Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Michael Waldman [Rerelease from 5/25/23]

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

Michael Waldman (The Supermajority, The Fight to Vote, The Second Amendment) is an attorney, presidential speechwriter, and author. Michael joins the Armchair Expert to discuss how the U.S. Supreme Court is involved in modern policymaking, what the concept of originalism is, and how extremism is influencing judges rulings on cases. Michael and Dax talk about the changes Congress can make to how justices are appointed, how public hearings have become spectacles for entertainment, and what role the media has in shaping the court of public opinion. Michael explains how the office of the President was founded, the struggles between gun rights and public safety policy, and why it’s important to protect judicial independence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Padman. Hello, Monica. Hi. We have incredibly exciting news. Starting on Monday, August 14th, you'll be able to find all new episodes of Armchair Expert free on Spotify and everywhere you get your podcasts.

But in the meantime, we decided we wanted to revisit a few of our favorite episodes over the last couple of years. Yes, it's very exciting for us because we get to come back to everyone, which is really, really fun. And these are some of our faves. Yes. In case you missed them, these are the ones that we thought were worth re-airing. These are the ones that we thought were worth re-airing before we go wide on August 14th. Please enjoy some of our best of.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Rather. I'm joined by Mrs. Mouse. Hey. Eller. We got a whole new genre of conversation today that we don't normally. You throwing some things away on your computer here? Just what? Trash? Do a little housekeeping on your desktop i had to get rid of something really important oh my god you look like classified documents photo or something before someone saw it i don't want to talk about it oh my god uh michael walden is here he is an attorney and a

presidential speechwriter he wrote he wrote or oversaw 2,000 speeches in the Clinton administration. He's also a political advisor. He is currently serving as the president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. He's got a couple of great books, The Fight to Vote and The Second Amendment, a biography. And he has a new book out, which he's here to talk about, and is the new genre of exploration for us, the Supreme Court. The book is called The Supermajority, The Year the Supreme Court Divided America. Supreme Court's really interesting. Very.

Twisty, turvy history. Mostly turvy and some twisty. A little twisty. A little bit twisty. Please enjoy Michael Waldman. Trip Planner by Expedia. You were made to have strong opinions about sand. We were made to help you and your friends

find a place on a beach with a pool and a marina and a waterfall and a soaking tub. Expedia. Made to travel. Hey, I just got us a new Coca-Cola spice. Nice. What's it taste like? It's like barefoot water skiing Made to travel. Nah, it's like Coca-Cola with a refreshing burst of raspberry and spiced flavors. Yeah. Try new Coca-Cola Spiced today.

We should do it just because you're from New York and we're in L.A. How preposterous do we seem? So you're in Brooklyn. I'm very hip. Clearly you're very hip. You're involved at NYU. I mean, you couldn't help but through osmosis stay young, I'd imagine. I get younger as everyone else gets older.

That's my theory. You're like Wooderson. Exactly. But we've lost all objectivity. So I'm just asking if you could just tell us still what seems preposterous about L.A. I still have trouble with the lack of sidewalks. I look on the map. Oh, it looks like this is pretty close.

I'll walk from here to there and it says 20 minutes and it should be two minutes. Yeah. One of my kids went to school nearby. And so I would come visit and I came to understand it's actually two minutes. Yeah. One of my kids went to school nearby and so I would come visit and I came to understand it's actually a collection of communities and suddenly it made a ton more sense to me. In LA geography,

they called it multinodal or polycentric. We're on multinodal city. You're from originally New York. Yeah. But what was the cute name of the town? Great Neck. Where is Great Neck in relation? It's on Long Island.

It's right over the border. I'm embarrassed to say this. You may know of it as West Egg. West Egg. Oh, sure. From the Great Gatsby. Before they built all the subdivisions. So East Egg was right across the water and everybody had to have a light on their dock, just like in the book. Yes. Oh, wow. But you do wonder how much the culture is imitating the book. I think of this in terms of how much Hollywood's version of Mafia infiltrated the Mafia and they started acting like characters in the movie. Apparently, when you listen to the wiretaps, suddenly they start talking like the Godfather when the movie came out. I think if you look for thousands of years, but certainly more recently, everybody's following some set of codes of what they think they're supposed to be doing in their profession or whatever. Half the time it comes from somebody writing about it or portraying it rather than actually legacy passed on through the generations.

Yes. We have these incredible now unifying cultural apparatus, which is like before even in my hometown of Milford, we had a mini culture within Michigan because we didn't share any kind of media other than our local news, but we didn't have social media. We had no way to emulate really the next town. I don't know. It kind of got rid of the individuality a bit. Before radio, the regional accents were really thick. Al Smith was the governor of New York, and he ran for president in the 20s, and so there are recordings of him that exist. You can't understand a word he's saying because he's got such a thick Brooklyn accent,

but he sounds like a Cajun. Oh, really? And then radio came along, and the movies had this mid-Atlantic accent where everyone talked like Katharine Hepburn, halfway between England and Groton, Connecticut. And then radio came along, and there was a period where all the late-night hosts and all the news anchors were from Nebraska. And so the Nebraska accent became the not having an accent.

The standard. It's really fascinating, the homogenization, how quickly that can kind of happen. Somehow, all the groundwork we just laid will dovetail beautifully into our conversation today about the Supreme Court. By reading a few of the prominent books about the founding of the country, what you quickly realize is that next to zero thought was given to this third branch of the government. They were very concerned about what the executive branch would look like. No king, right?

Everyone did not want a king, although some did want a king. And then once you get into the legislative body, which everyone they're arguing, that's the class they'll assume, right? They assume that's going to be the power in the government, is the Congress. And should it be elected by the people or by the states? And they had the big compromise where the Senate was the states and the House of Representatives was the people. And really quick, that's even worth you breaking down. So just right out of the gates, a democracy,

okay, every human will have a vote that'll get weighed proportional, each human, but then the smaller states, and this is what maybe the biggest stumbling blocks of coming up with the constitution were, was we're gonna get run over and steamrolled by the rest of the country. And then this compromise was the Senate,

which doesn't make any sense in a democracy. Even at the time, Hamilton and Madison, who were these kind of young nationalists who'd come out of the army, they were not just from their local areas, but they had been in this big national, revolutionary, radical enterprise. They thought the idea of having a Senate was terrible.

They said, are we electing people based on houses or trees? These are artificial beings, these states. But they knew they had to do it to get the compromise. And there were aspects of it when they created the country. I mean, in some ways, the Constitution was a backlash to too much democracy coming out of the revolution. Things were a bit of a mess. But it was also by far the most democratic document of that kind that had been done ever. Yes. Or in a long time. And even

having a census was considered a big deal. What was the objection? You would count people. And that way you could actually know how many there were and who would get to vote. And of course, one of the things that they did was they said that enslaved people counted toward representation but couldn't vote. So they were three fifths of a person. Oh, three fifths. Sorry, downgraded. Already shitty. But they gave barely any thought at all to the courts.

It was about one tenth the amount of the Constitution devoted to the rest of these things. Yeah, you're saying that Article III of the Constitution creating the judicial branch is 377 words long. Only one tenth of the amount of text devoted to the other two branches. It's a tiny bit ironic considering so many of them were actually lawyers that were involved in this. They were lawyers, but it didn't occur to them that the Supreme Court or the courts would turn into this branch that was sort of not co-equal or even less than the other branches, but in a lot of ways over everything else.

They understood there was this idea of judicial review, the idea that courts maybe could strike down laws, though that was new to the United States because in England, it was just the king. Do you think that safety measure was really there to police states from coming up with insane agendas that would counter so dramatically from the goals of the federal agenda,

more than they thought there'd be all these federal laws. Totally. I'm not a professional historian. I've written a bunch of sort of history. You're a jurist doctor holder. Yeah, but I'm like a wannabe historian. Aren't we all? But once I started reading the notes

from the Constitutional Convention, it's really fascinating because Madison wrote it all down. It's like reading a transcript. And he kind of fudged it a little bit. But all this stuff that we assume maybe it was in the back of their minds, they were very explicitly talking about all this. Well, now we're fine. But in a few decades, we'll industrialize and then our cities will be filled with immigrants. And then we're going to have to do it this way. They actually foresaw for worse and for better. And they were all about building federal power over what they saw as the often irresponsible states and state legislature. And this sort of fight between federal power and the states, which we're certainly seeing now, it's not been resolved. It's not new. How strong

should the central government be? That's obviously not new. And how do you ensure people's rights in a situation of that kind? Now, they thought the main way you would ensure people's rights was checks and balances, the political branches. I don't think they really thought there'd be judges in robes, talk about people acting the way they're supposed to act based on media representation. They did not really envision what we have developed over time. Okay, so if you look at the Constitution, it's a bunch of protections from things to make sure that no law could ever exist to infringe on these. There's no laws. Right. It's a lot of structures. And then the Bill of Rights was what can't happen and your protections. So we don't have like a litany of

federal laws yet. The presidency, which, you know, is so powerful, especially in the nuclear age, they didn't know really what they were creating. They didn't want a king. They were really worried about sort of a dictator, a demagogue, who, as Madison put it, a man of opulence and ambition who will try to sway the masses and be a dictator was specifically something they were really worried about, for good reason, based on history. That's the trajectory of any man that got power. Yeah, in human history. But there are provisions in there. Congress can regulate interstate commerce.

It can create the Navy. I mean, there are things of that kind. Again, they just thought Congress would be the one with all the power. When you read the Constitutional Convention notes, one of the reasons they didn't really want to talk too much in too much detail about what the president could and couldn't do is George Washington was sitting there and they knew he was going to be the president. Someone said, OK, I hereby propose that we have not a committee because some of the

states that had committees, one person will call it the president. And then everyone sat there silently, afraid to talk. Madison's notes say, you know, a considerable pause ensued. silently, afraid to talk. Madison's notes say, you know, a considerable pause ensued. And then somebody finally says, I propose that we put this to a vote right then. And Ben Franklin, who was the only one who had the stature to say, he said, uh, this is pretty important.

Why don't we actually talk about this? And then they debated it. But they were just so in awe of Washington, who was sitting there, that they couldn't talk about the presidency. So it had no actual constraint. They just knew. They were like, it's going to be him. A, he had just led the revolution of freedom.

