Alabama's Morning News with JT
Kirby Farris comes to the studio to discuss the Supreme Court ruling
Kirby Ferris from Ferris Rally and Pitt joins us now to talk about a couple of things happening in the legal world. Kirby, good to see you. Good morning, JT. Few things happening. Well, I mean, never a dull moment. No, there's not. And things are just getting real interesting now between, I guess, when the debate took place all the way to November 5th. Yes. I thought I'd get your thoughts on the debate the other night and your concerns, your thoughts, your opinion on where this may end up taking Joe Biden, the race, everything. Just did you catch it? Did you watch any of it? I actually watched it and then re-watched the last 30 minutes of it. Did you reel it? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Just your overall thoughts. President Biden did not look very presidential. Yeah. Unfortunately, former President Trump did not look very presidential. And I think we're in a tough spot in terms of an election. You know, five seconds into Joe Biden's first response. I think there was a massive across the nation's sound of a herd. And he had, I'm going to call it, the mortuary hairspray going. His skin looked grayed out, the jaw dropping when he wasn't speaking and just listening and his eyes kind of glazed over and staring with his jaw wide open. Did not come off like somebody that's got it all together. He did not look well. He did not. Now the cries from a lot of people in the Democratic Party, not the Schumer's and Pelosi's of the world, but there are some people, you know, that are circling the wagons, including the big donors going, hey, look, really? I mean, we got, we got to figure something out here. I don't know if he'll make the second debate, September 10th. They're saying he's full steam ahead. Joe Biden, everybody's coming after Jill now. You know, elderly abuse. How can you continue to drag your husband out here? Why do you want to continue to push this? And are you calling the shots behind the scenes is Barack? I mean, who's somebody has got to be behind Joe Biden, his staff and his aides and everything are always there for every president. But I think more so now than ever, I just can't see him being called to the situation room at three in the morning for a major incident for the United States and dealing with it. It's, it's, it's worrisome and, you know, I heard him speak like the next day or the day after that. Yeah. And he sounded like I think he went to the party after the debate and he was more upbeat than what's happening here. I don't know. It's, it's, I've never seen anything so, but it was really bizarre to me when I don't know if he was overwhelmed from all the seven or eight days of preparing a camp table with everybody. Boom, boom, boom. You know, he had a dozen aides there, probably firing rapid shot. Here's what we're going to do on this policy. If he says this, do that, try this. Let's go this way. Don't do this. It's like when you're teeing up a golf ball and you got your wise guy buddies you're playing with. All right. Keep your left arms. That's it. You know, all right. Move your, move your right foot. Okay. Center the ball a little bit more. It's like, Hey, let me just get up here and hit the ball. And watch it go in the water after you do all these things. Right. Then, then come at me, but I, you know, yeah, I think he may have been overwhelmed with direction. It looked like, I mean, you've got a guy who's been in politics for how many years, over a hundred years. Yeah. Let him go. Let him do his thing. I, I don't know. I don't know what happened to him, but it was, uh, it was difficult to watch. Well, we shall see, uh, the cries from, uh, a lot of people, including the big donors, they had a big conference on a zoom call, uh, yesterday I think there were 500 people on this thing. Yeah. And, uh, they're all like, Hey, hey, hey, what are we doing here? What happened? My question is if you're going to be donating money to the Democratic party and the presidential run and Joe Biden's ultimate reelection, if they make the decision to finally pull him out at the convention and go with plan B, does that donor money stay with the party? Do they get a refund? Do they get to change direction if they don't like the new person they're bringing out or? I don't believe the current donor money, which, what is it, 305 million or something? I don't believe that can be shifted to another candidate. I think it can be shifted to the vice president, but I don't know that that can be shifted to another candidate. So it wouldn't necessarily stay with the party. Maybe not. And I'm sure, uh, nobody's really pushing Kamala Harris as the one to replace him. That there's, they don't want that either. I don't, you know, I don't know what sits better for the Democratic party to, to go with Joe or make a complete change and go some different direction, depending on who you ask, people think it's best if he stays there, Democrats, and probably a lot of Republicans to bring him. I mean, you know, and then others think, Oh gosh, if you change out Joe, that's the end of it. We'll never win this election. You know, I mean, meaning the Democrats, I tend to think they will, they will stay with president Biden. That's what I believe is going to happen. That's what they're saying right now. Interesting. It could be a train wreck either way. The decision from the Supreme Court yesterday, of