Advisory Opinions - Free Speech and ‘The Executive Power’ | FIRE Crossover

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

David French and Sarah Isgur speak with Nico Perrino to discuss the origin story of Advisory Opinions and the few free speech issues where they disagree with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Show Notes:—Origin story of Advisory Opinions—Disagreements between FIRE and AO—Why FIRE doesn’t editorialize on the content of speech—Limits of presidential power—Free speech, the dread of tyrants—The prosecution of political figures—Cracker Barrel—State of the conservative legal movement Advisory Opinions is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I want to talk to my fellow attorneys for a moment. Do you really want to spend time on the technical side of briefing, blue booking, tables, appendix assembly, bait stamping? Or would you rather focus on your argument? Type law can take your draft and exhibits and transform them into a court-ready, rule-compliant, e-brief, and appendix overnight. They've helped prepare over 10,000 filings in courts across the country,

even SCOTUS. Learn more at typelaw.com and use referral code advisory to save 10% on your first order. That's type law. dot com. Welcome to advisory opinions. I'm Sarah Isger. That's David French. And we have a special bonus crossover podcast for you this week that we did with the foundation for individual rights and expression for their podcast, so to speak, the free speech podcast from Fire with Fire's executive vice president, Nico Perino, talking about all things fire, all things advisory

opinions, including where the two diverge on stuff like the TikTok ban. We hope you enjoy. You ready? I was born ready. All right, folks, welcome back to, so to speak, the free speech podcast where every other week we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define your right to free speech. I am, as always your host, Nico Perino. Today, we are joined by Sarah Isger, who is the host of the dispatch's popular legal podcast advisory opinions, as well as her permanent guest on that show, David French. We're going to talk about our current media moment, the Trump administration,

and the state of the modern conservative legal movement. Before we do, though, I have to ask, I think I read somewhere that your guys' podcast is the top legal podcast in the world? Is that true? What's the secret sauce? I don't know. The numbers are very, so this is something. that was told to us by somebody else that was a guest who they had done the research.

So I don't know. I do know that, you know, depending, especially when the Supreme Court's releasing opinions, we're often right up there in the top political podcasts, which is a lot of fun to see, especially since we're so nerdy. Do you guys not plan vacations for the end of the Supreme Court term? Oh, yeah, absolutely. June is off limits. You can be somewhere else. We record remotely. Okay. But you have to be available. On call. Yeah. Absolutely. But it's getting worse. I mean, it's funny because I think we're echoing the justices themselves. You know, they used to have the summers off. Yeah. Not anymore. And not anymore. And like kind of neither do we anymore because at least they know when they're, you know, interim or emergency docket decisions are going to come down. We don't. Yeah. So did you guys know each other

before you started this podcast? I thought I heard somewhere that you did it. Like, what's the origin story of advisory opinions. Oh, I think David should have to tell this. So the origin story begins in the distant, mists of the distant past in the year 2016. When, um, Sarah, it still feels weird to say this out loud. I know. I know. Okay. That's why you, but do it. This is uncensored. When I almost ran for president. So that feels very. Just to clarify, of what? The United States. Okay. Okay. Not the local Kiwanis club where I would have been an underdog. there too, but the president of the United States. So the story is that... That's the natural next step after becoming president of fire, right? Oh, yeah. I mean,

I'm just well-trodden path. I mean, no question. So after Mitt Romney had said no to a third party run and other luminaries had said no or, you know, never even really considered it or whatever. Bill Crystal, who was at that time with the weekly standard and was trying to organize a third-party run, I went to dinner with him and he said, our profile, now that like the mega names, like Mitt Romney had said no. Our profile is, look, if you just run a random congressman, nobody cares. It's an anti-establishment time. They don't want random congressmen. But what we think is a, from the heartland, non-politician post-911 veteran would be the right profile of a person. And I was like, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, totally get that.

Okay, well, you're from the heartland, from Tennessee, post-9-11 veteran, non-politician. Why not you? And this is going to sound insane, but I did briefly entertain it. And at the tail end of entertaining it, we brought in some folks to who would be on a part of a campaign team if it ever got off the ground. And Sarah had just finished running Carly Fiorina's campaign and in come Sarah. And I met Sarah for the first time, really liked Sarah.

And then in mid-2019, when I came to the dispatch, Stephen Jonas said, we're bringing on Sarah Isker. And it's like, fantastic. I think we'd make a great podcast partners. I'm not, I just met her, like, had met her just a few minutes, really. But I had, I think we'll be. I think we'd be a good podcast. How many years now is it?

Six years. Yeah. Six years. Wow. What's your process like? Oh, there's supposed to be a process? Well, you've done the research. We listen to the podcast in my household.

Your voice is echo throughout my house. I'm the one who works in the legal world, but my wife is the one who turned me on to the podcast. We've heard that before, that like the spouses of lawyers enjoy the pod, I think more than the lawyers do. So we have like a running conversation over Slack or text or whatever, you know, where we'll put things in during the week of like sort of things that might be of interest to us. And then, you know, maybe 24 hours beforehand will set kind of an order or at least the topics, maybe not the order of topics.

But, you know, depending on what season we're in with the Supreme Court or how many circuit cases we're covering, just by like the number of opinions and briefs and the oral arguments and everything, we're probably, I mean, we're putting in many, many hours. It's always more hours than you think it will be. Far more. Yes. I mean, because you have to read all of these circuit court opinions, because I think one of the value ads that we bring to sort of the podcasting world is we're not just SCOTUS focused.

Yes. That the, I don't think the average American understands how much the circuit courts of appeals and in some instances, district court decisions, but especially circuit court decisions. really do shape our lives, and especially in the lives and the circuits where you live. And so I feel like a big value ad is that we've brought a bunch more of the legal world and the judiciary to the public eye. You know, we're going to be reading from circuit court opinions. We have, you know, we have talked about specific circuit court justice or judges so much that our regular listeners know when to hear. Okay, we've got, we've got Newsom concurring

with himself again. Like, everyone's waiting for that moment. No, I do think that it is, we were a little bit ahead of the curve in one way. I think one key to our success is we were a little bit ahead of the curve in the sense that all of a sudden a lot of media realized, wait, the legislature is not where things are happening. Things are happening in the judiciary. That's the functioning branch of government.

That's where the action is. That's where real decisions are being made. And we were there. Like, we were already there covering it right when sort of this demand started to grow for more legal coverage. And so I think we've really, you know, right time, right place kind of thing. And are you trying to write a book, too, amidst this all? Yes. It'll be called Last Branch Standing.

It's not coming out until next year. Okay. But to echo David's point, it's the last branch standing, right? The thesis is it's the only branch of government that the founders would recognize right now. Yeah. Hmm. And what's the book about necessarily? Oh, I mean, to be honest, it's sort of... I think I read something online about how it's an insider's look at the Supreme Court. It's sort of, yeah, it's, it's A.O. the book. No, it walks through. There's like little bios of each of the justices that will have, you know, insider, you know, fun stuff, what they're eating for lunch and who's going to think of the TikTok case, perhaps? Do you have that countdown clock going in your head? Where are we at now?

