BUCK: “Supreme Court Votes 6-3 to Uphold Arizona’s Voting Regulations,” and essentially this is a slapdown of the Democrat Party, ’cause this was brought by the DNC. The Democrat Party’s contention that there was racism, which is not a surprise. Democrat Party can find racism in anything, but there wasn’t racism in Arizona’s voting laws.

The case is Brnovich, ’cause he’s the attorney general there… I actually know Attorney General Brnovich. Good guy. Brnovich versus Democrat National Committee. Here’s what it basically comes down to. You couldn’t, under Arizona law, you couldn’t vote day of out of precinct, and you weren’t allowed to be ballot harvesting.

That’s really it. Those two things. The DNC claimed that those put a disparate impact on minorities and were racist and cannot be allowed. And, Clay, what this came down to was the court here by 6-3 — solid majority, not a 5-4 decision, 6-3 majority here — you had the court saying, “Look. Arizona doesn’t have restrictive voting laws.”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You can vote by mail over 20 days beforehand. You can vote day of in person. You know, this is just… Could we have the most very basic of voter integrity? You can have someone take your ballot to the poll for you, family member or postal worker or somebody who’s assigned.

What you can’t have is walking around to a nursing home or to an apartment complex and grab 50 ballots — where there’s no chain of custody — and drop them off. Plenty of states have this as a prohibition as well. Democrats fought this, but they lost on this one.

CLAY: And it’s a significant ruling because we talked about this in the context of what might happen with the voting bill that they tried to pass in the House and the Senate to effectively federalize elections, and that got filibustered, and it basically has vanished as a substantial talking point.

But I said then, Buck, this voting bill in the House and the Senate, I believe, would get shut down by the Supreme Court. This decision that they just released by a 6-3 majority as you are referencing, basically is letting it be known, it’s going to take a wildly Draconian bill being passed by a state to not meet Supreme Court muster.

And so much of this has to do with the civil rights era and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And effectively the Supreme Court is saying, “We are not, as a court, going to step into every little nuance of law. We’re gonna look at this from the perspective of presuming that these are constitutional restrictions,” and that’s not even the right word necessarily, but just the prohibitions on particular activities are not going to be presumptively illegal.

BUCK: Basic rules.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: We’re really just talking about basic rules. And what you see is the Democrats, they engage on voting rights issues, the most absurd demagoguery, right? I mean if it’s six weeks of early voting and a state now, a Republican state says, “You know what? We’re gonna have five weeks of early voting.
“Oh, it’s the new Jim Crow,” as Joe Biden says.

“It’s, you know, it’s the worst — from the worst parts of our past coming back here through Republicans, racism.” It’s madness what they do. But they understand that with that hysteria they create an environment where people all of a sudden say, “Okay. Do I really to want fight? You know, do I want to be involved in this?”

Being called a racist is still… Even in a society that, as we know, the term racism is now thrown around for just everything and anything that someone who’s a leftist doesn’t like, it still comes with a sting. It’s still a problem for a lot of people. I just want Clay to put into context ’cause, remember, the DNC brought this.

They’re claiming this is racist because of “disparate impact on minority communities, “which means that even though the law here was applicable to everybody because they were claiming would affect more minorities than non-minorities in the state of Arizona, it’s basically racist. “The Arizona counties,” this was from the decision, “that reported out of precinct ballots,” ’cause that was a big part of this, remember.

Out-of-precinct ballots and ballot harvesting — where someone just goes and grabs all of the ballots and drops them off at a voting station. Of those counties, a little over 1% — and this is in the 2016 election they were looking at. A little over 1% of Hispanic voters, 1% of African-American voters, and 1% of Native American voters cast an out-of-precinct ballot on Election Day.

For nonminority voters, nonminority voters the rate was around 0.5%. So just to be clear, I mean, we are slicing the onion super thin here, folks. But the point is — to what you’ve been saying about the difference in last election — changing the rules so just gives you a little bit of edge here? Democrats are obsessed with it.

