The following is an edited transcript of an interview between Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and The Heritage Foundation’s Sarah Parshall Perry on a Sunday Extra edition of Morning Wire. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday on what’s being called the marquee case of this term. In United States V. Skrmetti, three trans identifying teens, a Memphis physician and the Biden administration challenged a Tennessee state law that aims to protect children by banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for the purpose of attempting to change a child’s gender. * * * JOHN: Joining us to break down this week’s oral arguments in United States V. Skrmetti and the broader implications is Sarah Parshall Perry, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Sarah, thanks for coming on – always good to talk to you. SARAH: Thank you for having me. JOHN: So, this week we had the oral arguments for this landmark case. Now, we here at the Daily Wire have followed this case closely, in part because of the role Sunday Extra edition of Morning Wire. in this. His investigation into Vanderbilt helped prompt the law that this center’s on. First, can you walk us through how we got to the Supreme Court hearing? SARAH: Yes. This actually came from a parental rights challenge. Three parents of transgender minors brought this challenge against SB1, which was a law that was enacted with bipartisan support in the state of Tennessee, saying that not only did it interfere with their rights to achieve this particular very controversial and experimental medical care for their children, but it was also a sex discriminatory law, and that would make it illegal, unconstitutional, under the Equal Protection Clause. Well, both the Federal Trial Court and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found for Tennessee, basically determining that the state of Tennessee had satisfied the constitutional bar, and it had every interest in protecting minors from unproven sexism, scientifically sketchy procedures, and that this was well within their police power as the state. Well, by the time it got to the Sixth Circuit, the United States had filed a motion to intervene. It can do so when a state law challenging an equal protection clause violation is at issue. That’s what they did here. And so by the time it got to the Supreme Court, it only granted review of the United States’s claim and not the parental rights claim. So what we heard was oral arguments specifically dedicated to whether or not this was sex discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause. JOHN: So, let’s unpack that a bit more. What is the argument for this being sex discrimination and the argument against it?  SARAH: Well, Elizabeth Prelogar, the U.S. Solicitor General for the United States, argues for the Biden administration that because the law makes a distinction on boys who are identified as boys at birth who want to get testosterone, but will not allow girls who are identified as boys who want as male at birth – being transgender, of course – they cannot get access to testosterone, that that’s a facially discriminatory characteristic. But what the law actually does, and the state legislators were very careful to engage in this type of analysis, is to simply restrict for both males and females any access to the drugs determined by their age alone – which the Supreme Court has never held to be a class requiring elevated scrutiny — and also based on the use to which the drugs would be put. So restricted only based on use and age, nothing more, and treated men and women equally under the law. JOHN: And to be clear, what is barred here is to use these controversial procedures, these hormone treatments, these puberty blockers, in order to attempt to change the gender or sex of a minor, correct? SARAH: That’s exactly it. In fact, there is no restriction on the use of these puberty blockers for endocrine disorders like precocious puberty, which obviously indicates that those are appropriate medical uses. And of course, the state of Tennessee restricts the use of other drugs for particular purposes as well. It wants to make sure that the dangers of “off-label use” — And that’s exactly what’s involved here. This is off-label use of unproven drugs for gender dysphoria. They want to make sure that that use is restricted, and they’re constitutionally permitted to do that. JOHN: For those who aren’t familiar with that term, “off-label” – which is actually crucial in this case – what does that mean in this context? SARAH: The FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, has never approved puberty blockers for “gender dysphoria.” It has never approved those particular drugs for which these minor children and their parents, and the United States, have all argued to get access to. Instead, it’s only approved them for endocrine disorders. So the state of Tennessee does not want minor children assuming the risk of off-label use and making determinations that could have lifetime consequences. JOHN: Now, judging from what we heard on Wednesday, where do you think the justices are leaning in this case? SARAH: I think there’s a very strong reason to believe that at least five of the justices are going to be skeptical of the United States’ arguments. In fact, Justice Alito himself was fairly excoriating in his refusal to allow Elizabeth Preloger, the Solicitor General, to be creative with her legal analysis and to ignore the science. In fact, he said that she’s relegated to a footnote