Yeah, we're at about 220 days. Too many days, too many days. Yeah, this is one of the, you know, I can't believe you went there, the one of the few areas where at least me and I and fire disagree is on the age verification too. Age verification. There are two big cases, yeah. But this is, you know, David and I were talking last night. David, you know, comes, we have a slumber party usually the night before we do something in person together. So he stays at the house and hangs out with my five-year-old who calls him great-grandpa Steve.

Yeah, great-grandpa Steve. Where's Steve come from? We have no idea. No clue, but we know where great grandpa comes from. It's Sarah's relentless propaganda that I'm old. I have a six-week-old, a two-year-old, and a four-year-old, so I know that words just come out. Words just come out.

Yeah, so we were hanging out last night, and what we were talking about was how incredible fire work has become and how important it's become and yada, yada, of all the nice things. But that part of, I think, why we know that fire is staying true to principle and true to its mission when so many other organizations have had mission creep to, like, follow where the donors are going or follow where the social media is going or whatever else. Yeah, if we were following where the donors were going, we'd be doing something entirely

different. No question. Oh, I know that for my early fire days for sure. That's right, because we know where several other organizations have gone. And part of it is that y'all, like, we do disagree on a few things, not many, but we're not totally aligned with you guys on every case. And I think it speaks to just how independent you're making some of these decisions. Now, like, we could have a really fun debate over, like, why we think you're wrong about some of those cases. Because what I think is fun about the ones we disagree on is that there's a First Amendment interest on both sides.

now the TikTok case is a little different because it's more of the national security case but like age verification or some of the social media cases about whose First Amendment right is it the person who's like getting to post on social media or the social media companies and things like that I find those arguments almost more fun

well the thing that's most frustrating about this TikTok case is I saw our legal team working on the brief over Christmas on that and what was it for nothing apparently I know well you you lost and you won. Well, yeah, I guess in a certain sense. You lost in the Supreme Court case. But the precedent's still there.

The precedent is there. I mean, the thing we always said is that this is the first time in American history. I think actually Erwin Chemerensky said this first, that the federal government has outright banned a communications platform. I mean, that's a pretty big hole in the First Amendment for nothing. Well, yeah. I mean, I don't think it's a whole in the First Amendment because it's the People's Republic of China's platform. But that was the first time, actually, I believe, that,

the Supreme Court ever struck down a federal speech restriction on First Amendment grounds was 1965 in the Lamont v. Postmaster General case, which was banning or placing a burden or restriction on receiving what was at the Peking Review from China. So, I mean, the first time the Supreme Court ever strikes down a federal speech restriction relates to a media outlet from China. Yeah, yeah, that is interesting. That is interesting. Yeah. No, I mean. Trust me, I get it. I get the data. security stuff. And I wish they would have focused their rationale more on that rather than some of the content concerns that you saw a lot in the record. But nevertheless, here we are.

That's what I was going to say. The Peking review or whatever it was was not getting, it's a condition of me getting the Peking review. I was not providing my physical location to the Peking review, not providing a history of my purchasing, not provide, like all of the information that TikTok accumulates, which is, you know, one of the reasons why service members for a long time were told, no TikTok. Sure. Because you were literally trackable as an individual, which is obvious national security concerns in those kinds of situations.

But, yeah, back to the sort of the fire picture broadly, what you say about donors, so as a former president of fire, I was front line talking to donors all the time. And what was so, we had a, from the inception, we had a donor education issue because sometimes they would come in because they saw you taking on their ideological enemy. So we're defending free speech for a conservative group or a Christian group. And a conservative or a Christian donor's like, here's my check. Yes, please. Great work.

Then, you know, they're on the mailing list. And then all of a sudden they saw, you know, back to go to early fire lore, just to show you how there's nothing new under the sun. And one of the first things that fire really got in the people's crosshairs over was the Sami al-Aryan case. And Sama al-Aryan was a guy who had ties to, gosh, was it Hamas? I can't remember. I don't know if it was Hamas, but it was one of those anti-Israel terrorist organizations. He had like legitimate ties to, you know, foreign organizations.

But he was being punished for his speech. this was immediately post 9-11. And I remember we stood, and Greg could tell this story, chapter and burst. I think he has, and stood squarely. And I remember being on the phone, even in 2004-05 when I was president, on the phone with donors. Tell me about the Sami Al-Aryan. And then the thing that we dealt with when I was president was Ward Churchill. This was the professor who compared the people who died in the World Trade Center to,

little Adolph Eichmann's. And so the cry to censor him was overwhelming and the donor issue. But interesting to fire lore, you may not know this. That was when, and that issue is when we decided we're not going to do the thing that a lot of people do, which is, I hate his speech, but I'm defending his right to speak, because then we realize that we'd be constantly be told and asked, we'll condemn the speech before you defend it, right? And so we just put full, we put both feet on the brakes on the, well, he was horrible, but we just left it with the only, we just left it with the First Amendment. Well, and you kind of have to if you're going to do nonpartisan free speech work, because

otherwise you are taking a position on the content of the speech that's separate from their free expression rights. And this is something David Goldberger, who was the lead attorney in the Skokie case for the ACLU in the 1970s, he disagrees with me on. He thought it was essential for him to bring people along to the ACLU's. position by first repudiating the speakers that he was representing. Now, the ACLU is a little bit different because they have 19 different issue areas. Fire has won. I mean, I don't think you could find fire staff consensus on many issues politically. Maybe some of these more controversial issues

you could, but we just can't do that. And so we don't. Oh, yeah. And it's dissatisfying to a lot of people who want to see that you're on their team even as you defend their First Amendment rights. The fire staff when I was there was probably 50-50 split red-blue. I'd say we're probably about that now. So you could not do that. You could not say, well, this is horrible, but, because then you're ticking off half your staff, right? Yeah, sure. Not the word Churchill, but, you know, on a lot of – so I thought that was a very sound decision, you know, way back then.

And I've – in my columnist role, I'm a little bit more free to say, well, I don't really hate – I really hate that. but it should be protected and I think in the columnist role that can be very important in the impact litigation advocacy role it is different I think it's different well to put a bow on the TikTok thing Sarah

how do you think that's all going to end up I mean here we are he's on the platform now President Trump right? That's right they've opened a White House TikTok account it feels to me like nobody cares and fewer and fewer people care

per day, you know, I think that if the White House wants to win this issue overall, they're going to have to have TikTok sold before the Trump administration runs out, or else the next president will get asked whether they're going to enforce the TikTok ban. And at some point, we end up in a, I mean, not to be super catastrophizing about this, but we have a law that was signed by, passed by both houses of Congress, signed by a president, the Supreme Court upheld it as constitutional. Crickets. I mean, for so many reasons we're in interesting constitutional territory these days, but I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear that the president has that power or that the next president has that power with laws they may like. So the best

thing that could happen at this point is that the president somehow pressures TikTok to get sold, which he keeps publicly saying it's about to happen or whatever, and that at least they can say this was for a limited period of time, I think, passed any definition of limited, my definitions. But, you know, it was temporary. I just, like, what are we going to say, four years from now, was still temporary? How would you compel this even, right? What is the standing here? I mean, to faithfully execute the laws as the Constitution requires, would that require?

