion spending bill was passed unlawfully. So go back to 2022 when Republicans win the election and we have to wait until January to the new Congress comes in. And so one of the things that Nancy Pelosi did is she helped do a spending bill, and this was signed by President Joe Biden. The thing they did on the spending bill was under the guise of COVID-19. And I'm saying guise because when you get to December of 2022, I mean at this point, nobody should be really confused at COVID at this point. This wasn't two weeks to slow the spread. We've kind of gone beyond that. Not that there weren't still some questions, concerns, issues, some unknowns, but one of the things that Nancy Pelosi had instituted was proxy voting, where that members of Congress did not have to be in Congress to be able to actually vote, that you could have somebody show up and dad, one person could vote for five or ten.
David Barton
They could vote for ten. Ten, they could vote for ten. And we were told by some of the congressmen that some of the Democrats did not show up for months in Washington DC because someone else could cast their vote for them.
Tim Barton
Now to be clear if someone else is going to do your job for you and you get paid whether you show up or not, then why would you show up, right
David Barton
and why are you even needed?
Tim Barton
Well, for some of them, that would be a very different answer than where we're going right now. But what is interesting about this is Ken Paxton. His argument was, and is actually the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas agreed in a ruling that came out now several weeks ago I guess it was the end of February when this came out but what they identified is that this violated Article 1, section 5 of the Constitution, which requires that a quorum is present for legislation to be passed, for spending bills to be passed, you have to have a quorum. Now, a quorum means you have at least half of the members present. So, all right. This is not even an argument against proxy voting, which we could argue is a terrible thing. Proxy voting shouldn't have happened, but you have to have a quorum to do business, and because there's 435 members of Congress, you have to have 218 members to have a quorum, or more than 218 or more to have a quorum, and this was passed with 201 members of Congress present and voting. And so Ken Paxton pointed out this is actually unconstitutional. They can't do this. They did not have a quorum, and the good news is Ken Paxton said this. He said former Speaker Nancy Pelosi abused proxy voting under the pretext of COVID-19 to pass this law. Then Biden signed it knowing that they violated the Constitution. This was a stunning violation of the rule of law. I'm relieved the court upheld the Constitution All right. So that was part of Ken Paxton's point.
To kind of go full circle, this was initially. The complaint went back to December 23rd, when there's only 201 members of Congress. Now what's also kind of interesting about this is, and I don't know what those numbers were with 201 members of Congress being president, but I would be curious. I know one of the political strategies at time is if the side who has the speaker like so, republicans, right now, mike Johnson, Speaker of the House. But if they have a lot of Republicans that aren't present, if Democrats choose, we're just not going to be here, we're going to go home, do whatever else. They can strategically do things to try to prevent a quorum from being there. So the other side can't get business done. So I don't know if Republicans, right strategically, are like, hey, we're about to have control of Congress, we're not going to be here helping them do more bad things. So maybe Republicans weren't there and Democrats weren't showing up anyway because they have people voting proxy for them.
I don't know what the strategy details were, but it was December 23rd of 2022 when that vote happened, so this article goes on to really highlight a lot of the details in the case, the complaints, and this is something that I would be very curious if the Biden administration has an appeal on this, because clearly this was a violation of the Constitution. Actually, I even wonder at this point right, some of that money has not been spent, but a lot of it's already been distributed, so how are you going to cover that? So I'm not sure how tangible this victory will be, other than again acknowledging that the Biden administration is unconstitutional and they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar. They're not supposed to do this, they were told. Though, it's at least good news that you do have courts recognizing this was wrong.
David Barton
And I think one of the good things out of this is, while it may not affect the 1.7 trillion that's probably already spent several times over probably with Ukraine for that matter but that 1.7 trillion that's already gone and spent what the court has established now is you can't do that proxy voting. You can't have a proxy voting to meet the quorum. You have to be there in person, and that's what's good for the future. We won't see the same kind of nonsense again where somebody says, hey, I can have 50 proxies, why don't you all stay home and campaign and we'll just send four Democrats to vote for all of us? That's just not going to happen and that's good news.
But notice too that, Tim, in your story it was two years than what I had. It was three years. It does take a while to get through the process. We're getting the right answers, we're getting the right conclusions by the judges. It just takes a little while to get there. So you can't be impatient. In constitutional theory, constitutional law, hopefully we'll get more people that read it, understand it and can act on it more quickly. But when you get into court, it's just going to take a little bit, and that's just going to take a little bit, and that's just the way the system works.
Rick Green
All right. Lots of good news for you folks. There's more at our website. Be sure and check it out today at wallbuilders.com, or go check out the archives of the radio program at wallbuilders.show. Thanks for listening to the WallBuilder Show.