in the bombshell Cass Review Report, which came out of England earlier this year, but in fact the science itself is we also know that Justice Kavanaugh said there is “a red light” here to prevent us from getting involved in new areas and constitutionalizing new areas of medicine. Justice Barrett said this is a question better left for the legislature, as did the Chief Justice himself, who actually quoted, without citing the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health by saying this issue is better suited for the people and their elected representatives. Strangely silent was Justice Gorsuch, who had nothing to say during two and a half hours, and he may be the swing vote in this. Credit: Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images. JOHN: Justice Gorsuch was notably silent. Do you have any sense of why that might have been the case? SARAH: You know, it could be one of two things. First of all, I think it’s wise to remember that Justice Gorsuch was the majority opinion author in Bostock versus Clayton County dating to the year 2020. And in that case, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, relative to employment discrimination, was expanded not only to prohibit sex discrimination, but also to prohibit anti-racism and gender identity discrimination. Now, he was that opinion’s majority author. He may have been dealing with the fact that there is now a recognition that the Bostock opinion was a Pandora’s box. The Biden administration has used the Bostock opinion to expand the administrative state, and to force gender identity into concepts like medicine, school lunches, education, and more. That is something I think with which he will have to ultimately reckon because Elizabeth Preloger, the Solicitor General, mentioned the similarity to Bostock, so he very much may have been curling his toes underneath the table. JOHN: So will this ruling potentially override that – will this set a new precedent in terms of that discrimination clause writ large? SARAH: Well, as the other justices noted, particularly conservative justices, the analysis for a constitutional claim, a violation, for example, of the Equal Protection Clause and whether it discriminates based on sex, is slightly different than a discriminatory analysis based on sex under civil rights law. The Constitution holds to a higher bar, what’s called intermediate or heightened scrutiny, and that’s a higher bar for a state to achieve. But that analysis is different enough where Bostock is different from the current issue. I do think what it will do, however, is pin back the ears a little bit, the reach of the Bostock determination, and ensure that equal protection claims are not brought alongside statutory civil rights discrimination claims. JOHN: All right so that was the conservative response – what did we hear from the Left-leaning justices? SARAH: Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of histrionic commentary about trans kids dying and that these are proven scientific interventions, when in fact we know that is not the case. But the most interesting comparison came from Justice Kanji Brown Jackson, who cited Loving v. Virginia as a analogous case law study, and in Loving v. Virginia, that was the case in which the Supreme Court invalidated the interracial marriage ban from that state under the Equal Protection Clause, essentially overriding the judgment of the state legislature. She argued for the United States to be able to do so here, but ignored the fact that, once again, sex is not the defining characteristic at issue. JOHN: Right – and Brown’s questions in particular gained a lot of negative attention online. Now, it’s notable that the conservatives seem to suggest that this issue is more appropriate to be dealt with by state legislatures rather than the court. And I think the implication there is that science is constantly being updated and reexamined, the best practices are often changing. Is the idea here that a federal court ruling can be too permanent in a sense for medical practices? SARAH: Well, I’ll harken back to the Dobbs decision again, and we know the line of viability, for example, that Roe v. Wade set shifted and changed over the fifty years before Dobbs versus Jackson women’s health. And in writing the majority opinion, Justice Alito mentioned the fact that they should not be constitutionalizing areas of medical regulation. That was wholly within the state’s authority. I think they are very likely here to make the exact same determination, especially with so recent a ruling like that on the books. Credit: Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images. JOHN: When do we expect a decision to be handed down on this case? SARAH: Well, there are quite a number of high-profile decisions, but I would argue this is the most high-profile, which indicates to me we are not likely to see an outcome here until probably the end of June 2025. JOHN: Okay, so beyond the Supreme Court and constitutional issues here, looking at the broader legal issues here – one of the things that the Matt Walsh investigation uncovered was an apparent financial incentive for promoting the kind of very controversial, permanent treatments that we’re seeing with these transgender minor operations procedures. Do you foresee legal trouble for those that have been involved in these kinds of programs? SARAH: That’s a good question. We know that this is a three to $5 billion a year industry and some estimates are as high as $10 billion. On average, gender medicine yields