Well, you need a cause of action. You need someone with standing. And the problem right now that, again, the Trump administration has done so brilliantly is really discouraged people from picking fights with them unless it's existential to your company because they do have quite a few levers of power that they have no problem pulling. And again, I don't, like, even if you love some of the stuff that they're doing, like the people. power that you are now agreeing by norm a president has is going to get used by President AOC or President Gavin Newsom, and that seems crazy to me. You know, I've come to the conclusion that when you talk about this with people now, there is, the response is not, is no longer, oh, okay, well, if this is a power that my political opponent could wield against me, maybe I shouldn't have the power. and it's become, well, I just have to win all the time then. And this is what is making sort of the rhetoric around our elections so superheeded

is that because if you have a situation where every four years, you have a president who's accumulated more power, peacetime president, who's accumulated more power than maybe any president, peacetime president before, I'm not comparing Trump to, say, Lincoln at the height of his powers in the Civil War, FDR in World War II. But as far as peacetime presidents, these guys are grabbing more power every four years. And that is raising the stakes of every presidential election because every election you're electing a more powerful person.

And that is breaking our brains. It's breaking our country. And so it's creating this atmosphere of hysterics around every presidential election because you're going to have a lot of MAGA people looking at all of that power that they've exercised and they're going to look at whoever the Democratic nominee is and it's going to dawn on them and they're going to realize and understand and their reaction is not going to be let's claw back presidential powers it's going to be we have to win or all is lost and that's what's one of the things is fueling this ever escalating rhetorical war that we're in where every election

the stakes are existential and we can kind of laugh at that and say you know okay every election is not the most important of our lifetime. True. But if every election we're electing a more powerful person than the one who existed four years ago, that does raise the stakes. And it's creating this huge problem. Add into that the court and the role of the court and the proper role of the court, the realistic role of the court, you know, we had a time, you know, in America's founding, for instance, where the states were supposed to be the main drivers of law. post-Civil War, it becomes the federal government. Post-FDR, it becomes the president. And, you know, even in the 90s, if you remember, like post-Wicked v. Filburn, right? The Commerce Clause covers everything

that Congress wants to do. You have the Supreme Court, in two cases in the 90s at least, sort of trying to like tap the brakes on Commerce Clause power for Congress, this idea that maybe the federal government has grown too large, too powerful, Congress having sort of a blank check book to write any laws that they want. But as soon, you know, as they have those two cases, you never see another Commerce Clause case again, not really. I mean, you can say the Obamacare case where they say that that's not in Congress's Commerce Clause powers, but it is in their taxing powers. Like, maybe that's a Commerce Clause case. Maybe it's not. But almost as soon as those cases happen where you start to see the court put some limits on Congress is when you see

Congress stop being a player on the map at all. I don't think those two are related. I think that the court came in basically too late on Commerce Clause stuff. And so all of a sudden, Congress stops doing anything. And so the president basically fills in. Like I had knee surgery. I'm sure many people have. And, you know, my leg totally atrophied on the one side. And then on the other side, that leg had to get stronger. So the president, at first at least, feels like it was compensation. But now we're into something else entirely. It's not just compensation. And as a result, you see the Supreme Court, I think, now in kind of a delayed fashion, but that's the court's role, right? There's supposed to be delayed. They only can take the cases that are brought to them,

yada, yada. But you see the court suddenly now, I think, reigning in presidential power in almost every chance that they get vis-a-vis the other branches or the states. So when it comes to the administrative state, whether they have court power, reading statutes, the way to define their own power, all of that, the presidency is losing. Within the presidency, the president is winning. But as a friend of the pod, conservative lawyer once said to me, they're trying to make the president a more accountable president and a less accountable legislator, right?

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That's EXP-R-E-S-V-S-V-P-N dot com slash advisory to find out how you can get up to four extra months free. ExpressVPN.com slash advisory. You know, one way to think of the court is the court is majority originalist now. And so where a lot of people are conflating right and left with originalist or right with originalists, they're not the same thing. The Trump right, the Trump mega populist right, there's some Venn diagram overlap with originalism, but it's not complete in any way, shape, or form.

So where you do have some of the Venn diagram overlap, such as where the MAGA legal movement is putting forward a version of the unified executive theory, unitary executive theory that meshes with traditional originalist scholarship, they're winning. They're winning those cases. Where they're putting forward positions that conflict, they're obviously, they're losing those and losing again and again. And so, you know, in the first Trump term, he had the worst record at the Supreme Court of any modern president. The first president ever to be under 50 percent for wins. I mean, it's wild. Right. And so anybody's going to look at the Supreme Court and say they rubber-stamped Trump.

But because people are not familiar with the underlying legal theories and arguments, whenever they see sort of a unitary executive case winning, which a way to describe unitary executive is the president is the president is the. executive branch. So that means that any time the Congress is trying to limit the president's authority over the executive branch, including its agencies. And here we're having that dispute over the Federal Reserve and the FCC and all these other, you know, agencies that were set up to be semi-independent. Right. So the Supreme Court is essentially moving in the direction and saying, okay, if you're talking about a quote-unquote independent, and the Fed's different, as the Supreme Court has said, the Fed's different. We'll see. We'll see. But the, if you're talking about a quote-unquote independent agency. That is not a thing that the Constitution contemplates. There's an article

where did the power come from? Where is it come from? Well, that's the thing I never understood about the corporation for public broadcasting, right? It was like a private, independent corporation set up by Congress, but receives appropriations from Congress. It just didn't really make any sense to me. No, it doesn't exist, right? I guess they're folding. Yeah, TikTok lives and PBS die. I mean, wow. Yeah, it's. I mean, there are interesting First Amendment questions on that whole kerfuffle as well. But there's a spectrum here. So I think the easiest example is the president caused some waves recently when he said he was the chief law enforcement officer in the country. And people were like, well, no, that's the attorney general. Where did the attorney general get those powers from? Oh, the president. Therefore, the president must originally be the chief law enforcement officer of the country. And then he delegates that power down to the attorney general. And the attorney general can then delegate that power down to U.S. attorneys, for instance, who are also officers. of the United States, as contemplated by the Constitution.

It's one of the few positions that existed there at the founding, the U.S. Marshall, et cetera. And so all of that power, though, to, for instance, go arrest someone for violating a federal law still derives from the power originally delegated by the President of the United States. Therefore, it was contained within the office, therefore the person who holds that office during their tenure. Where it gets then hard is, again, in this post-FDR time, where it kind of, Congress is saying we now create by statute a Federal Communications Commission or a Securities and Exchange Commission.