course, I think they got it right here. But I think some, some discussion needs to be had about this and the reality of what took place yesterday and what did not take place based on the reaction from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who wants to impeach, I guess, the Supreme Court. I don't know how you do that or what that even entails. But the reaction from the left took it, and even Judge Sotomayor, I thought, went to the extreme scenario about certain immunities of a president if it's during official duties, not for non-official duties. The gray area to me to Kirby is who determines official and non-official? You know, I mean, I think there's some sorting out still to be done in all this. Oh, I mean, we have just, we're on the tip of the iceberg and there is a lot of danger underneath the water, a lot of danger. So the way this is interpreted is going to impact our country like maybe no Supreme Court decision I've ever seen. All right. And layman's terms for people that don't get the heroes and their twos and therefore upstanding withheld that move this legally is what was the decision about and what does it mean moving forward in layman's terms? It simply says this that a president cannot be held accountable by law, not even by the Supreme Court of the United States for anything he or she does in their official capacity. What it stops short of is defining for us what official capacity is. Now, let me give you an example when that goes to the extreme, former President Trump's lawyers have filed already are filing briefing on the New York case and try to get that overturned. They are claiming that some of his tweets or official acts, tweets. So if we go to that extreme, then you have a president that is unbridled that even the Supreme Court of the United States, he is supposed to be there to balance politics and balance social issues, can't do anything about their actions. And that could be a problem. Well, as we were talking about last hour, there will be appeal after appeal based on this decision and lower courts. Yes. Okay. The Ninth Circuit Court, for instance, they'll get a case that may present itself pertaining to this decision that will rule one way or another and the other side will appeal it because they may claim, well, this is under what the Supreme Court decided with immunity. We don't think it is in the Ninth Circuit. So here we go. And the Supreme Court may have to look at specific cases based on their ruling to interpret the ruling in that. And I see case by case in this. It is. And the question becomes, are they going to do it? Is the Supreme Court going to hear the cases, are we going to end up with the Ninth Circuit saying one thing is official and the Fifth Circuit saying another and the Eleventh Circuit saying something different? And there are going to be so many of these that need to be vetted. And the evidence part of this where they're talking about evidence that cannot come into a trial of a president is one of the biggest problems with this ruling in my opinion. Well, this also upsets Biden and the whole team that was weaponizing this DOJ and using it against their political opponent. It kind of puts the brakes on that. Okay. The decision by this judge in the case with the Stormy Daniels, left-leaning liberal judge, the prosecutor ran his campaign on going after Donald Trump, jury of his peers in the New York situation, far from that, no peers in that jury pool whatsoever. And the whole decision came down to convict him on something that should have been a misdemeanor and never gotten to trial to begin with. With that said, if a president has a problem or a question about election results, for instance, this opens the door for as the president to question that without political retribution. And I think that's what's taken place in some of this. So it puts the brakes on that, but I'm also fearful that on the other side of that coin, if the next president that comes in decides to push the envelope, where does it, where's the line on official and non-official duties? And I think we can all agree that the president of the United States needs some immunity. I mean, he can't be charged with looking at our shoulder because we have to defend our country. Right. He needs to be. But we needed, from this opinion, we needed more direction. And I'm afraid we didn't get that. Maybe they decided not to give more direction now and wait on individual cases to determine, okay, you were close and agreeing with this decision we made, circuit court. But you missed it and here's why. If they, you know, often they give you tests, litmus test for, you meet these criteria, then you're official or non-official. That would have been enormously helpful in this opinion. If they had said, here are the five things we want the lower courts to look at to determine whether it is an official or an official act, for instance, how much does it benefit the president personally to have done this versus the benefit for the country? Well, Joe Biden was all about supporting our justice system when the trial was over in New York and the verdict came down. We went through the process and it was a jury and we've got to live with this. Now he's not so fancy about the judicial system. You can't trust him. I thought, wait a minute, you could last month, but now you can't, but there's definitely more to come on this decision in the lower courts, for sure. All right, Kirby Ferris, thank you, buddy.