a doctor $8,000 per single procedure in sole profit. So we know money had to be spent, quite a bit to do with this and with the incentive of doctors to medicalize these minor children, but there is good news. We’ve already seen a lawsuit coming out of California brought by Harmeet Dhillon’s law firm and she’s done excellent work. They are suing Kaiser Permanente for rushing three minor girls, three young teen girls, through the gender medicine gambit without getting informed consent. I do believe a reckoning is coming. JOHN: You mention Harmeet Dhillon, we actually caught up with her recently and she gave as an overview of her cases involving transition procedures. Here’s some of what she said: HARMEET: We literally filed the first, second, and third lawsuits on this issue in the country. I think other lawyers are joining us and so these cases are winding their way through the court system or through arbitration, because Kaiser tries to force people into arbitration, so do other medical providers. And one of the issues why there’s so few cases is because there’s statute of limitations that are very short that really keep the window very narrow for these young women — largely women — to file lawsuits. And so it’s heartbreaking the number of people we simply can’t help because of these statute of limitations issues. I do think that’s going to make a difference, but the bigger and faster and more effective long term difference is going to be legislatures banning these procedures on children. Medical boards taking away the licenses of doctors who commit medical malpractice, which I believe most of these doctors are doing. I mean, you literally have cases where people go in, some guidance counselor sends them for one session with some rubber stamper who then goes and gets the girl’s breasts cut off. It’s shocking and outrageous, it’s insane and it needs to stop. And we shouldn’t rely on the courts and lawyers. We should ask Republican legislatures and Democrat legislatures, frankly, if they care about humans, to stop this practice. JOHN: Final question: How significant will this ruling ultimately be? Is it fair to say that this ruling will change how the issue of laws about trans procedures in the other states are handled by the courts? SARAH: Yeah, I think that’s exactly accurate. In fact, there are other cases relative to the notion of gender identity pending on the Supreme Court’s docket. But I think the first shot across the bow is the particular notion of gender medicine, because that is at bottom such a controversial notion. I do believe for the 26 other states who are watching keenly what happens with Tennessee’s ban, when they themselves have almost identical bans within their own states. They are very hopeful that the Supreme Court will come down on the side of states rights and their ability to protect minor children, which is something that the Supreme Court has recognized for more than a hundred years. JOHN: A consequential decision coming this summer. Sarah, thanks so much for coming on. That was Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Sarah Parshall Perry and this has been a Sunday Extra edition of Morning Wire. *** CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

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The liberal media have exhibited great compassion for President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, convicted of multiple federal crimes. “The President came to believe that raw politics had infected the process...he saw how political opponents of his — the President’s — were trying to hurt his son....He thought that the treatment of his son had been cruel,” CNN White House correspondent MJ Lee empathized during breaking news coverage December 1. “The White House concedes that Donald Trump was a factor here,” ABC’s Mary Bruce helpfully added during Monday’s World News Tonight. “The President was concerned that he wouldn’t let up, that a Trump administration would go after Hunter.” But in 2007, the liberal networks were much harsher after then-President George W. Bush offered clemency — not a pardon — for ex-Cheney aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted earlier that year of lying during Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into who exposed the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame four years earlier, in July 2003, to columnist Robert Novak. Novak was trying to fathom why Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson — a Bush administration critic — was sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate reports of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq purchasing uranium from that African nation. Novak later wrote that he cited Plame’s name “in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.” But Libby wasn’t Novak’s source. Fitzgerald had quickly determined that State Department official Richard Armitage — not a Cheney ally — had disclosed the information to Novak, later confirmed by White House aide Karl Rove. Neither Armitage nor Rove were charged. As the Washington Post — hardly a friendly venue for the Bush administration — concluded in 2006 after Armitage’s role became public: “[I]t now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.” Still, the media saw the Plame case as a way to challenge the entire Bush administration for what many journalists claimed were lies in the case for the war with Iraq. In October 2005, as the hoped-for indictments from Fitzgerald drew near (remember “Fitzmas”?), former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein hyped: “We are obviously watching and the press is beginning to document the implosion of a presidency.” “If the case goes to trial, look for an awful lot of people seeing it as a way to put the war in Iraq on trial,” NBC’s Tim Russert opined on the October 28, 2005 Today show, hours before Fitzgerald announced he was only indicting Libby. “The Libby indictments have opened the door to making the wider case against the Bush administration that they misled the country into war,” Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift argued on the November 5, 2005 McLaughlin Group. “The next logical step is impeachment....” Libby’s trial began in January 2007. On March 6, a jury found him guilty verdicts on four of the five counts brought by Fitzgerald. “Guilty,” CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric crowed that night, “the highest ranking White House official found guilty of a felony since the Iran-Contra scandal.” Earlier that afternoon, CNN’s Jack Cafferty growled that a pardon would be “the perfect parting gesture” for what he described as a lawless administration: “The most interesting part of this story will be whether or not President Bush pardons Libby on his way out the door a year and a half or so down the road. Somehow, it would be the perfect parting gesture for an administration that has come to view things like the Constitution and the nation’s laws as inconveniences that only serve to get in the way of their agenda.” “I got an idea, I got a solution,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews hooted on the June 21, 2007 Hardball. “Pardon him, but send him to Iraq in uniform and put him on the front. Send him to the front. He supported the war, send him to fight it!...In the old days the judges would take a working class kid who got into a scrape with the law and say, ‘Junior, want to go jail or do you want to go join the Army?’ They should say the same thing to Scooter Libby. ‘Want to join the Army?’” In June, the judge decided Libby’s punishment: 30 months in prison, a $250,000 fine, and two years of probation. On July 2, President Bush opted to let the conviction and monetary fine stand, but commuted Libby’s prison sentence. It wasn’t a full pardon, a la Hunter Biden, but the media were nonetheless outraged. “Are conservatives as angry as Democrats?” CNN fill-in anchor Suzanne Malveaux suggested on The Situation Room that night. “There’s going to be a lot of anger out there,” analyst Bill Schneider soon agreed. “I don’t think it’s going to be restricted simply to Democrats. Independents and some Republicans are going to be angry and it’s going to feed into the anger at Washington that seems to be poisoning the mood of the country.” “Above the law?” ABC’s David Muir announced as he opened Good Morning America the next day. “The President decides convicted White House official Scooter Libby should not go directly to jail. He’s not going to jail at all. Was justice served?” “There are many people who feel that this was a travesty of justice,” NBC’s Meredith Vieira argued on NBC’s Today that same morning. On CBS’s The Early Show, viewers heard then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton complain: “What we saw today was elevating cronyism over the rule of law.” Yet the network failed to tell viewers how Clinton’s own husband had pardoned numerous “cronies” in his final days in office, including fraudster and tax cheat Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was a big Democratic donor. “A President who lied us into war... has tonight freed from the prospect of prison the only man ever to come to trial for one of the component felonies in what may be the greatest crime of this young century,” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann hyperbolically thundered on his July 2 Countdown program. On July 3, ABC World News anchor Charles Gibson highlighted the “angry reaction to President Bush sparing Scooter Libby jail time.” Reporter Martha Raddatz pointed out how the President’s inbox was full of requests for pardons and commutations: “There are close to 2,000 commutation requests pending. More than 4,000 have already been denied. During his nearly seven years in office, President Bush has only granted four commutations, including Libby.” That same night, Olbermann returned to froth once more against both President Bush and Vice President Cheney in a ten-minute “Special Comment” rant: “You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday. Which one of you chose the route no longer matters. Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is now irrelevant. But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics, is the only fact that remains relevant.” “It is nearly July 4th,” Olbermann continued, “the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a king who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them, or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them, we would force our independence, and regain our sacred freedoms. We of this time — and our leaders in Congress, of both parties — must now live up to those standards which echo through our history — pressure, negotiate, impeach — get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our democracy, away from its helm.” “And for you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely to achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed on August 9, 1974. Resign!...Good night and good luck.” For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.