And by creating this and appropriating money to it, we put all these limitations on it for cause removal and things like that. And this is like the Humphreys executor problem where the original creation of the Federal Trade Commission, at least according to the Supreme Court, said, well, it didn't exercise executive power. It was doing something else, so it was okay. Congress created it that way and put these strings basically on its creation. But the Supreme Court in a case called Celia Law, even though no one else pronounces it that way, and I keep pronouncing it wrong. When you read things and you don't get it. We have that problem all the time. I remember one time, one of my most embarrassing

moments, the word Hutzpah. Yeah. I was talking to a professor of mine in college, and he said Hutzpah. And I corrected him. And I said, don't you mean chutzpah? That's the danger. I didn't know how to pronounce inevitable until I'd heard somebody say it. I spent years as a young kid talking about inevitable. Oh yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. Well, so the idea, again, Celia law, whatever, do you remember the other pronunciation? Celia? I just know that I've been doing it wrong. It's S-E-L-I-A, and I'm doing it wrong. Whatever the right one is, this isn't it. So there. There's your disclaimer. Basically, they said, if the agency in question is exercising executive power, meaning they are making policy decisions, then it has to go up to the president

who holds that power, because where else is the power coming from except from the executive? It's not coming from Congress. It's coming from the president. And how are voters supposed to hold anyone accountable in a representative government if it's, they can't hold Congress accountable because Congress can't remove them at all. But the president can only remove them for cause, and we've never fully litigated exactly what for cause even means. So therefore, no, if you're taking your power from the president, it's executive power,

then the president has to be held accountable for that use of executive power at the end of the day, and therefore he has to be able to remove people. I didn't vote for this current president, and that just has to be correct to me. So you should be careful who you vote for, basically, and we should all want to shrink the power of the presidency, and maybe Congress shouldn't be so quick to create all of these alphabet agencies that are giving more and more people, money, power for that executive power to be delegated to. But once you've done it, yes, I think it all derived from the presidency. The Fed is such an interesting counter example because we're all searching for ways that maybe that's not executive power. I know. It's like, it can't be the Fed, too. It can't be the Fed.

It can't be the Fed? Well, why can't it be the Fed? Is it just the understanding of the policy implications from it? You've seen all these other countries where the political branches have bullied monetary policy. But I also think the history of the Fed derives from the first and second bank of the United States. Okay. And so the question is. So that's where the originalist argument is going to come in.

That's where it's going to come. If it's going to come. So my, so I wrote a column. last week about the one sentence, and the title is there's the one sentence that's really basically causing us a ton of headaches. And I was going back to the anti-federalist in Cato 4. Cato 4. Every kid should read Cato 4. And also an old wig 5, which is going to be the name of our bourbon brand when we launch our advisory opinions, bourbon. Old wig number five, doesn't it just sound like something you should have on your shelf? Yeah, put it on the

Bourbon Trail. I mean, David has been saying this, but it's just true. The anti-federalists are becoming indispensable reading, if you care about our constitutional order, because their concerns weren't crazy. Yes. No, well, I actually tried to go on Amazon or somewhere and find the federalist, anti-federalist papers in conversation with each other, because I wanted to see what the arguments were in response to the other arguments. I couldn't really find a book like that. Well, they weren't really in conversation with each other. It's interesting because you had the federalist papers, the Hamilton, J. Madison papers that were mostly Hamilton. And the anti-federalists were actually hundreds of letters to the editor of this, that

that sort of spread out around the country. So it wasn't so much Publius versus Cato. Cato was sort of speaking to his. But they were talking about shared issues. Very much so. But it definitely shows you how you want to get your war room in order beforehand. The federalists had a war room. Yeah.

And Hamilton was running it. and the anti-federalists weren't. I mean, it's sort of funny because they were the anti-federalists. It was kind of very much part of their vibe. They were farming during the day. It's like trying to organize a libertarian convention. But they were kind of proving the point about the articles of Confederation not working by their very method of communicating their concerns with the new constitution.

But Cato and number four says that the first sentence of Article 2 is the quote is vague and inexplicit. So what is the executive power? Now, there's a lot of good scholarship. that says, wait, the executive power really, really under the originalist and meaning is the power to execute the laws passed by Congress. That's what the executive power is. But that's not self-evidently true from that sentence. The sentence refers to something, the executive power, that it doesn't define, okay? And so that has left courts for generations saying, what is the executive power? What I've talked about is, okay, if we wanted to make it to where the president

had less discretion where the president was more in line with that originalist vision, which I'm convinced by, the originalist vision is the executive power is the power to execute the laws, that we need to make explicit what is implicit and make it explicit by an amendment that says a president of the United States shall execute the laws passed by Congress. That that's the president's executive authority. It's to execute laws. It is not a freestanding executive authority that exists in the ether that is then left to courts to define. And I think Sarah's right.

If you're going to say there is the executive power that is sort of out there, well, then the executive power doesn't it include, at least to some degree. We can argue about whether this includes non-policymaking officials, too, but shouldn't it also include an implied inherent authority over the personnel? if you have the executive power. So I do think that that sentence, as Cato said, it is vague and inexplicit, and I'm very persuaded by originalist scholarship that says that it should be read in a very limited way, but the sentence itself is not that limited. And so I think that that is something that's causing an enormous amount of confusion and consternation.

But isn't that all over the Constitution? Just thinking about our line of work, the freedom of speech, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. What is the freedom of speech mean? What is the bridging? Sure. I mean, I think abridging is actually the more interesting word there. We fight over what speech is all the time.

And like, I think everyone can grasp that. But like, a bridging itself contains multitudes. Yeah. Well, but one of the differences, though, is you can talk about, all right, the freedom of speech is a very broad term. And interpreting that broadly, I would argue, is consistent with a liberty-oriented ethos of the Constitution and the American founding. Okay, right in the opening, we have unalienable rights. So broadly interpreting the freedom of speech

is entirely consistent with the American experiment and American Project. I think the reverse is true on broadly interpreting Article 2 because if you look at the prime purpose of the original founding was to establish a Republican form of government. That's where you get to, you know, Mr. Franklin, what form of government have we?

A republic, if you can keep it. So what was the purpose? The purpose was to establish a Republican form of government. What is antithetical to republicanism? Monarchy. So if you actually have a reading of a vague statute or a vague constitutional provision that enhances and counters the small R-Republican ethos of the Constitution,

that's when we should be testing. That's when we should be looking at it with some serious side-eye. There is some affinity within conservative movements at the moment, maybe fringe. I don't know. You guys are more tied in than probably I am of monarchy, right? Like Curtis Yardin and this crew like. Post-Liberals, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not all the post-liberals would want an actual monarch, but they would want a far less Republican republic. Smaller Republican Republic. I mean, we could spend the whole time on the debates, but the debates over what the Executive, you know, they knew the Articles of Confederation hadn't worked. It didn't really have an executive. It didn't really have a judiciary. Nobody was paying their taxes, yada, yada, yada, it was fine. Well, no, I do have a question about this. Yeah. So I think you do need the Constitutional Convention and our current Constitution to get the country stood up again, right? It just wasn't working. But after it was working, like would the more dispersed, I guess you could say, ineffective articles of Confederation be better if you're worried about the? super strong executive. Like, let's say you get, for the first hundred years of our country, you have the Constitution, and then you see power accumulate to the executive. No, in a modern society, in the world we live in now, there's a reason you don't see

any countries that are set up like the Articles of Confederation. I mean, the EU is the closest you're going to get, and I'm not sure that's been a raging success. There's struggles there. Yeah. And, you know, the EU model sort of weird. because, well, the states didn't have hundreds of years of existing with their own executive authority. But what they were debating at the time, remember, like, they believe it's going to be Washington.