But also, he was the embodiment of a compromise. He's from the South that has all the money, but the North trusts him quite a bit. He was the only guy who didn't talk in that group. Everyone else is a fucking blowhard. Right. Motormouth. him quite a bit. He was the only guy who didn't talk in that group. Everyone else is a fucking blowhard, motor mouth. And they started imbuing all this wisdom on him simply because he was silent. John Adams, you read his letters, he's like a blogger. I mean, he's just nonstop opinions like spewing out. So Washington, first of all, he showed up at the Continental Congress in a uniform. That he had made himself, by the way, and paid for. They all said, oh, he must be a good

military leader. He has a uniform. He was like the himself, by the way, and paid for. They all said, oh, he must be a good military leader. He has a uniform. He was like the best horseman in the colonies or something like that. And he had also done this thing that was really extraordinary, of course, which was step down from power. And if you think about, he's not the only revolutionary military leader in history. Almost always, whatever they say at the beginning, they turn themselves into a dictator.

Yes. And there's like a really limited number of people. Grant are the only people I know. Yeah. You could say Mandela, too. And then the other thing is he was very focused on following the lessons from the Romans and what had gone wrong there through theater. And he had them all watch these plays about Cincinnatus, about the people who stepped away from power in ancient Rome.

And this was what they were all supposed to be like. A friend of mine who's religious says if there was ever a providence that he's witnessed, it's George Washington. He's like the only human on planet Earth that everyone could have possibly gotten behind to make president. And he had no kids. He couldn't pass anything on. He couldn't pass anything on. Because that's what they were super fearful of right it's a hereditary coming from the king yeah a counter example is i just read a biography of napoleon oh i've been dying to do you have a

good rack andrew roberts it's long but so napoleon is also this modernizing he's up from nobody he's not even french there was a lot going on at the end of the French Revolution, but he rises up. He believes in sort of the rule of law and all this stuff. He makes himself a dictator and he decides he's going to become emperor. What I still don't really understand is why did his imagination fail there? Why didn't he say, oh, you know, I'm going to be like George Washington, who they all really admired, and have a term and step back. And instead, he's literally put a crown on his own head. Yeah.

Now, some of it was the other European kings respected that better. But again, Washington was pretty unusual. He didn't want to be president, and he certainly didn't want to be there for a second term. Unique. Yeah. And flawed in deep, deep ways, as we know. The largest slave owner, I think, in Virginia, among the things he did was when you were in a non-slave state for long enough, then your enslaved people would get freed. So he would send his guy back out of Philadelphia to make sure he

stayed enslaved. So he was not, he was terrible. And yes, his right-hand man, I forget his name, I'm embarrassed to say, but the one he was sending back, that guy was like running the show. And he was never, ever given much. With all of them, none of us can look away from they knew it was wrong. At the same time, they set in motion this government that could fix it. Jefferson, who never freed his slaves and went heavily into debt, but put the ideals of we're all created equal and life- liberty, and pursuit of the happiness out into the world at the very best a hypocrite. But the ideals that they were putting out into the world were pretty revolutionary. They understood at the time, a lot of people in Europe understood at the time, they said, why do we hear the loudest cries for liberty from the people who drive the slaves?

Oh, yeah, yeah. But they put these ideas out that became this kind of goad, this ethos, that then became what, when you read about the abolitionists, when you read about Frederick Douglass or Dr. King, they're still appealing to those ideals, even though the people who did them were very, very flawed, and we would regard as racist, and we would regard as white supremacy, and all that's true. But the universal ideals ideals they weren't lies

they just were not true but they haven't ever been true i gotta say i think that whole era in the continental congress it screams of pragmatism in maybe the best way possible which is you had a whole group of people that did not believe in slavery the northerners and they were pragmatic they're like we're to appease them. Sure, we'll have the Capitol in the South. We'll have George Washington, the Southerner from Virginia, as the president. But we're going to slide in these mechanisms by which we can unravel this whole thing. And it's a really pragmatic and long view approach to solving an enormous problem

that doesn't seem entirely present today. approach to solving an enormous problem that doesn't seem entirely present today. That level of Machiavellian plotting, compromising with the ultimate goal of that. It's an interesting thing because all of us have a tendency to look at this group of people as deities. And again, it's part of how we all mentally organize the country and our lives. They were both revolutionaries, pragmatic, flawed, but put these pretty dramatic ideas out into the world. The idea that as a Declaration of Independence says,

government is legitimate only when it rests on the consent of the governed. In a world where everyone else had a king. Yeah. Or a pope. And the constant way we make change in our country is to go back to the ideals and say, well, if you really believe this, then we can't have slavery. If you really believe this, we need the New Deal. It's the kind of thing we all keep appealing back to.

It parallels a lot the art and the artists. They're all flawed. They're all philanders, many alcoholics, terrible dads. You name it. They're shitheads. But the art they created is worth in many ways, minimally that it's still functioning. And you have your complaints and I want to get into them and we'll go through what's happening now. But all in all, I'm regularly astounded with it working.

When you see a certain court uphold something in some district and then they fuck up the whole system and they slam the train stop. Like it still works incredibly well. Not that it doesn't need a ton of. Like, it still works incredibly well. Not that it doesn't need a ton of work, but it is also quite impressive. You know, it's the oldest written constitution in the world now, which means there's plenty of stuff they were really cutting edge for that moment. And that later on, we learned lots of lessons and therefore we wouldn't do it that way now. So, I mean, the Electoral College is an example. And for the longest time, it was basically an irrelevancy. It always followed the popular vote.

And as we know now in the last two decades, the loser of the popular vote won the Electoral College. It almost happened in 2004 when John Kerry almost got elected president. It's not just Republicans. The Senate, this compromise, at that time, the biggest state was seven times bigger than the smallest state. And now compare California to Wyoming. They're under a million.

Yeah. And all kinds of things like that. And I would even say lifetime terms for Supreme Court justices is another example. Right. Exactly. Now, here's what is fundamentally frustrating about hearing people who are treating the Constitution as the Bible. So it differs dramatically as two different documents, the Bible and the Constitution. One was intentionally designed to evolve and change. The other one's the Word of God and

it doesn't change. But these two things, they've been conflated into one thing. There's the Bible and there's the U.S. Constitution. But it's very frustrating for people who hold that opinion of the Constitution that they're denying that the document itself was designed with many mechanisms to change it as we evolve. They added 10 amendments in the first two years. They thought it was going to be easier to amend than it was. But part of what's so absurd to me about the way we're now looking at this, if we're going to parse every word of the text with dictionaries from the 1700s, as though everyone walked around carrying dictionaries. And like you say, in a sort of a religious worship of the fathers, this holy text way, it's going to tell us what to do now. Even if everybody else has had a different view for 200

years, now we're going to consult this religious text and the wizards and the robes. The clairvoyance in 1778. First of all, they all fought with each other all the time about what all of it meant. They assumed it would change. It's really important to know that everyone walked away pissed off that they didn't get a lot of the stuff they wanted.

Right. It wasn't a slammed up. They didn't leave their high-fiving. Well, and they were fighting with each other about what it all meant instantaneously. And in high school or college, you read the Federalist Papers. And this is the thing that the lawyers are often consulting. You know, this is what it meant, which is Hamilton and Madison and John Jay.

Anybody who's seen the musical knows they wrote it in this flurry of activity. It was a bunch of op-eds. Yeah, there you go. They churned them out. And a lot of what they were saying was basically nothing to see here. Move along. You're worried about too much. Don't worry about it.

And now we assume that this is what they actually meant. James Madison, in one of these Federalist papers, Federalist 10, said, well, the thing we care about most is avoiding faction, meaning we have to structure the whole thing so that factions, sort of special interests or political parties, we can't let them exist in our country. Only wise people are going to make these decisions. He wrote that anonymously in The Federalist. Two years later, he'd organized the first political party in the United States, but still it was basically the Democratic Party. So he writes a whole bunch of other anonymous articles saying some people think faction and political parties are bad. They obviously don't know anything. All throughout history, there's been two political parties, sort of one on the left, one on the right.

And that's the way change happens, literally within two years. Yeah. So it makes it even harder to treat it with the religious reference. The sanctity that everyone wants to. Okay, so now here we get into this third branch of the government, the judicial branch. I trust you've listened to More Perfect. Have you listened to that great podcast series? Yes. I have a very cursory knowledge of it all, but whatever I have comes from that podcast, which is incredible. I encourage people to listen to that. It's Radiolab. Radiolab produced. It's incredible.

A lot of law professors now do really good podcasts. It's like the perfect medium. Get long and boring. Let's go. You're going to do our commute. We'll talk to you about something. As long as you don't fall asleep. Okay. So as I recall, and I'd love for you to give us a kind of a history of how engaged in part of the machine it was at the beginning. I remember from More Perfect listening seven years ago, they convened once in a blue moon in the basement of a building. They rode there on horseback. They could only be there one or two days a year. I mean, it was a fucking joke at the beginning. The Supreme Court justices, Congress made them ride circuit, meaning they literally had to get on a horse and ride around and supervise the cases.

There was a pretty significant early case, Marbury versus Madison. And that was the one where they said, oh, we have the power to strike down a law as against the Constitution. But they didn't do much after that. And for the first half a century of the country, there was a lot going on. There was all these fights over expansion of the country and slavery. The Supreme Court sort of stayed out of it. It was these other big figures who were really involved in it. Is that when a liquor tax first pops up as well? This is the Whiskey Rebellion. There we go.

And so, again, it was all about trying to exert the power of the central government over these rambunctious people out there in the countryside. Yeah. I wrote a book on the Second Amendment and the history of the Second Amendment, and that was a lot of the same idea was that we had to have our local militias, and they were going to stand up against the tyranny of the U.S. government. People have been worried about overreach from Washington when it was actually George Washington. Well, when you found a country because you're pissed about overreach of one government, the King of England.

It gets in your bones. Yeah. It's kind of the premise of your whole situation. Yeah. It was this kind of primordial soup era where things were getting created and crashing into each other and there was a lot of violence. It was all new. And the Supreme Court, again, just didn't play much of a big role in the whole thing. Okay. And you say that there's three big cases that move their evolution towards what they are today.