That morning, the skies were clear. For the first time in months, they weren’t swarming with fighter planes and missiles. The air wasn’t yellow with noxious gas or red with the mist of blood. You could not hear gunfire or explosions or the screams of dying men. 'First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up "O Come, All Ye Faithful," the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words "Adeste Fideles."' “I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence,” veteran Alfred Anderson later said. “It was a short peace in a terrible war.” A pope's request On that day in 1914, Christmas Day — not even six months after the start of World War I and about three years before it would end — troops all along the Western Front had a few precious hours to remember what peace was like. Soldiers from England and Belgium and France arose from their muddy trenches, facing their enemies, and stepped onto the battlefields without a single weapon at the ready. The German troops did the same, and all the men gathered on the battered fields of Europe, where many of their fellow soldiers had lain dead for weeks, stuck in “no man’s land.” Pope Benedict XV had called for a Christmas Day truce. Commanders on both sides outright rejected the idea and insisted that the men would fight, Christmas or not. But when Christmas Day arrived, a wave of humanity overtook the soldiers. It began slowly, on Christmas Eve, described by one soldier as “a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost everywhere.” It began quietly. It began with a song. All ye faithful Graham Williams of the Fifth London Rifle Brigade wrote:First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up "O Come, All Ye Faithful," the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words "Adeste Fideles." And I thought, well, this was really a most extraordinary thing — two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war. The truce spread throughout the front, and about 100,000 soldiers honored the pope's truce. The next morning, on Christmas Day, Germans troops shouted “merry Christmas” in English across the battlefield. They held up signs that read, “You no shoot, we no shoot.” Men exchanged gifts. They gave haircuts; they even played soccer. For one day, they could live a somewhat normal life. Life multiplied Too often, the public is disconnected from its military. We forget the atrocities of war. Journalist Sebastian Junger writes about this in his book “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.” In 2009, Junger spent a year embedded with a platoon of Marines in the Korangal Valley of Afghanistan, which was one of the deadliest places on earth at the time. He saw the tragedies that war brings. He writes: “War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.” By the end of World War I, there were an estimated 20 million people dead and 20 million wounded. It had been billed as “the war to end all wars,” but that would not be the case. In a matter of years, the world would become embroiled in yet another apocalyptic war. But amid it all, the Christmas truce stands as a reminder that humanity can emerge at the darkest times, in the most broken places. The truce of 1914 was seen by many officers and commanders as an act of mutiny and cowardice. To them, 100,000 had disobeyed their superiors’ orders. Adolf Hitler, then a corporal of the 16th Bavarians, reportedly said of the truce: “Such a thing should not happen in wartime. Have you no German sense of honor?” The fact that Hitler hated it makes the whole miracle shine even brighter.A war on war The soldiers themselves, the men dying in trenches and fields, engulfed by gas and smoke and blood, they saw it differently. For one day, the warfare did not involve one superpower against another superpower, with all the soldiers as pawns; it was bedraggled men against the superpower of war itself. British soldier Murdoch M. Wood later said: “I then came to the conclusion that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves there would never have been another shot fired.” Unfortunately, that is not the case. War remains. Despite the dramatic drop in war and violence following World War 2, we still have to deal with the ugly realities of war. The people who live with those ugly realities the most are not the superpowers but the men themselves. Sebastian Junger, in "Tribe," again: “Today's veterans often come home to find that, although they're willing to die for their country, they're not sure how to live for it.” On Christmas Day, many soldiers will find themselves in combat zones, thousands of miles from home, and many veterans will find themselves just as lost and broken. Let’s bring back the Christmas Day truce, for the women and men who must fight every other day of the year. Wherever you are, whoever you’re with, may Christmas be a day of peace and compassion. A day guided by hope. A reminder that our shared humanity is stronger than we know.

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