They know it's going to be Washington. And so their concerns, like, are sort of vaguely of monarchy, but also, like, Washington could have served for life. They didn't put any limits on that. In fact, I think several of them would have wanted him to serve for life. According to the musical Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, absolutely. Right. There was talk of splitting up the executive power into multiple people. I think triumvirates have an interesting history.

But it's interesting. They don't always end with the triumvirate alive. Usually one of them. We've had bouts of strong executives, followed by bouts of relatively weak executives. You know, after Lincoln comes decades of, I don't want to be rude to Garfield and Hayes and Cleveland, but irrelevant. Mediocrates. We had a bunch of mediocrity. Garfield wouldn't have been a mediocrity.

He was wonderful. He was cut down months into his tenure. But the powers of the presidency swung back after Lincoln and after the threat was gone. I think what's, even after FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy. you know, LVJ, Nixon even, they are not FDR levels of president. What I think is uniquely bad that's happening right now is we seem to be on a bit of a runaway train of presidential power where it's not that there's a specific crisis that the president is addressing. And so that even maybe you could see strong presidents in a row as long as it's the same crisis, I've argued we're

in sort of a post-2008 financial collapse world and that that's the sort of populist moment. moment that was created. It's why Trump is not a American phenomenon. It's an international phenomenon. Populism has been an international phenomenon. But I don't see how the pendulum can swing back with the runaway train we're on where it's Obama's pen and phone. It's Trump with more executive orders and more injunctions than any president in history. It's Biden with, you know, saying he does not have the power to do an eviction moratorium, student loan debt forgiveness, the vaccine mandate. He tried to create a constitutional amendment by tweet. And everyone, one of the weirdest, you know, it's a sign of our weird era that we've

largely forgotten that a president tried to unilaterally ratify the constitution. And he just was like, I hereby recognize the equal rights amendment as the 28th Amendment. And you're like, ha ha ha ha and we all laughed it off but like that like again that's not hard to imagine a future president doing and then us struggling over like well wait is it what huh um and so i'm far more concerned about what comes next than i am even about now because the pattern we've seen for the last 10 years has been uh bad bad so so think about it like this um and i'm going back to our anti-federalists, the original job of the presidency was like a George Washington job, a job description for George Washington. And then you go and you read some of the anti-federalists

in an old wig, and an old wig number five, 120 proof, double-oaked barrel, says they're not all going to be George Washington. And he even goes to say that there's just a one in a million shot that a president's given this much power are going to overtime exercise it virtuously. And he was right. He was right about that. And I think that that is something that, you know, so if you were going to talk to Hamilton right now about all these executive orders, Congress being inert, the way in which the president is trying to modify the 14th amendment by executive order, like all that's going on, he would say, how did this happen? Because he would be thinking there are two firewalls against it.

One is the Electoral College, because their vision of the Electoral College was, this is a committee meeting of some of the wisest people in America selecting from the American public, the most wise and gifted leaders. They didn't imagine the electoral colleges, oh, well, you won Tennessee, you get your nine votes. Like, that's not how they envisioned it at all. Okay. And don't forget, the Supreme court has recently said that also there's, if the state says so, there's no such thing as faithless electors. Right. You can't have faithless electors. So a person who even is picked by their state to vote in the electoral college, if there's a state law that says they must vote the way

that the popular vote went in their state, they have no authority to even. Wow. Wow. I know, exactly. It's incredible. So you have no electoral college firewall. Instead, the electoral college has now become basically just a quirk of our federalist system, but the original meaning and intent of the electoral college is gone. So that doesn't exist. And then he would have said, ah, but impeachment, because this was the way, you know, in the Virginia ratification debates, George Mason stands up, and he lambasts the pardon, the vastness of the pardon power, which is, again, something that right now we're like, oh, whoa, that

pardon power that's big. he's blasting the vastness of the pardon power, and Madison rises up to defend the 1787 Constitution and says, impeach him. If he surrounds himself with bad people, impeach him. And in the Madisonian view, that was a very viable option because he had not locked in yet on the, even though he wrote Federalist 10 about how to deal with faction and everything, it had not really locked in how powerful partisan politics was going to be so powerful that it wasn't into the year of our Lord 2020 when the first senator voted to impeach or convict a president of their own party in American history. And that was Mitt Romney.

And so impeachment isn't a live option. The electoral college doesn't exist in any sort of form. So two of the prime checks on executive abuse are just dead letters right now. And so where does that leave us? that leaves us with a president, with us having to depend on the character of the president more than the founders intended. And I think that's a problem. Well, where do you go from this?

Do you have to convene a constitutional convention to rebalance the checks and balances? Let's just make one quick point that hopefully is obvious to people listening, which is all of these problems we're talking about with the presidency are upstream, then of problems with speech, right? Because once you have a presidency that is as powerful as the one that we're contemplating, heading towards, however you want to think about that. Enduring. Yeah.

Speech gets stifled. I mean, Wilson, don't need to remind fire listeners about Woodrow Wilson. We did a whole podcast on him. So, you don't care that much about whether the president has for-cause removal power or not over these independent agencies, which can seem like a relatively esoteric question. It all, everything else is. Well, it's interesting because I wanted to talk with you guys about this. You both work in media.

He's mixing his recourse as private citizens with his role as the chief executive. So you just look at that settlement with Paramount over the 60 Minutes broadcast. That stemmed from a lawsuit he filed in Texas, I believe, under a deceptive trade practices act. But at the same time, he's filing that lawsuit. He's tweeting at the Federal Communications Commission, Chairman Brendan Carr, to levy maximum fines and penalties. Yeah. And you're wondering why no one is suing yet over the TikTok ban?

Exactly. I mean, the list goes on. Wall Street Journal with the Epstein case, AP, getting banned from the press pool because they didn't use Gulf of America. ABC, you work for ABC right now. What's up with your broadcast licenses? I don't know. Brendan Carr wears a lapel pin with Donald Trump.