Yeah. We'll just start by saying they're at apex power today. I mean, it's really unparalleled, the level of sway they have over our politics now. I think that's right. By a factor of like 10x. They're making huge decisions. Right now, there's a super majority,

six very conservative justices moving mostly in political lockstep. They're striking down laws all over the country. They have lifetime tenure, and a lot of them could be there for a long time. They're not elected. And the question for all of us is sort of, well, do we just sort of sit and take it? We say, oh, well, you know, maybe my great-grandkids will sort this one out. Well, by the way, it's the most unique problem if you assess it as a problem, as I do. I'm sure if I was on the right, I wouldn't even be too concerned about this. And I do hope we can

keep this as neutral as possible because I want to appeal to both sides. Like currently, yeah, if you're on the right, you're crushing. You're in the end zone doing a victory dance, which is great. I get it. But also, I really want to try to do a nonpartisan reason why this level of power with nine human beings is not a great idea. And the idea that we sort of take for granted that every June we're going to sit there and wait for nine unelected people to tell us what country we have now. Other countries don't do it that way. And we really haven't done it that way always through our own history. I grew up at a period when the Supreme Court among liberals was just revered.

Yes. And I run an organization called the Brandon Center, which is named after one of the great liberal Supreme Court justices. But most of the country's history, actually, the Supreme Court hugs the middle. It pretty much reflects whatever the consensus is at the time. Well, it's supposed to be apolitical. Yeah, it's supposed to be apolitical. That's the whole purpose of it. And even specifically, if I recall, in one of these books I read,

it's supposed to be the lever that is not responding to popular outrage. It's kind of like a control group. That's the design intent, right? Is that these other two bodies are probably going to be quickly swayed by public opinion. And we are right to say, oh, we should have a cool off period before we make decisions. 9-12, not the best day to make a policy for the rest of our lives. They call it the counter-majoritarian. In other words, sometimes when the crowd wants something, you want someone to say, slow down, everybody, but not too much.

Sooner or later, you want the country as it is and as it's growing and changing to be reflected in the government that is supposedly elected by the people. There were only three times in the country's history where the Supreme Court left this kind of invisible, unmarked spot in a really big way, where it was extreme or partisan or unduly activist.

And each time there was a massive backlash. There was a massive political and social backlash. There was even a political realignment. You know, one of the questions is, are we in a beginning of a moment like that now? So one of them, for example, which I talk about in the book, is the Dred Scott case. So that was the first time Supreme Court really, really got in the middle of things. And only the second time in the country's history, they struck down a law of Congress. There'd been all this growing agitation over slavery and efforts to push slavery out of the

South so that it would be more nationwide. Every time there was new territories, every time there was a war, we had to decide. And the country was getting more and more worked up about it. And the Supreme Court said, we're going to intervene and, quote, solve the problem, meaning the problem of agitation over slavery, not the problem of slavery. They did this case Dred Scott, which was this enslaved man who'd gone to a northern free territory and became free and then went back home to Missouri. And they said, oh, you're a slave again. And he fought this 11-year battle.

First of all, everyone knew it was going to be a really big deal. You might remember that the Dobbs case, the abortion case, leaked last year. That was a really dramatic thing. The Dred Scott case leaked. Really? It leaked to the incoming president-elect, Buchanan. He was actually privately lobbying them, hey, go big, overturn the limits on slavery. And so then he knew exactly

what they were going to do. So he had his inaugural. And first of all, he was on the stage and he was like whispering to the chief justice and everybody said, well, we know what that means. And then he got up in his inaugural address and he said, well, the Supreme Court's going to make this big ruling in a few days. None of us know what it will be, but let's just all agree we're going to abide by it. Whatever it says. And the newspapers the next day said, well, we know what that means. So it said Congress could not limit slavery in the Northern Territories.

Wow. Not only that, black people are so inferior they can never be citizens and have no rights. This was explosive. It led to an incredible eruption, led to the rise of the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln's whole political career was to take on this opinion. He said, this is not just an opinion. This is a big conspiracy to try to spread slavery nationwide. And it got him elected president and split the, you know, split the country apart.

In his first inaugural address, a lot of Southern states have already seceded. Washington, D.C. is nestled in between Maryland and Virginia, which was still in the Union, both slave states. The capital is surrounded by troops. And his inaugural address, he says, you know, some people say when the Supreme Court makes a ruling, we're all supposed to listen to it.

I don't agree. Oh, wow. I think it should bind the parties in the case. But really, if we're letting the Supreme Court be the super legislature, then what kind of democracy do we have? And then the guy who wrote the opinion has to swear him in. And so this was this really aggressive move by these unelected justices at that time. But the country reacted and pushed back in ways that are obviously really big. And it happened two other times before now. Was the next one Brown? Well, no, it was actually at the beginning of the 20th century. A lot of it was sort of similar to challenges we face now. Massive

economic change. At that point, it was the rise of these big national corporations for the first time, the trusts, really big inequality of wealth, millions of immigrants flooding into the country, not from Latin America, but from Europe. And government was seen as not catching up and corrupt. And there was a big response, the progressive era, to all of this. And at that point, the Supreme Court said, our job is to stop government from being able to do anything about it. And they concocted constitutional reasons why government couldn't protect worker safety, women, wages, you know, how many hours people would work in a factory or sweatshop or something like that. Right. There was a case

called Lochner. It's called the Lochner era. This was a case that said you can't work more than 10 hours a day in a bakery. We think of bakeries as like cupcakes and frosting, but it was really dangerous back then. They were in the tenement basements. There's explosions and shit, right? Yeah, and everyone had tuberculosis and we put the tuberculosis in the food. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, they said a rule like that

violates freedom of contract, the freedom to work for as many hours as the employee wants. There was a massive backlash. Theodore Roosevelt, who's an incredible character, he ran for president in 1912. After he'd been president, he challenged his successor. And it was this crazy election where it was him and the guy who replaced him, Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, and there was a fourth candidate who was a socialist. And Teddy Roosevelt's issue was the

Supreme Court, was these decisions. He had some really out there ideas. He said that when the courts made a constitutional ruling, the voters should be able to vote down what they'd done. But this was what he was fighting about. It was a huge, huge issue. And he didn't win the election, but this wound up being in the New Deal in the 1930s. So again, the Supreme Court saw its job just the same way. Strike down the New Deal. And they blocked all the agencies that Roosevelt created at the beginning of the New Deal during the Depression when a third of the country is unemployed. Social revolution in the air. The Supreme Court said our job is to stop progress. And Roosevelt proposed packing the court, expanding the number of justices.

It was a huge fight. How many were then? There were nine. Oh, okay. And nine, you know, is not in the Constitution. It's just a law passed by Congress. But it's been nine for a while. Roosevelt said, oh, they're working too hard.

Let's go up to 15 to relieve them of their burden. Which is a strategy that's been suggested currently for Democrats to expand to 12 so we can get it even at least. Right. So what happened was, it was a huge, huge, huge fight. Roosevelt lost. Can I pause you to say I love how you say huge?

I knew that. I knew you were going to say it. I just love it. Huge, huge, huge. You know, you can take the boy out of my nylon. Yeah, exactly. It's a really big tell. Don't lose it.

Don't lose it. I like it. I've spent all my life trying to sound like I'm from Nebraska. You're going to have to put that H back on, huge. Yeah, I will. It was a big fight. But the Supreme Court backed down. They called it the switch in time that saved nine.

And so, again, it was just, I'm not going to use the word that begins with H. It was a really big political brawl that changed the country. And then the time after that, as you said, was Brown, the Supreme Court led by Earl Warren, who'd been the governor of California. And that court did all these things that I think to this day are extraordinarily important. It ended school segregation or ruled it unconstitutional, at least in Brown versus Board of Education. It said that you had to have one person, one vote, meaning legislative districts had to be kind of the same size. They did all these things leading up to after Warren was off the court, Roe v. Wade.

Can I ask really quick what the composition of the court was at that time? Because here's where I want to police myself about being a hypocrite. Obviously, as a liberal, thank fucking God they did that. And also, perhaps the only mechanism that could have done that stuff so speedily. Some of the stuff they did, I think,

like Brown v. Board of Education, where the country actually, if you look at public opinion polls, now they're not the only way to understand how people are thinking. But when Brown versus Board of Education was announced, it was very popular in the country, other than the white Southerners. The system was broken and they were the only ones who could bring the hammer down and break this. And same thing with representation, with the malapportionment, but we would call it gerrymandering, the same thing. They said these people elected to office, they can't fix it themselves.

Right. We're the only ones who can do it. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Sasha hated sand, the way it stuck to things for weeks. So when Maddie shared a surf trip on Expedia Trip Planner, he hesitated. Then he added a hotel with a cliffside pool to the plan. And they both spent the week in the water. You were made to follow your whims. We were made to help find a place on the beach with a pool and a waterfall and a soaking tub.

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There's all these situations that we really do need them. A great one would be sodomy laws are on the books in a ton of states. And in order to get them off the books, some politician in that state would have to get behind removing them, which is or at least historically has been political suicide. So they'd rather just not touch it and then decide to not enforce it. So it takes kind of an act of the courts to get rid of these laws because on the other side, there's no incentive to do so. This is one of the great dilemmas. And I love so much of what the Warren court did. But we're still living in the backlash.

Progressives and liberals lost the muscle memory of how to organize and how to win people over. They were relying on the courts to protect those rights. on the courts to protect those rights. We got lazy a little bit. Starting in the early 1970s, the right wing organized and built a political movement and elected presidents and elected congresses to take this stuff on. And clearly had the Supreme Court as one of their main objectives. Emphatically. Until just a couple of years ago, Democrats and liberals revered the court more than conservatives.

Even when the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act or in Citizens United, they struck down all these campaign finance laws. Liberals still loved the court, partly because of a ruling that would be an example of articulating national rights or the Obergefell case, which said you have to have marriage equality. But what's interesting too, though, is that by that point, the country had sort of ratified marriage equality and same sex marriage before the court did. On a state-by-state. Yeah, it was just changing. And they actually held back from making a big ruling for a few years to let the public consensus build.

In a way that when Roe v. Wade in 1973 struck down the abortion laws, a lot of states had just been moving to liberalize or legalize abortion. And that cut it off. Okay, so what was the composition? Political philosophy didn't match up the way it does now to political party, because Eisenhower, who's a Republican, appointed Warren. But it was mostly liberals and a lot of Democrats. The last time a Democratic-appointed majority was on the Supreme Court was 1970. The last time a Democratic president appointed a chief justice was 1946.

Oh, God. So that really— Coming up on 100 years. Some of that was just like bad luck. Yeah. That predates now. That's not Donald Trump. That's not, you know, Mitch McConnell. And as you said, there's six.

