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Eric Bolling Hosts an Election 2016 Special |
| On The O'Reilly Factor...
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| All content taken from The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel. Each weeknight by 6 PM EST a preview of that evening's show will be posted and then updated with additional information the following weekday by noon EST.
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| Eric began Monday's show with the sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the fight over his successor. Juan Williams and Mary Katharine Ham opined on the vacancy and how it should be filled. "President Obama should nominate a successor," Williams said, "and the Senate should have hearings and a vote. This should go forward because lots of people voted for President Obama to be president for eight years, not seven years." But Ham urged Republicans in the Senate to reject the president's nominee. "It's perfectly within the rights of the president to say here's who I would like, and it's perfectly within the rights of the Senate to say, 'Yeah, we'll see what we can do about that.' It's far from standard operating procedure to name somebody in an election year who will fundamentally change the ideological balance of the court. I do think there is plenty of precedent for the Senate to sticking to their guns." Eric contended that President Obama has repeatedly circumvented the Constitution and should be prevented from naming another liberal Supreme Court justice: "The president spent the better part of seven years going around the Constitution on executive orders, immigration, and ObamaCare." |
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| Legal experts David Rivkin and Eugene Volokh examined the wisdom of naming someone to replace Justice Scalia. "The nomination should be delayed," Rivkin declared, "in order to protect the court's legitimacy. We have tremendous polarization and enormous issues of constitutional issues before the court. To select a new justice now would further contribute to the weakening of that institutional legitimacy." Volokh argued that Republicans in the Senate are perfectly within their rights to reject any nominee. "It's pretty likely that the Republicans won't like the president's nomination, and if they say it is someone they don't want to see on the court they have a constitutional role to play. This president's job is to nominate, and the Senate's job is to decide whether to approve the nomination." |
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| Republican candidates, most notably Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, hammered one another mercilessly in Saturday night's South Carolina debate. Eric invited political observers Lisa Boothe and Kelly Riddell to evaluate the growing enmity among the rivals. "This was like an episode of American Gladiator," Boothe quipped, "and it was interesting to see Donald Trump attacking George W. Bush. A recent poll showed that 54% of Republican primary voters believe that going into Iraq was the right decision, so it will be interesting to see how this will affect Donald Trump. If he wins South Carolina, I don't know how he'll be stopped." Riddell pointed out that Trump, however outrageous his remarks, never seems to alienate his base. "His supporters like to see strength from him, they like to see him be aggressive. So it's hard to say whether his hard-core supporters will take offense to anything that was said at that debate. Trump basically called George W. Bush a liar, those were really strong words." |
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| Eric introduced excerpts from Bill's recent interview with Donald Trump, which was conducted right after Trump used the word 'evil' to describe Hillary Clinton. "Just look at the job she did as secretary of state and the destruction she caused. The decisions that she and President Obama made on so many different fronts were absolutely insane. At a certain point, you have to ask how she made so many bad decisions, and I don't care whether you call it 'evil' or 'inept.'" Trump also assessed the surging campaign of Bernie Sanders. "I think he'd be easy to beat when people start figuring out that their tax bills will be 95%. I'm shocked that a socialist, maybe a communist, is beating Hillary Clinton so easily. He was a very ineffective senator and now he's going to change the country? I don't think so." |
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| Eric welcomed Fox News legal correspondent Shannon Bream, who scrutinized a controversy involving Justice Antonin Scalia's death. The Internet rumor machine went wild after comments made by Texas businessman John Poindexter, who discovered Scalia's dead body. "He has been quoted as saying that he found Justice Scalia with a pillow over his head," Bream reported, "which sparked a lot of questions and conspiracy theories. But Poindexter told us there was nothing unusual in the location of the pillow and he wanted to correct some misimpressions of that. A judge said there was no evidence of foul play and Justice Scalia had various medical conditions. So there was no autopsy and the family didn't want one." |
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| Bernie Sanders, fresh off his resounding victory in New Hampshire, may be gaining ground on Hillary Clinton in Nevada. Sanders supporter Nomiki Konst and Clinton supporter Julian Epstein analyzed the Democratic race. "Hillary Clinton is saying that Bernie Sanders tends to be a one-issue candidate," Epstein said. "He tends to start every sentence with a noun, a verb, and 'Wall Street.' She was involved in all these fights for decades and decades, while Bernie has been talking about the same thing, the disparity of wealth. This is an effective pushback and she has a 20 to 30 to 40 point lead in most March primary states." Konst disputed the notion that Sanders only talks about bankers and billionaires. "Bernie Sanders does talk about Wall Street, but he also talks about criminal justice reform, education reform, and health care reform. This is a classic Hillary Clinton distraction to distract from her own record. Hillary Clinton's message is, 'let's just continue to do the same-old same-old.' She has no proposals!" Eric reminded Epstein, "Bill Clinton was the president who instituted 'three strikes and you're out,' which is one reason there have been so many African Americans imprisoned." |
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