Trump's face on it to government meetings. I mean, he's, he's, and we're right now in court representing Anne Seltzer who ran that poll for the Des Moines Register. He's suing her for, under some sort of deceptive trade practices act in that state. This is going to be music to fire, fire listeners or no doubt are aware of this. I keep going back to the single best short argument for free speech ever put on paper in American history, Frederick Douglass, a plea for free speech in Boston. And he says, free speech is the dread of tyrants. It is the first thing that they wish to extinguish. And so to me, free speech is the

temperature check. It is the canary in the coal mine. So if somebody does have tyrannical aspirations, if somebody does have authoritarian dreams and goals and visions, they're coming for speech. They are coming for speech. And Trump has come for speech. He has. has come for it in the mass media. He has come for it in the university level. He has come for it in the law firm world. He is coming for speech. Now, what's also interesting about this is that, look, nobody, after the guy has won two elections,

and after he won the second after being indicted and everything, you got to give, the guy's got some political shrewdness to him. Oh, absolutely. You've got to hand him, you've got to say he's got some political shrewdness. and he chooses his targets well. And free speech activists and free speech attorneys are very familiar with this conception. Like in the McCarthy era, taking on communists, you're choosing your target well. In the 1950s, there's not going to be a huge groundswell of people in the streets for suspected Soviet spies, right?

You're not going to get a million people in the streets chanting hands off Harvard. Right? Oh, we know. That's just not happening. Why? Because kind of Harvard's been a pile of crap in a lot of ways. Oh, yeah. They're at the bottom of our college free speech. And so what he's doing is he's taking on institutions that have earned their public animosity,

but he's taking them on in an unconstitutional way. And so you're put in this position of like, yeah, I agree Harvard needs reform, but not like this. Yeah. You know, it's sort of like saying, okay, I'm against. I'm against robbery, but I also don't think we should torture robbers to death, you know, without a trial. Like that, making that argument doesn't make me pro-robbery any more than saying that depriving Harvard of its free speech, free association rights, arguing against that makes me pro their, the, the censorious atmosphere they established on campus. Yeah, his targets don't have clean hands. When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from winners,

I started wondering. Is every fabulous item I see from winners? Like that woman over there with the designer jeans. Are those from winners? Ooh, are those beautiful gold earrings? Did she pay full price? Or that leather tote? Or that cashmere sweater?

Or those knee-high boots? That dress, that jacket, those shoes. Is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering. Start winning. Winners. Find Fabulous for Less. Don't forget also the, so there's the smartness and how he's picking targets.

There is also the knowledge that whatever he says, the opposition party will gleefully do the opposite. Yeah. No matter what he says. So take the flag burning executive order where he's like, I'm going to criminalize flag burning again. Don't read the details where I don't criminalize flag burning. And like, you watch. I bet there will be an uptick. flag burning because the left wants to like show that like if he says flag burning's bad we're for it

and it's like nope that's really unpopular thing to do and speaking of the difference between the debate over what is speech versus what is abridging flag burning's perfect for this because the dissenters in that five four supreme court case there was an argument over whether burning a flag was speech or is it conduct and that's always you know is it speech is it conduct we have lots of fun fights about that but there was also the question of whether it was abridging because the argument was whatever your beef is, you have multitude other ways to say it in other vehicles. So isn't it okay to just not allow you to do this version?

Is that really abridging your free speech? Even if burning a flag is speech, like if your point is you hate Ronald Reagan, which was Johnson's point in that case, you can scream that at the top of your lungs, like paint your chest, you know, for the football game, whatever. they're not abridging your ability to hate, to say you hate Ronald Reagan. Man, that's a slippery slope argument.

Oh, it's the most slippery slope. It's the slipperiest of slippery slopes. Of course. But, you know, when you're talking about what's happening here, Sarah is exactly right. The worst thing that you can do is take a troubled institution that Trump is targeting and wrap both arms around it. And so you see this pattern play out again. And again, I was on a TV program, not like that. long ago where some, the host was saying, we need to stand for Harvard.

Who's going to stand with Harvard? It's like, let's be super careful about that because I'm standing for free speech. And if Harvard's rights of free speech and its academic freedom are being unlawfully assaulted, then I'm going to stand for free speech. But I'm turning around at the same time and I'm saying, Harvard, get your freaking act together. But how much of this is also just a problem of the scale of the federal government, Harvey Silverglade, a co-founder of fire who you know very well, David,

wrote a book called Three Felonies a Day. You know, you can find something to go after anyone. Show me the man. I'll show you the crime. And this is the restraint. And Harvard has, what, six, seven investigations going on right now? They tried to go after their foreign students as well. And those investigations came after it decided to stand up for itself in court.

Yeah. So the point was that you were supposed to. and this has been happening. I mean, the Department of Justice, when it moves from president to president, changes its priorities. So I always give the example. You move from George W. Bush, really prioritizing terrorism and national security prosecutions to the beginning of the Obama administration. When their move is to prioritize financial crime prosecutions, makes perfect sense. You want that set by the president. That is the accountability that we were talking about in the unitary executive conversation.

But, and it's a fine line, right? The exact opposite. On the opposite end of that spectrum is Nico is my wife's paramour. So someone go find a crime that Nico's committed so that I can throw him in jail. Right. But there's a whole bunch of things in between, right?

We start an investigation because we think you might have done this, but we just found you did this other thing and we don't like you. What about that? Where does that fall on the spectrum of like, we're looking at this type of crime versus we're trying to punish, you know, my wife's adulterist boyfriend? Which is just to do the rip from the headlines thing. Are we actually looking at all public officials who've committed mortgage fraud? Or are you looking at Democrats who've committed allegedly committed mortgage fraud? If it's, we're looking at all public officials who've committed mortgage fraud, more power to you. Well, now you have the Paxton allegations, right, as well? Yeah.

I don't know where those came from. I haven't followed the headlines close enough. Oh, no. Don't get Sarah started on this one. We're not even going to do it. But the mortgage fraud versus classified documents is a really good example. We basically have been always trying to find people who have taken classified documents home. You can find cases about that at a pretty good clip going back for a long time.

And high profile people too. High profile, low profile, and everything in between. We can talk about whether the punishments are either. equalized over all of those and maybe the president has some special, you know, powers to do funny things like declassified documents in his brain. But whatever. The point is the classified documents actually is something where there is an entire section at the Department of Justice that does those types of prosecutions. Individual mortgage fraud is not one of those. It's coming kind of out of nowhere. The one exception to this, and by the way, David's talking about

Senator Adams Schiff, Federal Reserve Governor Cook, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who were all being investigated by this administration for saying that they're basically having multiple primary residences for the purpose of lowering their mortgage rates. Marilyn Mosby was prosecuted. She was a Democratic, she was basically the district attorney for Baltimore. She was prosecuted for mortgage fraud. And so again, you're like, well, it's not out of nowhere, but this isn't really the type of case DOJ does unless they are investigating you for something else and stumble upon it. And are they going to investigate Paxton?

Right. That was an AP report that he had three primary residences, but only, you know, he and his wife can't have three primary residences. And is the Trump administration? Is the Trump DOJ going to go after Ken Paxton the same way it would go after? And that's where the rule of law issue. So prosecute mortgage fraud, fine. Prosecute only Democrats mortgage fraud? Not fine.