It's not just that they're appointed by one party. It's that back then you couldn't really predict what a justice was going to be like when they went on the court. A lot of them would change. And there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. It was all more mixed up. Now these justices on both sides are cleared and vetted well in advance. And none of them are going to make a lot of surprising decisions. You know exactly what they are.

Yeah. Here comes a pet peeve of mine. Because I remember being young and watching some of these early. I guess the one that first was like national news, of course, was Clarence Thomas when I was younger. Because, of course, you had Anita Hill who was accusing him of sexual harassment during that. So that was the first one I remember being like national news. And even watching how he represented himself in those congressional reviews, keeping it pretty neutral. I mean, other than defending whatever his point of view was on Anita, but not out there.

You're right that they had two sets of hearings. I mean, he was going to get confirmed. And then she came forward with the accusation. And then he came back. And it was this very intense thing where the committee was all men. They'd never heard of something called sexual harassment. It was a huge national education. Lots and lots of workplaces suddenly developed sexual harassment policies.

But the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time were mostly experts and practitioners of sexual harassment. Of doing the same shit he had been doing, yes. And he came back and said this is a high-tech lynching. It was very, very dramatic. Yes, exactly. And he came back and said, this is a high-tech lynching. It was very, very dramatic. But the part before that, he testified, he did not say, I am going to be a radical conservative.

He said, I believe in a right to privacy in the Constitution. He testified that he had never, ever discussed Roe v. Wade with anyone ever. And even though he was in law school when it came out, it was a lie. And then there were people who came forward and said, that's a lie. Nobody in America had not had a conversation about Roe v. Wade, but particularly a judge. Yeah. These hearings turned into this very euphemistic thing where they all learned how to dance around what they actually thought. I guess it's a chicken or an egg question, but one of my enormous pet peeves with our current democracy is, and we're about to see it, right? We're about to go into an election cycle and they're going to get every candidate up on the stage and they're going to go to the most divisive

and most irrelevant fucking point for the general health of 350 million americans they're going to isolate the most polarizing completely useless topic and they're going to fuck up the whole election based on that i find this infuriating, and it's what's driving the fringe taking over, both on the left and the right. And so now when I look at these hearings for the appointees, they go straight to the most asinine, crazy question, and they make them plant a flag.

I don't know if it's the questioning that's changed, or it's them that's changed, or both. It didn't used to be that there would be these public hearings for Supreme Court justices. Well, because there's no place to televise it, right? Well, that's changed or it's them that's changed or both. It didn't used to be that there would be these public hearings for Supreme Court justices. Because there's no place to televise it, right? Well, that's right. It's part of the way in which this has become more and more central to our political life is these celebrity justices that we now know about.

There was a nominee in 1987 named Robert Bork. That was the first really big public spectacle hearing. But it was on ideas. He was very, very extreme conservative. And Joe Biden was the chair of the Judiciary Committee and led weeks of hearings where this guy, there's nothing wrong with him personally, was so extreme in his political views that they voted him down. And a lot of Republicans voted him down, too. And after that, the lesson was don't say anything. Right. voted him down too. And after that, the lesson was don't say anything. So for a long time,

people would go up and they would dance around and they would just not answer questions. Elena Kagan, when she was a law professor, wrote an article saying this is a ritualized farce. Then more recently, as it's gotten closer and closer to the point where Roe v. Wade, say, was going to get overturned, all the questions were not these kind of euphemisms, but they were, are you going to overturn Roe v. Wade? What do you think of Roe v. Wade? And so you look at the hearings of the three nominees that Trump appointed, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett.

They all say, I believe in precedent. It's settled law. It's settled law. But they never say, I'm going to uphold it. They kind of imply it, but they're really careful. So the most recent hearing was Justice Katonji Brown Jackson. She's very impressive. And the hearing was not about broad political philosophy. First of all, all the questions from the Republicans seem to be designed to be spliced into tweets. And they were all about child pornography. And

it was QAnon stuff. You know, you were on the board of a school that had a book in the library and you made these rulings on these cases. It was nonsensical. And it was just because they were doing a dog whistle to QAnon, which is, you know, is this conspiracy. Can I say both sides do it? And it drives me fucking nuts. It's going to be about like four issues that don't affect even 0.001% of the population.

And that's what we're going to decide on. And it's maddening. And that's what the justices are getting elected on. It could be. I do think that when you look at the midterm election, the 2022 election, Biden got a lot of grief for saying that he thought that the election was about responding to the Supreme Court on the Dobbs case, the abortion case, but democracy. Right.

And taking on the election deniers who falsely say the election was stolen. And a lot of the kind of pundits said, oh, this shows he's losing it. The issue should be inflation and things like that. And it turns out that when you talk to independents and actually Republicans who voted for the Democrats, they actually voted on democracy and they voted on abortion and they put it together. They said, this is evidence of extremism. Most of the public is not in the fringes. Correct. And the political system pulls everything to the extremes. Yes.

Now, I would say right now, I think this is empirically right, though some listeners would say, oh, that's just partisan. When you watch Trump's town hall, there's no equivalent on the Democratic side right now in terms of making stuff up and being as inflammatory as that. I don't think. At least not near the center of power. Okay, agreed. But here's the liberals' problem. We're fucking creating it. That was gonna be one of my questions for you.

Why is CNN hosting a town hall meeting with Donald Trump? Why haven't liberals figured out that of the people who love Donald Trump, 40% of them had to vote for him because he was pro-life? They would have voted for any reporter. Yes. Then you had maybe 30% that were like, whatever his brand of misogyny.

His base is 30%, yeah. That's a big chunk. But what they're ruling out is an enormous percentage was just people who hate the left and they saw how much he pissed off the left. How'd they see it? Well, we showed them all day long, every fucking day. So there were lots of people who simply enjoyed how much the liberals were upset and wanted to see four more years of the liberals upset.

And so we gave him whatever it was, a trillion dollars of free media. We didn't learn. That's my biggest perplexion ever is watching CNN. You're doing it again? So who's at fault? Him lying or these bozos hosting this thing? Although, why assume CNN is liberal?

Ooh. That's what they're saying. They just wanted ratings. Post Tucker Carlson, they want to try to attract some of the Fox News viewers. But also, I think CNN got very polemical. I couldn't watch CNN for a while because they were so sort of fact-free opinion about Trump. Yes. And there's still not really a news network that is neutral.

I watch MSNBC. I like MSNBC. But it's pretty clear which side it's on. Frontline, maybe? PBS, hopefully? Too much of the neutral stuff is boring. Right. And so I've always thought that if there was a lively, less ideological news source, I would watch it.

But that's Frontline, and no one watches it. That's PBS. Too much of the media assumes that everybody is sitting around reading the news all day, following Twitter, and knows everything already. And what they need is analysis. And what they need is opinion. And I pay more attention to this stuff than most people, but I'm like, I don't know what happened today.

I have a job. I grew up in an era where you would watch the evening news and that was the first time you would learn what happened. I realized we're not going to be there. I agree with you. So it's not good for ratings and it's boring, but if excitement's what you want, then we have to make the government super exciting, which we've done. It was incredibly lopsided Supreme Court now, you know, demagogue. You have a guy that's very, very old running the country. Minimally, is that the best option in the country? Can't imagine it is. The whole system is laughably fucked up because we want to be entertained. And so here we are. It's very

entertaining and it's terrifying. But the new CNN guy, that's the claim of why they did have Trump and why they are doing all this is to make it more neutral, to have both sides, to not just be liberal. That's his whole point. That's what he's saying he's trying to do. And then we're saying, well, you can't have Trump on. You can do whatever you want. If you were upset you had Trump, you must acknowledge your role in creating Trump. And now here you go again, doing the same thing. It's just a little insane. And if you listen to the moderator of that, she had an agenda. She was finally going to get him to admit out loud

that there was no voting issue. Of course he didn't. I think they still thought, oh, we'll get them this time. They just need to fucking walk away from the whole sitch. Well, he's running. It is tricky. Like, it's a fair chance to get the nomination.

We're doing it all over again is all I'm saying. CNN, they showed Trump's speeches in 2016 in full, including when the podium was empty. Ratings. Yeah.

I have a friend who's a much, much older writer. And the question was always, you know, looking at Nazi Germany, the Jews who were there, why did they stay? In other words,

did they see what was coming? And he talked to a bunch of people he knew who were Jews from Germany. And they said, we knew Hitler was terrible. We used to listen to his speeches. It was obvious he was an anti-Semite.

But he was really riveting. But just the way people would watch Trump's debates and speeches in 2016 and say, oh, my God, could you believe the thing he just said now? I just read The Warburgs, which is the history of the Jewish banking family in Germany. And we have verbatim what they thought about all of it. Here they're running this great sector. The Germans need them to run the sector. They think they're kind of doing this thing where, yeah, we'll give 30% of the shares to Sumerians.

They're thinking, this guy's nuts. They stated it. Well, did you see this latest thing? It's going to be over in a second. Like, it was so insane. They kept thinking, oh, this will be over. Well, now that he did this crazy thing, everyone will finally wake up and it'll be over. And then it just kept getting worse. And it was never over until the Americans showed up. It's kind of the boiling

frog situation. Yeah. And Trump claiming the stolen election and the attack on the electoral system. We have not had that in our country before. And I don't think our system has figured out how to handle it because you can't ignore him. He somehow still speaks for tens of millions of people who partly just because he's the leader of their party, say, oh, then I also think the election was fraudulent. Oh yeah, I lost a couple of buddies that I go off roading with over there.

And it's hard to out-fact and out-argue. It might work on this stuff a lot. And there are ways of showing people that the elections can be trusted, that election officials are not partisan, they're local and they're trustworthy, but it's really hard. What I'm suggesting is with the greatest minds at our disposal, you being one of them,

working on a counter narrative to that, employing facts to debunk that, to me doesn't work. Another strategy we might try is ignoring. Because again, the fuel is that it's pissing everyone on the left off. You can't underestimate how motivating that is. Look, you were a speech writer for Clinton. If anyone knows how to compose a fucking speech, it's you.

If you made the perfect speech and you got to get all eyes on you, 300 million Americans, my guess is you might lead in your best day, 9% of them towards you. But I think if we just ignored the whole situation, it'd be a much more impactful gross total of people. You may be right.

I don't know. We got to figure that one out. We've been trying the same thing now for about eight years. It doesn't seem right. Okay, back to the Supreme Court. So what is originalism? Originalism is the way the Supreme Court now says it's the way it's making rulings.