CLAY: And also, Democrats, frankly, are making insulting arguments, because what they are really arguing, Buck, is that minorities are not capable of legally voting. When you think about this, 80% of people out there — white, black, Asian, Hispanic — believe that you should have to have an ID in order to vote.

That is part of what Democrats are arguing is Jim Crow 2.0. Only 20% of people in this country — almost none of whom who are minority themselves, most people see through this and see it to be insulting to argue that the most basic parameters of voting policies that people are incapable of it. I talked about this, Buck.

In order to get a vaccine in the state of Tennessee, you need to have an ID. You have to have an ID to get a covid vaccine. I haven’t heard anybody out there arguing that it’s racist to require an ID to get a covid vaccine. But for voting, to say that you have to have an ID? Oh, it’s super racist.

I think what this did, this Supreme Court decision, what it will do is it will codify and make clear that it’s almost impossible to challenge a state decision in this day and age that it is racist, discriminatory, that it violates federal law as it pertains to state elections.

BUCK: I think there are gonna be a lot of challenges. You think there were not gonna be? I think the Democrats are gonna bring every challenge everywhere they can, but you’re saying they changed the standard a bit? Disparate impact — and I think this is where we’re gonna here. Disparate impact as a standard for voting laws and regulations has received a major blow today.

CLAY: It shuts the door on many of these challenges. I always say… People say… As a lawyer, people always say, “Hey, can I file a lawsuit arguing X?” and I would say, “Yeah. You can file a lawsuit for anything. There are lots of dumb lawsuits that got filed every day.”

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: The question you should be asking is, “If I file this lawsuit, will I win?” and in the wake of this Supreme Court decision, the answer is for most of those voting rights challenges lawsuits, “No, you are going to lose.”

BUCK: The new standard that the majority here, the 6-3 majority with I believe it was Alito — yeah, Alito — delivering the majority opinion, is essentially, for one thing, you have to take into account — and this would have really helped for the Major League Baseball, for example, remember when that got moved from Georgia?

CLAY: I’m going to Atlanta this weekend so, trust me, it’s still a sore spot.

BUCK: You take into account the totality of the voting circumstances in the state. So you can’t say, “Oh, my gosh. It’s racist and its disparate impact” to move, you know, to move voting, early voting, let’s say, from six weeks to four weeks if you got four weeks, plus you’ve got in-person voting on day of by sworn affidavit and basically it’s really easy to vote.

Like, you can’t pretend that we’re not living in some reasonable world here where the rest of the factors come into it, and so that’s one part of the standard. The totality of voting in the state. And the other part is there has to be actual evidence of racial animus or discrimination in the legislation itself.

Which is a much higher bar than disparate impact which is, “Well, we think this may affect the Latino and black population, Native American population more. Therefore, we’re going to act, though, this is racist even though it applies to everybody,” and to your point, these are basic legal standards for conducting an election that everybody should be able to meet.

CLAY: The way to think about this if you’re out there listening to us and you’re like, “Wow, this is a lot of legal mumbo jumbo. This is complicated.” Essentially what the courts are trying to figure out, Buck, is how do you balance legitimate concerns about fraud — electoral fraud, maintaining the integrity of an election — while also providing the best possible access to the ballot?

And so the courts are charged with balancing both those sides of the education. Just about everybody out there listening to us would say, “Hey, we wanted elections we can rely on, but we also want reliable access to the ballot.” That’s what the courts are trying to balance here. And in these scenarios, their general perspective is going to be, we’re gonna rely upon the states to make these determinations.

BUCK: And just so everyone understands, Democrats got their dream come true in the pandemic year by changing a lot of rules in a lot of states and using the emergency as a justification — the covid emergency as justification — to do it. And their plan is, Clay, until you can vote from your phone the way you, like, order something off of, you know, Uber Eats or whatever, until you can vote from your phone with no verification, nothing whatsoever? Sounds racist to me.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Racist. Everything will be racist until voting essentially has no safeguards and no rules. That’s the Democrats approach to all this.