Does that become then a First Amendment violation if you can allege that the president is going after just Democrats? Sure. And it would be an ideological prosecution, right? Yeah. Yeah. Those cases always lose, to be clear, like when you're bringing the motion of basically a targeted prosecution, you will always lose that motion, except maybe now we're getting to the point

where you might win it. And those cases in particular certainly are the best case I've seen in a long time. Whereas, for instance, John Bolton, who is being investigated for having classified documents in an unclassified setting, like, nope, he's going to lose that prosecution, even though Donald Trump,

sorry, he's going to lose that claim of prosecutorial targeting or misconduct, he's going to lose that claim because they're actually that there have been so many of those that actually is a thing the DOJ does. Maybe you came to their attention for some other, you know, not great reasons, but that's fine versus the three crimes a day or I'll show you the man, you know, show me the man, I'll show you the crime.

And to your point of like, are there too many federal crimes? I don't think anyone at this point can argue that there aren't too many federal crimes. But, you know, you raise a really good point about the classified documents. Just in the last 10 years, you've had a Clinton in federal crimes. investigation. You've had a Petraeus prosecution. You've had a Biden investigation. You've had a Trump indictment. You've had a brief Pence investigation. So this sort of idea that prominent people in politics are not investigated for classified document mishandling. No, no, no. That is very common. That's a very normal thing to have a criminal investigation for mishandling classified documents.

This mortgage fraud thing, it's novel. It's novel. It's kind of transparent what's happening. I don't know why anyone would want to go into politics right now. It just It seems like you're putting a target on your back. Like, if you're a good person, why would you want to go into politics? I mean, it actually, I think, goes even beyond that. Imagine you're a person who is sort of a Mr. Smith goes to Washington type, who has, you know, some real legislative goals. Why would you go to Congress?

They're not doing legislation. And so what you're seeing is lots of members of Congress who are sort of those more legislatively focused folks are leaving Congress and who's replacing them, the influencer Congress. Right? We have like 535, or we're heading to have 535. 535 cable news pundits and influencers who aren't hiring legislative staff. Why would they? That'd be a waste of resources.

They're hiring bookers and people to like follow them around and like make social media clips up them. So there's that part. There's the like good person you don't want to put your family through this. That would be sort of an insane thing to do at this point. And I think that cost, again, we can sort of say like, oh, criticism, have thicker skin. That's representative government. And I agree with that on the one hand. And I do think that it can be really rough and really rough is still okay.

But we are getting to the point where people who think about their family's safety and well-being have to really think twice. And it's not just running for office, though it is, but it's being willing to be a federal judge. I mean, how close did Justice Kavanaugh come to having him and his family potentially killed? by an assassin who was outside their home, fully armed and capable of doing it. Or even just a journalist, David. I see the vitriol hurled at you on the line all the time. Wait, people get mad at me? What?

I wasn't aware of this. Chris Rufo was just going after you this past weekend. Oh, super mad, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I mean. He will go to the mat for Cracker Barrel. Oh, or against Cracker Barrel, I should say. Yeah, the great social menace of our time.

How blest are our lives that our most important people in the country are spending their energy on the logo for a restaurant that you go to when driving long distances. And most of them have never set foot in, by the way. I've got real Cracker Barrel street cred. I took my first- I got a Cracker Barrel gift card for Christmas this last year. Look, this is the kind of Casanova I was in high school. My first date, Cracker Barrel, nicest restaurant in like a 20-mile radius.

Oh, yeah. If you try and go on the weekends, it's packed. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what type of business it does during the week, but. But, you know, this, we... It's hard to imagine on December 8th, 1941, a lot of conversations about the logo of, you know, the local, you know, roller skating. Yeah. Well, can I ask you guys, as we close up here?

Just what is the state of the conservative legal movement? Like, we're talking here about all this concern about the power of the federal government, whether it's executive branch or not. the power of the federal government to shape business, to shape universities, to shape the media. I mean, right now we're talking about a 15% export tax on Navidia chips, which I think is explicitly precluded by the Constitution, or taking a stake in Intel. Like, one of the things that we've seen at fire in the First Amendment space is that the conservative legal movement, where it was with us on Title IX under the Obama administration, has just totally abandoned us on Title VI with the Trump administration. The same issues. Or with Harvard, you have the federal government essentially trying to federalize the core components of a university. That's hiring who they hire, who they admit, and what they teach.

And we're alone. I mean, we would receive an award from the Heritage Foundation like 10 years ago. And now they're on the other side of us on these issues. So we feel a little bit of whiplash. Fires leadership is the exact same as it was 10 years ago, plus a few members of the executive, new executive team. The whiplash has been extreme. I mean, think of it this way. 10, 15 years ago, the red state response to university excess was passing free speech laws.

So you had, in the early 2000s and building up in the 20 teens, you know, I remember writing at National Review, look how many states have passed free speech laws protecting free speech on college campus. And then by 2021, it had flipped around to the Stopwoke Act and the anti-CRT push that's really censorious at saying, oh, okay, no, what we're going to do is we're going to say the problem with the left speech codes is that they were the left's speech codes. Now we've got the right speech codes, and this time we're going to do it right. And so I think the best way to describe it is I think the conservative legal movement is at a pivot point. It is not the same, the conservative, whatever is left of the conservative political project is now completely a wholly owned

subsidiary of MAGA, not the case in law. The law, thanks to the existence of the Federalist Society and a legal culture that is, I think, in large part, a tone set by the most important people in the legal culture, judges, your Republican-nominated and confirmed judges by and larger classical liberals. But is that going to change? I mean, President Trump went after Leonard Leo and had the That's the pivot point. So what's happening now is you're beginning to see a full-on infrastructure of sort of common good constitutionalism, populist.

What's common good constitutionalism for our listeners? Common good constitutionalism would be. Living constitutionalism for the right. Yeah. It's social justice for the right. Well, it's great branding. Who doesn't like the common good? Everybody loves, who doesn't like social justice?

I mean, it's similar kinds of language. So you're at this pivot point, and I think that the legal movement had a few more. antibodies in it to resist MAGA than the political movement did. But it cannot endure in any recognizable form if the political movement remains almost entirely in this MAGA populist mindset. Well, what about the law students? Yeah. So becoming more divided. Remember, you're talking about a minority within a minority. So the minority of law students are conservative. And then within that conservative brand, part of the strength of groups like the Federalist Society were that there were so few conservatives that they were never going to agree on stuff. And so this bonded them

in some ways. There wasn't going to be a statement from the Federalist Society on literally anything. They've never filed a brief at the court. They really don't take positions. So you have, and that starts in 1982, you have kind of 1.0, this is the Edmese era where they're just beginning to push back on the war in court and it's like they're making stuff up what if we actually look at the text of the constitution and everyone's like cool idea so they do that and then it's like okay now i'm going to have the scalia era if you will and in the scalia era they're really developing what this means applied to all sorts of things like and what if the constitution's a little ambiguous and what does it mean to be an originalist we are now in the post scalia that like third era