Especially last year when they did these big new rulings, they said for the first time, this is how we're doing it. This is now originalism. And it's the idea that the only way you can properly interpret the Constitution is to look at what it meant back then in 1791, say, or maybe sometimes later if an amendment was added. That means in practice what the property-owning white men of 1791, many of whom owned slaves, none of whom believed women should have the right to vote, who used leeches for medical care, what they thought was the way society should organize itself. society should organize itself. And laissez-faire capitalism would allow for two steamboat captains to run their boats into each other in competition and kill 300 New Yorkers. And we'd say, fine, that's laissez-faire capitalism. That might be the right. That's the era. It's a crazy way to run a country. They call it history and tradition. Ironically, there's no history and tradition of making rulings this way. In other words, up until now, the country's been changing. People's

understanding of the Constitution has changed along with it. The Supreme Court, by and large, has moved along with the country. This idea that you have to go back in a time machine, and that's the only way to do it, is just as extreme, I think, as it sounds. But that's what they said as of last year. It sounds maybe hyperbolic, but it really isn't. So first of all, there were three big cases in the last three days of the term in June. This is June 2022. Right. They crammed decades of social change and political goals for the conservatives into those three days. The first case was called Bruin, and it was about the Second Amendment, about guns. And then the second day was Dobbs, which overturned Roe v. Wade and put at risk all the other rights to privacy that have been protected in the Constitution. And the third day was a case people don't know about as much called West Virginia versus EPA, which was about climate change, which really made it a lot harder for environmental protections and other things to happen from the government.

But the first day, as I said, was the Second Amendment case, Bruin. So the Second Amendment says that a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That's the entire thing. And it wasn't until 2008 that the Supreme Court ever said that protects an individual right

to gun ownership. As opposed to a militia member? Right. Before that, it was just over and over again, this is about the militias, which was from a time that's so different from us, we can't even imagine. Back then, every adult man, eventually every white man, was required by law to serve in the militia from 16 to 60 and required by law to own a gun and keep it at home for their military service.

There were no police. There was no army. The militia was the way it went. It was the Minutemen versus the Redcoats. And then the NRA for decades waged a long campaign to get people to say, no, actually, this is to protect an individual right to gun ownership. So that didn't happen until 2008 in a case called Heller. And that said, oh, it was an individual right.

Back then, that's what they meant. Whether that's true or not, that was what they claimed to be doing. Just time travel, talk to one of them. Tap James Madison on the shoulder. Also, let's say we time travel and that person told us that, then you'd have to go, and we've decided that person's opinion is the most important opinion in the history of mankind. Even if they knew that, that that would also somehow be a slam dunk. Not that other countries are always doing it better, but in England, when there's a new law being proposed on guns or anything else, they don't sit around and say, well, that's a really interesting idea. What did King George III think about it? Because that's what we're

going to make our decisions based on. That's literally what they do now. Although Putin does reference Rasputin. Yeah. The past has never passed in some ways. But so, you know, they did this thing in 2008. They said, yes, it's an individual right. But then they said there could still be restrictions on guns. There could still be laws that were public safety laws. And so over the past 14 years, almost overwhelmingly, the courts upheld the existing gun laws and said, you know, it's an individual right, but you've got to balance it against public safety. And that's true with the way we deal with all these rights in the Constitution. This case was by far the most radical opinion on the Second Amendment in the country's

history, by a long shot. Really? It was written by Clarence Thomas. He doesn't believe in precedent. He only believes, he says, in going back and asking what they meant back then. And Thomas said, well, you cannot care about public safety when you're talking about gun laws in the United States. Only history and tradition. And what that means is you have to find an analogous gun law from 1791. If they had them then, then you could do it now, but not anything else. And this just sounds as absurd as it is. It's actually what it says. This all struck down a law that was passed in 1911 in New York saying you can't carry a gun around New York City. They said, oh, it's actually what it says. This all struck down a law that was passed in 1911 in New York saying you can't carry a gun around New York City. They said, oh, it was okay up until now,

but now it turns out that was wrong because that violated what they meant back in the powdered wig days. New York quickly passed a new law. A federal judge in upstate New York said, well, history and tradition. Two examples from the colonial era, that's a mere trend. For it to be a tradition, you need three examples. And I therefore can find no tradition. I can find no examples of laws banning guns at sleepaway summer camps. Therefore, you can't have a law like that, let alone banning guns from underground electric trains, which hadn't been invented for a century, and struck down all these laws. And it sounds like a parody, but that's actually what's going on all over the country right now. Well, and here's where we get into

the a la carte nature of the argument. So I want to state for the record, I own guns. So I'm not acting holier than thou. I've said this a million times. If there was a switch on the wall I could hit, no more guns in America, I'd hit it in one second. But I also own them. If we're going back and we're getting literal about this, which is what he wants to do, Clarence Thomas, it is to fight a tyrannical government.

And at that time, the weaponry was dead equal. The civilian could have the exact same firepower as the tyrannical government. as the tyrannical government. So if that is what it was about, he must believe that you should be able to own drones and nuclear weapons because that's the tyrannical government we have to keep in check. That's the armaments they have.

So we should always be keeping pace with them, which then immediately we get into, well, who can afford that? So basically we're saying Bezos should have probably tons of nuclear weapons and drones. He has drones. Well, that's a good point. It's so literal and then all of a sudden it's not.

If they really believed that this was to keep a tyrannical government in check, then they should be on a very proactive campaign to get every American semi-auto grenade launchers and F-16s and drones. Or have a draft, because everybody would need to serve in the military. And you could even make the argument also that if you're really serious about looking back at what they meant, it was all about public safety. They didn't have police back then. The idea that it wasn't about public safety

or that public safety only came from me as an individual defending my home. The originalism in some respects in that case was kind of fake because Thomas rummaged around looking for examples that worked for him. I mean, to me, the fact that this law that they struck down was from 1911, that's kind of fake because Thomas rummaged around looking for examples that worked for him. I mean, to me, the fact that this law that they struck down was from 1911, that's kind of history. I wasn't around then. It's a long tradition in our country that people had guns in their homes, but that there were limits or even bans on what you could carry. Even in the old West, there were.

Right. Check your guns in town. There's a wonderful photo from 1878 from Dodge City, Kansas, which was the archetypal Wild West town. It looks like a movie set. It looks like Universal Studios' backlot. It's a dusty main street. There's saloons on either side.

There's hitching posts. And there's a sign in the middle of the street that says, Welcome to Dodge City. Firearms strictly prohibited. Right. And you had to leave them at the town limit, and you would get a token, like a coat check for your gun.

And so there's kind of a long history. The next day was the Dobbs case, and probably folks are more familiar with that. All these people who said, oh, I respect settled precedent, said, actually, this was egregiously wrong and they overturned Roe v. Wade and thus the nationally protected constitutional right to reproductive rights. And they did it in a way also that put at risk all the other privacy rights that rely on the same thing in the Constitution, the same idea of protecting privacy, whether it's contraception or same-sex relations. I mean, there's a lot of other things that are based on the same thing. And in that one, the implications of the originalism

aren't fake. They're just terrifying. Just as Samuel Alito wrote that opinion, he literally six times cites a guy named Matthew Hale. He was a British judge from long before the founding of this country who was notorious for sentencing women to death for witchcraft and who invented the doctrine of marital rape, who said that a man cannot rape his wife because she doth have consented. They cite him six times as showing, see, this is the tradition. It's just not the way our country has ever organized itself up until now. It is literally a turning back of the clock.

And I think people know some of these rulings are big deal. I don't think that people really know how big a deal the gun ruling was. But I'm not sure people understand how significant it is that this very powerful branch of government with lifetime appointments is now making its decisions based on such an extreme approach. We don't see that in the Congress. We don't see that even in presidency. But they're letting their freak flag fly. And there's not a whole lot they think that people can do about it. And for a long time coming, we could probably predict,

there's a lot of youth within this by the judicial standards. A lot of these people could be around for another 20 plus years. That's part of why they were put on there at young ages. I think that's right. Now, here's something that makes a lot of sense to me. That they're tenured. that they cannot be fired because, again, per the original design, if they're going to be the voice of slowdown, let's think before we act against the crowd mentality that pervades the U.S. at times, they need some protections to make very unpopular decisions. So that in itself seems very defendable to me,

that they would have a job security. But I guess why not for a 10-year window? Yeah, wild lifetime. You want to protect judicial independence, and that's really important. And we've seen it even in other countries where judicial independence gets threatened, even most recently in Israel,

where huge protests against what people thought was an attack by Netanyahu on the independence of the judiciary. And I think we can see his aim. It is to make his position stronger and theirs weaker. Yeah, but every state Supreme Court and the constitutional courts in every other country have some kind of term limit or a retirement age or something like that. And it goes back to the basic insight that no one should have that much public power for too long. It actually goes back to George Washington, who understood that sooner or later, part of what you need to do is limit the amount of time you have the much power. The Constitution says that justices serve on good behavior. You certainly could pass a constitutional amendment to create an 18-year term, say. I think it could also be done by a statute passed by Congress saying that after 18

years, their role changes. They become what's called senior judges, and they still get paid, which is important to them. And they have some role, but they're not the same. President Biden appointed me to be on a commission on the U.S. Supreme Court. And these government commissions famously don't do anything. And this one literally was instructed not to reach any conclusions. No kidding. In the executive order. It was all because there was pressure on Biden when he was a candidate to be for expanding

the court. So he said, well, I'll create a commission. Literally, they said, whatever you do, don't reach any conclusions. And we didn't. Congratulations. Yeah. Finally, a government agency that works as intended. But it was really interesting. We had public hearings and we heard from dozens of

witnesses, left and right. And some said, I'm for expanding the court. Others said, I'm against expanding the court. Some said, I'm for a mandatory code of ethics. Others said, I'm against a mandatory code of ethics. Over and over again, left and right, they said, oh, but I'm for term limits, of course. There is a national consensus. People get this. It isn't Democrats. It isn't Republicans. Now, if this actually starts to move, I'm sure instantly it will become more political.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All these people that agree currently, once they find out what their side is supposed to believe. There is a sort of silent national understanding that you can do this without really undoing the stuff we want, which is the independent court that can stand up for rights and say no to the mob and that sort of thing. These justices are on there for much longer than they used to be. It's a much more political process. And the people who are on the Supreme Court are actually different than they used to be. You asked about the Warren court. Who were they? Warren was the governor of California. You had former senators, former

attorneys general, people who'd lived life, people who understood humanity in different ways. Had been elected. The people on the Supreme Court now, all but one of them was an appeals court judge. They're very smart. They're academically gifted. They were all churned through the kind of ideological legal machines of either the Republican or the Democratic Party. None of them have ever been elected. Only one or two of them had a senior government position at all. And that doesn't mean you have to have a senior government position. But again, it's a very rarefied, hyper-intellectual approach that they

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I think what's really relevant to say about this recent schism in June is that popular opinion is quite clear. Popular opinion did not agree with the Roe v. Wade. Every single poll I've read has been really demonstrative. Did not agree with what they did. Exactly, with what they did. The day of the gun ruling, because remember there were a ton of mass shootings. There's a ton of mass shootings every single day.

Exactly. Yeah, so you could say any day. Any day. It's the spring, comes with the weather, unfortunately unfortunately and gallup polls show that the day the supreme court basically radically deregulated gun laws only eight percent wanted looser gun laws a lot of people wanted them to stay as they were yeah a lot of people wanted them to be stronger only eight percent wanted what the court did same thing on the dobbs. There has been for a long time a strong consensus in the country, probably with some limits, but pretty strongly pro-choice.

Yeah. Upwards of 70%. There's no issue like that. You're seeing a real backlash in these other periods of American history. The backlash to the overreaching Supreme Court really shaped the country in big ways. You never know, of course, what's it going to be like now. Are we seeing little ripple or is this some longer term thing? Two things really suggest that it's a pretty big deal. One is the midterm election, the strongest performance by a party controlling the White House in decades.

Generally speaking, the pattern is whatever party is elected as president, they usually suffer then in the midterms. This time, the Democrats almost kept the House and actually gained seats in the Senate, won state houses and legislatures, and it was a reaction to the Supreme Court. And the other thing was an election a few months ago in Wisconsin. So state Supreme Courts are really important. They're not part of the federal system. State constitutions are really important. Wisconsin is a state where it's pretty evenly divided, half and half Democrat, Republican. The elections are always really tight. Now, it's very gerrymandered. So the legislature has a super majority of Republicans, but the voters,

it's pretty evenly divided. They had an election for Supreme Court justice and most state Supreme Court justices around the country are elected, whether that's a good thing or not, different issue, but they are. And it's always really tight. This election was a referendum on the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade, whether there should be abortion rights in Wisconsin, and also gerrymandering, the drawing of these election lines in a manipulative way. It was an 11-point victory for the more liberal candidate in reaction to Dobbs. Political scientists will tell you that's an electoral realignment. If that gets replicated in one year, that's like an earthquake. And I think there is a big reaction that's going on. It's also putting politicians in a very weird position in some of these southern states,

because I'm from Georgia and people really like Brian Kemp. He's giving money back to the people and he just signed this six week abortion bill because he has to do that now. Six weeks from the beginning of your period. Yes. So it's really two weeks. Yes. It's well before most women know they're pregnant. He doesn't want to be the one doing that. That's hard for him politically. But now the Supreme Court has put that on these politicians, which is sort of interesting. When they overturned Roe v. Wade, they said, look, this should be for the states. This should be for the democratically elected branches of government.

So first of all, you have the reality is in places like Georgia or in Florida, where Governor DeSantis signed the same kind of bill, which could doom him in the general election nationwide. The political system is very captured by the extremes. These are states that are the most gerrymandered with the most voting restrictions, where democracy is not at its healthiest. It's roiling things. Now, one of the really good things that I think happened in the 20th century, and the Supreme Court had a big role, was to say we have nationwide rights. It doesn't matter where you live. Your freedom of speech is the same. Your freedom of religion is the same. Abortion rights basically is the same. It wasn't always followed, but that we were one country finally. And it wasn't just the court. It was also when they did Brown versus Board of Education. Ten years later,

Southern schools, only 3% of them were integrated. It wasn't until Congress passed the civil rights laws that you actually saw the real change happen. But nevertheless, there was this idea that we're Americans, we're not from these separate states, we're going to all live the same way, more or less. Now, if Congress can't pass, say, voting rights laws because of the filibuster, even when there's a majority, which is the case,

and the Supreme Court won't protect these rights, because they won't, then states can go do their thing. And so the red states, mostly, where it's one party control, places like Georgia or Florida or Texas, especially, they're headed in one direction. And places like Michigan or Minnesota or Oregon are headed in another direction. And the kind of life you're going to be able to live is going to be different in these different states. Well, one prediction I made right when that happened, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which I think is starting to materialize a little bit, and I am even afraid to say it out loud, but I think the Republican party committed suicide with that. In that, I think they vastly underestimated that the

connective tissue and the glue that held that party I think they vastly underestimated that the connective tissue and the glue that held that party together, and even more that made them turn up in such numbers to vote. In my opinion, that party had really kind of boiled down to a single issue that was keeping it together. And now they don't have that issue. And I think you're going to see much lower turnouts from that party. I think the people that live in the red states that already have it banned, they're happy, they're done, their mission's complete. I think they spelled the end of their party with it, for starters, because the margin was not that big for that party. You take away that section of the motivated voter that only cared about abortion

is now gone. That's going to be enormously significant. Second thing is, and I don't like this one, all these states are going to become whatever they want. It's going to be a very scary place to raise a teenage daughter. I'm not going to want to do that if I have a teenage daughter. The economic opportunities are going to be different in these states that have more liberal agendas. We already see it. The brain trusts are going to go where there's more freedom. It's going to be a shootout, and I hate to predict it, but the red states are going to suffer, and then the blue states are going to go, see, we were right. And I don't want any of that. I don't think that's the goal is victory in all these different states doing a different way and some losing dramatically because of it.

And the people inside those states suffering so that they can lose and us celebrating. Well, they have to vote for different people then. I mean, that is part of it. You have some control in your vote. But, you know, if you look at these founding fathers, they were pretty split. There were a lot of them that really believed in a federalist approach. Some of them was really hell bent on the republic. They wanted states rights. Some wanted a strong federal government. This is the original debate that's been going on. And we're actually now going to see it play out where it's like, great, let's all compete, all 50 of us, because now everyone can do whatever the fuck they want. And we'll find out. The truth will come to the surface.

But I'm a Federalist. I don't think that's how we are competitive against China. I so agree with that. It's interesting, too, because it's not just the states. Think of Texas. One of my kids used to live in El Paso. Texas is like a country. Four of the biggest cities in the United States are in Texas,

and they are as blue as Santa Monica. And they call them the blueberries and the red seeds. Yeah, exactly. Everybody there thinks they have their own version of that. But the rest of the state is so conservative. So a place like Austin, which is America's boomtown, everybody wants to move to Austin or at least visit Austin. The laws being passed affect the people in Austin on gay rights, on abortion, rich people and poor people. It's not just, you know, wink, wink, it really doesn't affect me. I mean, it affects everybody. And so one of the good things about what happened in the 20th century was the understanding that we were stronger when we were one country. And if you go

to the mall in Washington, there's a World War II memorial that's about 10 years old. They hadn't had one up until now. It's 50 pillars for the 50 states. And I thought when I saw it, that's not how they thought back then. FDR was not talking about 50 states. This was one country. And we were standing up as the beacon for democracy and freedom all around the world as a country, not 50 individual sovereign states. A great example of this is like the electrification of the country in the 30s. That's a premium, of this is like the electrification of the country in the 30s. That's a premium, I think, sample to look at, which is it didn't behoove anyone in California or New York to fight for the rights to electrify the South. They didn't let the market decide who got electricity. They said, nope, this electricity is being generated by the resources of this country, and therefore you

guys are going to electrify. And that was to defend the rural America. That wouldn't happen today. They'd be like, yeah, fuck them. Let's see how those backwards motherfuckers die under, you know, no, our best moments have always been when we're like, no, no, it's an embarrassment for the country of any part of this country. It doesn't have electricity.

One of the things I hope for is that that kind of national humanitarian vision sooner or later still can appeal to people. Yeah, a child born in any part of the country should have virtually the same opportunities to get educated, to thrive, to do everything. We can't have these pockets of people living in the 40s and some living in the future.

It's crazy. You mentioned that I was Bill Clinton's chief speechwriter when he was president. Oversaw 2,000 speeches. I just want to put that number, the future. It's crazy. You mentioned that I was Bill Clinton's chief speechwriter when he was president. Oversaw 2,000 speeches. I just want to put that number out there. That is bonkers. What a cool job. When I left that job after a long time, they had a very nice party for me.

And they gave me a t-shirt with what they said was the symbol of the speechwriting department. It was the recycling symbol. You know, you say the same thing over and over again. You get to 2,000 speeches. You oversaw 2,000 speeches, but only 12 original ones. Yeah, exactly. No, but Clinton, before it had anything to do with him, when he was running for president in 1992, and again, a lot of these divisions didn't start last week. And in fact, the Democratic Party had been really split, especially since the 60s, by divisions between white working class voters who were still Democrats at that point and voters of color. And the idea was that

it would be impossible to put that coalition back together again. And Clinton was very focused on this. He was really determined to show you could. And so during the primaries in 1992, in values terms, he said, opportunity for all, responsibility from all, a community of all Americans. And it sounds like Pablum now, but in Detroit, when they had the primary in Michigan, he went to Macomb County,

which was the suburban county where the white flight had happened, where all the white UAW members had moved to the suburbs and voted for Reagan. And they still considered themselves Democrats. Well, they were voting against their interest in that they were union members. And he went and gave a speech at a community college in Macomb County

and an inner city black church in Detroit the same day, and he gave the same speech to prove you could. If you talk in this national language of equal opportunity but values driven, that you could talk to these very divided communities. It wasn't a party trick. It was to show that you could. Well, you're losing sight of the real enemy, right? We can't have New Hampshire competing against New Mexico.