of the conservative legal movement where they're winning and it's really really hard to win. I mean, it's in the musical Hamilton, like, welcome to the present. We're running like a real nation. That's the conservative legal movement. So now you're in charge, which means that you're not just like sitting in dissent and being like, I wish it had been this way. It's much easier to be in dissent, by the way. And it means that the whole team can sort of be like, yeah, we should have won that one. Now, when you're winning, they expect to win everything and they expect to like the outcomes of everything. Whereas the conservative legal movement as an answer to the Warren court, the genius of it was that it wasn't

about just getting the outcome you wanted. It was about instituting a whole new process so you'd never have another Warren court. Because if the conservative legal movement won, the 1982 conservative legal movement, they would win that you had to follow this process. And that process is going to favor separation of powers and federalism and things that are, again, not necessarily conservative outcomes, but sort of by definition in that Burkean sense, or in a classical liberal sense, conservative, because that's what the Constitution is. But then when the conservative breaks from Republican, and remember in 1982, Reagan had just sort of married the two together. It was sort of the apotheosis of the Goldwater vision. Conservative didn't

mean Republican up until really that point. So 1982 corresponds when when conservative meets Republican. Forty years later, conservatives breaking, Republicans breaking from conservative, conservatives breaking from Republican, however you want to call it. But the Republicans are like, yeah, but we're the ones who fought this fight for you. We're the ones who won the presidential

elections that allowed you to get these Supreme Court seats. And by God, we want these outcomes that happen not to be conservative, that happened not to be Burkean. And so that's causing a lot of frustration within that conservative legal movement family. And when you're looking at the law school,

What's interesting is it felt like the high watermark of the common good monarchy, you know, splinter groups, kind of had its high watermark maybe a couple years ago. Before Dobbs. Oh, that's interesting. Which is really not what I expected. You know, in Bostock, where the court with Gorsuch writing, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act applied, you know, because of sex, employment discrimination to gender identity and sexual orientation. And that was really the creation myth for these splinter groups. And then you have Dobbs coming out where it's like, oh, okay. And that puts a lot of damp cloth on the embers.

We'll see where it goes from here. Maybe they will come back. There are certainly reasons to think that when a group has become powerful enough and stratified enough so that you have to kind of wait your turn and get in line, we often see the groups fall apart because the people at the very end of the line are like, well, I don't want to wait in line. What if I just start my own thing or burn it all down? I'm better off than waiting in line. So there's those sort of like institutional concerns that I have. But it's really interesting that it doesn't look like it's taking off the way that we, I think,

would have expected it to if you just looked at sort of Adrian Vermeul's writings from a few years ago. Even Adrian Vermeel himself is the Harvard Law professor that gave the name to Common Good Constitutionalism. even he is starting to back off of it a little bit or its most intemperate forms. Well, and also I think there's a difficulty right now that you have, if you're in what you might call a MAGA legal theorist, is that the ultimate reality of MAGA is that it is not a ideological project. It is a personal project. It is the advancement of a man, Donald Trump.

And so if the core, if the core fundamental fixed North Star of MAGA is Donald Trump's interests. It's very difficult to form a legal theory around that. That's a legal theory. If the theory is, well, Trump has to win, that's a political theory. That's not so much of a legal theory. And so it's very difficult to articulate legal principles, which are supposed to endure beyond each given individual dispute if the ultimate decision maker is a person who's non-ideological and often highly erratic. And so there is a sort of dispositional disadvantage. that you have if you're a MAGA legal theorist, because you don't necessarily know six months from now what position you're going to be taking, right? And so that creates a difficult,

because think about TikTok, for example. The original TikTok ban idea was one of the good ideas, in my view, from the first Trump administration. So you're sitting there, and let's say you've been a loyal Trump person. And so in late 2019, early 2020, you're like, TikTok, national security problem, TikTok, location, data, all of this stuff. Look at what the PRC is vacuuming up out of American citizens. We need to do something. And in fact, such a threat that we can take care of it by executive order. By executive order, we can do this.

And then by 2023, 2024, no, no, TikTok. It's unconstitutional. I mean, it's unconstitutional debate. So what's the underlying theory here? Yeah, yeah. Well, so much is different from the first Trump administration. We were putting together what our plan of attack would be for the various free speech threats that would exist under a Kamala Harris administration or a Donald Trump administration. And we had something to look at for Donald Trump, right?

We had the previous Trump administration where we were often aligned with the Trump administration going after Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, where we were rolling back some of the due process and free speech abridgments that we had seen on college campuses. And then fast forward, now you don't even get the process in violating Title VII. when you go after all these different universities and we're seeing every week a new speech threat. Yeah. And so it's it's kind of whiplash for us. Kamler-Harris administration, we kind of knew what to expect as well. We thought it would be a continuation of the Biden administration, some jawboning,

some social media stuff, an effort to go after misinformation, disinformation, hate speech. But the Trump administration, we were surprised. And, you know, going back to bring our conversation full circle back to, we started at the very beginning talking about donors, there is an issue. One of the things I wish people understood about sort of the right more broadly, the category of person who is enthusiastic about Trump, number one, obviously, is your rally trumpist, is the people, you know, your front row Joe's who've been there. Number two, behind your rally trumpist is the GOP donor class. The GOP donor class in many, and especially like your people who write the $5,000 check or a $10,000, they love them, some Donald Trump. And so if you are a, especially in Christian circles, if you are evangelical circles, so if you're a non-profit in these social conservative circles, taking on Donald Trump or taking on his administration, good luck selling that to your donors.

Yeah. Good luck. Well, I don't want to overstate the challenges. We also have brought in a lot of new donors and foundations from the principled stand that we've been trying to take as well. That's where I think Trump one and Trump two helps out groups like fire, because if there is going to be whiplash, everyone kind of sees that. And it's like, oh, what would help if someone can change their mind abruptly on what we're allowed to say or who can say it? And it's like, ah, what about the First Amendment? Isn't this a great idea?

Well, I love a line that you had in a previous podcast, Sarah. You said I'm a process girl living in an outcomes world. And I was like, I love that. That pretty much summarizes what we're doing here. I think you said it around the time we were fighting the Harvard thing, too, because so much of what's problematic there is the process the Trump administration used to go after Harvard. I was like, yes, yes, yes. I mean, the whole constitutional framework is based on process.

And if you just throw that out the door for outcomes that you like, well, the whole constitutional deal goes out the door with it. So I appreciate both of you for what you're doing with advisory opinions, Sarah as host and David as a permanent guest. Great Grandpa Steve. Great Grandpa Steve. Bringing my trickney into the podcast twice a week. All right, folks, I'm Nico Perino, and this podcast is recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my fire colleagues, including Sam Lee and Chris Mulby. This podcast is produced by Sam Lee.

You can learn more about, so to speak, by subscribing to our YouTube channel or our substack page, both of which feature video versions of this conversation. We're also on X by searching for the handle free speech talk. If you have feedback, can be sent to so-to-speak at thefire.org. Again, so-to-speak at thefire.org. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a review. They help us attract new listeners to the show. And until next time, I thank you all again for listening.