We need to be unified in some of these more geopolitical struggles. So let's just really quickly talk about why it would behoove folks on the right as well to try to be motivated to address this Supreme Court issue? Because again, right now, if you're on the right, you're probably stoked. I can't not recognize that. And again, we were pretty stoked in the 70s on the left. But is there more to say than other, like, well, the tide will change. So if like with this system, guess what? Then you're going to be eating shit for 21 years. Is that the system we want? Ultimately, my main issue with our government is the zero-sum nature of all these disputes and the notion on both sides. I think liberals think if we

had nine liberal Supreme Court justices that this country would be utopia and it'd be a fucking disaster. One of the things that has to happen that I argue in this book is that liberals need to understand that and fall out of love with the idea that the Supreme Court are these guardians who are going to do it all for us. And that it is ultimately, when possible, better to have the democratic system produce our protections for equality and protections for rights,

because it goes deeper and it becomes more socially accepted and in people's hearts rather than just something that's done with a lightning bolt from up above. One of the things that people of all political parties need to re-embrace is the idea of judicial restraint, that there's just a limit to what the Supreme Court or the courts should be doing versus the other parts of the government and the political system. Especially because it's the only one of the three branches that we have no recourse.

If we disagree with Congress or the president, we have an election every four years. So this is a branch that we have no recourse if they go insane. We have some recourse passing constitutional amendments. Sometimes you can pass laws, but sooner or later, it's a better system if the Supreme Court knows its place in the system. So it's hard to say who that benefits. It's hard to say kind of whether that's left or right, but it is out of whack to have this nine folks. And it creates a crisis potentially for the system. The country is moving in one direction and the Supreme Court is moving in another, as is sort of visibly happening in front of our eyes. That creates a crisis of legitimacy. They have the power they have because we give them that power. It's not written in the

Constitution how much power they would have. We want a court that is like a court, that is going to not be just a political body and is not just going to be a party caucus, but is going to somehow act like a court. And if it isn't, then that creates a crisis of legitimacy, which we see, I think, happening right now. I would think for their own self-preservation, they should also be semi-aware of how dangerous of a position they've put themselves in. When we have recourse, we can be patient for two years. When your issue is all you care about and there's these people, there's no removing them unless there's violence. Like, I'm shocked that they're not more scared. When we had eras where you couldn't remove them from power,

you saw enormous, I mean, you read any of these old books, world leaders were getting assassinated like every nine months. It's nuts how much people assassinated. If you read the notes from the Constitutional Convention, when they're talking about the presidency and impeachment, although you can impeach justices, they were really talking about whether we should have impeachment for the president and why that was a good idea. Ben Franklin says, well, the only alternative method of dealing with an abusive executive is assassination. So this is probably better. Yeah.

And people need to know that that system is there. So in the past, the Supreme Court has reacted, whether it says it is or not, they react to public opinion. They react to the country, both as it should be. But it's one of the reasons they kind of have tended to hover near the middle of the political consensus. These folks say, we're not going to do that. That would be shallow and cowardly for us to care about what the public thinks. But they're there as part of a very well-oiled political machine. I mean, there's a huge amount of money and political organizing that went into getting these six very conservative justices on there. People are familiar with the Federalist Society, which started as a college club, believe it or not, as a club of law students, but now it is a massive political machine to make sure that the justices are conservative

and to make sure that they don't make any sudden moves, that they're kind of reliable conservatives. I always used to look at the Federalist Society and say, gee, they really do quite a lot, considering they don't seem to have that much money. Turns out that someone secretly gave $1.6 billion a couple of years ago to Leonard Leo, who's the leader of this operation, and they spend it on ads.

Is that secret donor the Koch brothers? It was somebody who had a company and gave the company to the guy who controls the Federalist Society. They left the company. I assume they got a tax deduction. Don't hold me to that. But there's a gusher of money involved in this. And in recent weeks, we've learned about Clarence Thomas and this right-wing billionaire. It's not an ethics issue. Ethics to me is like, oh, am I allowed to take that cup of coffee or not? This guy is subsidizing his lifestyle. Luxury yacht trips.

I got to say, and I think we do this a lot, I think we embarrass ourselves a little bit. Now, I have joined people on their airplanes. If I'm friends with a super rich dude and we're all going on vacation somewhere and I get invited on a jet, of course I'm going. I don't owe him $11,000 or whatever my portion was. I've been in people's nice houses. They're nice jets and they're nice boats. Now, I guess you could argue, well, you're not a policymaker. Yeah, you don't have any power. But I will say, I think it's a lot of smoke. I think joining someone on a vacation.

Now, if he buys him a jet, we got a big problem. But joining someone, that's not big enough. He's paying for the college and he's paying for stuff. He's paying for his surrogate son's education. And he bought his mother's house and kept the mother in it and did's paying for stuff. He's paying for his surrogate son's education and he bought his mother's house and kept the mother in it and did all the renovations. This is the other thing,

is none of it got disclosed. You know, two decades ago, the LA Times wrote a story saying, hey, you know, this guy Harlan Crow seems to be giving a lot of gifts to Clarence Thomas based on the disclosure forms at the time. So Thomas just stopped disclosing.

To me, it's like impugning Clinton over that. The original story in ProPublica, the website that revealed this. They had a painting from this private resort that Thomas goes to, I guess, every summer. And the painting, it looks to me like one of these paintings of the dogs playing poker. Like it's these people sitting around.

And it's Thomas and Harlan Crowe smoking stogies with Leonard Leo, with the head of the Federalist Society who controls this $1.6 billion bank account and this political operation. The scandal is not that, oh, Thomas was a liberal and then he took this jet trip

and suddenly he became a conservative. It's this political machine. It's like a political machine of the kind that we would see back in Tammany Hall days. A faction of a faction now controlling the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is the only court in the country that doesn't have a binding ethics code. We're fine. Trust us.

Every other court has something else. So to me, that's not as important as term limits or something like that. That's more kind of structural. Exactly. So for me, it's like you're wasting firepower. This isn't a knockout punch. This is a distraction. I think it obscures from the real problems.

And I don't like this incessant need to try to put Donald Trump behind bars for weird things other than trying to obstruct democracy. That's the only thing anyone should be pursuing. Yeah, but that's not at all what he ends up in court for. Like this whole thing in New York where he was arraigned is going to blow up terrifically. Right, but the Atlanta one, that has real legs and that is about obstruction of democracy. But that's not at all what he ends up in court for. Like this whole thing in New York where he was arraigned is going to blow up terrifically. Right.

But the Atlanta one that has real legs and that is about obstruction of democracy. Like they're all coming. That's great for me. That's the big thing that we all should be insanely upset about is that he's calling governors asking them to change a vote count. Find 11,000 votes. Yeah. Yeah. But the Stormy Daniels buy off.

Who gives a fuck? No one cares. It's embarrassing. It's a waste of everyone's time. That DA is going to go down from it. It's yet another person wasting time and energy in this fringe thing that we would not want a Democratic leader. I don't agree with this. I think this is as threatening as the Supreme Court issue, which you're raising brilliantly in the supermajority. But this notion of jailing ex-leaders is very

fucking dangerous. The fact that Trump was saying, put her in jail, I found to be his most offensive thing he did, among many offensive things. And so I don't like our side saying, let's throw this person in jail over something like Stormy Daniels payoff. I think that's us jailing political opponents. And that is the biggest destructor of democracy. It's an interesting thing, the New York case. So I think that we should see how this plays out. I know that DA, he was not looking to get Trump. People who are familiar with the New York criminal system say, oh, this is a really strong case. People who have their experience practicing law in the federal system, they say, oh, this is a big nothing burger. But the people who actually

have experience with white collar crime in New York say, oh, this is a strong case. You know how impacted the New York court system is. Do you think the most pressing issue is for us to sort out whether he paid Stormy Daniels illegally? It's the most politically motivated thing ever. And I think we need to stay the fuck out of these politically motivated trials. Yeah, may or may not be a good idea. I don't think it's actually politically motivated based on knowing the people who did it. Okay. That said, I think there's a reason we as a country have not had indictments of former presidents. It is a big deal, but it's also the case. I think that there's going to be several and that the one in Atlanta presumably is going to be about the overt attempt to steal the 2020 election.

And that has to be tried and prosecuted. That's an enormous threat to democracy. I would say, too, the question on the documents. So I've always said that if you walk around Washington, D.C., and go into the basements of a lot of the houses, kick open the cardboard boxes, a lot of classified documents would fall out. But there's evidence, at least from what we read, that Trump obstructed justice, that

he got a subpoena and said, oh, let me see what we've got here. That's fine. But to me, that files perfectly with Hillary's emails. It's like, OK, is that the thing? The attempt to overthrow American democracy. This goes back to the CNN question. How do we grapple with this new thing that none of us have experienced before, which is this political leader. Who wouldn't leave office.

Who wouldn't leave office. Virtually wouldn't leave office. All the other stuff is a waste of time. Like, that's the only thing. I think that if these other indictments happen, if Atlanta happens, if there's something related to January 6th, that will dwarf everything else. Yeah, I do too. And its impact. But who knows? Okay. You say in the book, conservatives long

understood and liberals are now remembering that the only way to win meaningful legal and policy change is first to win in the court of public opinion. It turns out that the most important words in the constitution are we the people. So I love this. I agree with this. Does it worry you that the court of public opinion is controlled by an increasingly small group of loud actors, mostly on social media platforms, whose opinions are drastically overrepresented in the media? Do you trust what we believe public opinion is versus the reality of it? Because I've lost trust in that. I think that the vast majority of this country is centrist. That's not at all what an alien watching our media would conclude.

I think these issues that we're all spiraling about are the most fringe, useless issues that are driving the whole narrative. Public opinion is really at the height of its most fucked upness, I think. Public opinion is not like a scientific lab experiment. But I would say public opinion is where it is. The political system, as polarized as it is and as broken as it is, is not reflecting always public opinion. But there are times when voters voting, even now, can overwhelm the broken system or respond. And again, some of the response just in the last couple of years to the Supreme Court suggests that. I think sooner or later that there's what a lot of people call sort of the

exhausted majority that is actually pro-choice, that is actually pro-democracy, pro-gun limits, but not necessarily take away all the guns, but not having more guns than people and AR-15s. Compromises to complex issues. And the answer ultimately is if you can move that public and have it reflected in elections and reflected in the political system that comes out of it, that is the best answer. And the interesting thing is when you look at how did we get this notion that you couldn't have any limits on guns in the Constitution. That's not what the Constitution said when it was started. And it wasn't what people thought it meant a few decades ago. By the way, it will be something different in 12 years than what we think of today.

But what the NRA did was wage a campaign for constitutional change. They didn't start by going to court. They didn't start by going to get judges to make a ruling. They started with Charlton Heston. They started with scholarship. They actually paid for a lot of scholarship to try to show what the real story was. Some of it was real. Some of it was kind of made up. But anyway, they understood that. They worked on public opinion.

They worked on elections. Charlton Heston was the head of the NRA for years. They moved public opinion so that by the time the Supreme Court in 2008 ruled that this was an individual right to gun ownership, it was non-controversial. It was like an apple falling from a tree. Barack Obama and John McCain said, oh yeah, that makes sense. Marriage equality, I think same thing. There was a really sophisticated effort to change public opinion about it before getting a court ruling. Starting with Will and

Grace. Will and Grace. And when people knew somebody in their family who was gay, who was LGBTQ, then suddenly their attitude changed. So getting people to be out was like a political strategy. It was like addiction. I've seen very few moments in all those debates with Trump where I thought he actually lost his own group. In fact, I can only think of one. And it was when he made fun of Biden for having an addict son. I was like, oof, everyone has an addict they love in their life. And Biden's reaction was very human. Yes. And very not politician, very real. And I was like, you can't do that.

No. We all know the reality of that. Plus Trump himself, his brother was an alcoholic. He's paid for a quadrillion abortions. Everything, everything. It's literally not even worth exploring. So many times in the last 10 years where I just said, finally, I'm never going to have to think about this guy.

I know. I never talk about him. Six years of doing this. I don't talk about him. Sometimes you have to admit there are certain opponents. We're not going to see the victory over him. He was impeached twice. Nothing happened.

He's got these court cases. He just lost a $5 million verdict. He's not going to pay that money. People need to accept we're not going to beat him that way. The only way we can beat him is to ignore him. That's it. And to have something that is as powerful to as many people as what he's putting forward. Yes. That as well. That's a huge short-sightedness of both parties that he was answering something that no one's actually put their finger on and no one's come into in a more healthy version. Because what he's saying, I get, by the way, I'm from Michigan. I'm from right where the suburbs end and the rural shit begins.

And I know there's a lot of fucking poor ass white people on welfare that I grew up with in the welfare apartment building that have three kids, no dad around. And they're hearing a lot of plans for other marginalized people. And they don't ever hear one for them. And that's a huge chunk of the country that literally neither side really. Well, the right was doing. That's what Trump was doing.

So the poor white people are really being. What he was saying. What he was saying. That's right. He wasn't doing. He didn't do anything. Biden's done much more for those people than Trump did.

Totally agree, but he said, I see you. He didn't really think we're going to return to a coal economy with a bunch of coal workers. That wasn't real.

He just lied to them. That's it. If you're at home and you're like, well, he cares about them and they've been rendered obsolete and I've been rendered obsolete and what the fuck happened

to this town that we used to love and have parades in? Like, a big chunk of the country's suffering and that's a failing of the Democratic Party. It'd be wrong to acknowledge white people need help, too. And if you think about the 2008 financial crash and the recovery in the Great Recession, there was not enough of a sense in those parts of the country that people understand what's going on in my life.

People understand this is a really big deal. This is not as bad as the Great Depression, but it's worse than anything we've had other than that. Yeah. And you wouldn't know that from hearing the elite discourse, including the Democratic Party, for a long time. My mom had built a business over 20 years that in that 2008, everything went away. The warehouses that had been worth something were worth 10 cents on the dollar. The GM contract, they go bankrupt. They're not paying vendors. Like I watched my own family's business, 20 years of work, disappear in 2008. You know, no one felt bad for her. The country's changing. The demography of the country is changing. People conflate their

situation with that change. That is one of the oldest stories, too, is the idea that going back to the 1890s, the reason we had the Jim Crow laws, the Civil War happened, there was this brief period where there was a real attempt at multiracial democracy in the South. You had black governors and black senators and members of Congress. It was all sort of covered up later. And then there was this pushback, and they took the rights away, but they didn't start actually writing segregation into law in the South until the 1890s. And that was because for the first time it looked like white farmers and white workers and black farmers and workers were going to unite. And the power brokers of that time said, we got to come up with some way to say to those white farmers, at least you're not them. Yes. You know, and that division is not new. It's been a powerful tool. And when Democrats or progressives, whatever they call themselves, have succeeded, it's when they found a way to

unite ethnically divided communities saying you've got something else in common. Yes. I say this all the time. I'm straight up white trash. Most white trash dudes and most black dudes from downtown Detroit, way more in common than me and any of the East Coast people. So it's like there is this incredible unity that no one wants to bring together and acknowledge. But when they talk about wedge issues, the wedge was to drive people apart along their tribal lines rather than seeing on economic or other issues what were the things that

united them. Yeah, they established the in-group, out-group for them. Yeah. Fortunately or unfortunately, we're in a kind of a time of epic change. The split between the Supreme Court veering in one direction, the country moving pretty inexorably in another direction, that's part of it. It's only part of it. There's massive technological change, demographic change, AI. You know, in the last two months, suddenly everything's changed. We're not going to have a kind of a calm, static period. That can either be catastrophic or it can be when the new consensus forms itself, when sometimes things get themselves together. Is it safe to say that you feel like this is a moment that would mirror the Lincoln era or your hope? Yeah. I mean, either we're

going to really slide backwards and get just fractured and divided and at each other's throats, or it becomes a time of renewal and positive change. That's up to the people. As I said, that's up to the court of public opinion. It's up to people getting engaged and staying engaged, not being stuck in the rut of their own ideas forever. Yeah. What is the logistical roadmap for, let's say, term limiting? Would that not require like a two-thirds? These are impossibilities. So if it's done by a constitutional amendment, there's that process. And that's pretty hard, although it's interesting. Right now, doing constitutional amendments on that or say, one of the things the Supreme Court did before these last couple of years was just to strike down all the campaign finance laws, many of the significant ones, and you could have constitutional amendments to restore those, for example. Right now,

it looks impossible. How could you do a constitutional amendment? It always looks that way. And then about every 50 years, there's a burst of them when things get really messed up. That's one way. If you did term limits for Supreme Court justices, you could pass it, I think, by a statute. Let's assume that's true. Well, how do you get a statute passed? How do you get a law passed? Isn't Congress completely dysfunctional and broken? The filibuster in the Senate, which says you need 60 votes to cut off debate and pass something, that's not in the Constitution. That's just need 60 votes to cut off debate and pass something, that's not in the Constitution. That's just something that's been done recently.

And you can change that. I worked very hard on trying to get federal voting rights legislation passed in the last few years. The thing we wanted, federal national standards and an end to gerrymandering, it passed the House of Representatives. President Biden said he was going to sign it. It actually had a majority of the Senate Biden said he was going to sign it. It actually had a majority of the Senate,

but it didn't have 60 votes. And there were two senators who supported the bill but would not change the rules, so it couldn't pass. You were close. Yeah, really close. And the next time the Democrats have control of the House and the Senate, I think they will make an exception to the filibuster for voting rights. So you can get stuff done. You need the political will.

Now, really quick. They ultimately interpret the laws that have been passed and they can render them. So once they pass a term limit law, that will go to the Supreme Court. Yeah, yeah. There's that. That's weird. You know, if Congress passes term limits and the Supreme Court says, oh, that's unconstitutional. Yeah, what happens then?

I bet you get a constitutional amendment real fast. Oh, you think they'd all be like, fuck y'all, we're going to get two things. And they'll be like, public rebellion. Public says, yeah, we support this thing. Our elected officials did this. You blocked it. Guess what? We've got power too.

These are government officials. They're not wizards, even though they wear robes. They're not religious figures. Everyone thinks they're Dumbledores. Yeah, exactly. And nobody's Dumbledore. It's a Dumbledore. They're just public officials who wield power,

and we need to treat them that way. You just wandered into something wonderful, which is Monica's true worldview is her product. Everything's on there perfectly. Gryffindor, obviously. And Ravenclaw. What house would... Dax be?

Or you? I don't know what a Kagan would be. Oh. Or Sotomayor. Or Thomas. I stumbled into some bad... I said that once about somebody being a Hufflepuff. Oh, yeah.

That was bad things. And I got a lot of heat. Huge reaction. Yeah. So I can't play this game anymore. I get in trouble. Okay. I have one last question, which is your wife, she's currently

counsel for the governor of New York. She was a deputy assistant attorney general for the U.S. and the Clinton administration. And your brother was a senior advisor to the chairman of the FCC. What's the family dinner? What's the family reunion? My kids will point out that it is far too focused on law, politics, and policy, and why are we not normal like other families? I got to imagine it's like just the apex political debate at a dinner. My wife and I met in law school. We actually both went to Little Rock, Arkansas. Oh, you did?

And worked in the Clinton campaign in 92. So we had this sort of underpaid adventure throughout our lives. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We get to do interesting stuff. She's counsel to the governor. I see her once in a while. Did she ever take the governor on like a private jet to a yacht?

You know, she's the person in the government who tells people, those are two donuts. You can't. It's interesting stuff. Yeah. It's interesting stuff. Last question. You've uniquely touched down in a lot of these insanely esteemed fantasy status level things.

You go to Columbia undergrad. You get your Juris Doctorate from NYU. You're in the White House for eight years. That's like the pinnacle. But then after there, you go and you lecture at Harvard. And then now you're at NYU again. You're in all these esteemed places. How does the real life experience live up to the fantasy?

Are you able to enjoy it in the way I would hope? Oh, I've been in my current job running the Brennan Center for 17 years. And people say, why are you still there? Part of the answer is, I don't know what else to do. But part of it is, it's a joyous thing to be able to get to work on stuff you care about and really dig in. And I don't just yell at the television. You know, I feel maybe ineffectually or self-delusion, but I get to go and try to work on stuff I care about and advance it. There's a quote from one of the Greek poets.

I don't remember which one, but happiness is the full use of one's faculties along lines of excellence. I'm lucky in that way. I like that. It was interesting. When I was in government, the thing that all the media and fictional portrayals of government don't show enough. On the one hand, there's an assumption, sort of House of Cards style, that it's all really corrupt and malevolent. It's actually much more idealistic and much more chaotic and incompetent. More Veep.

Part of Veep and part of West Wing. Nobody in West Wing ever messed up ever about anything. And in real life, it's more like Veep in some ways. Yeah. Well, Michael, this has been really incredible. I hope everyone reads the super majority how the Supreme Court divided America. It's among the very most pressing issues of our day.

And I don't imagine a ton of people know how the whole system works. It's one of the more convoluted ones we have, if not the most. So walking through all this in your steady hands, I highly recommend The Supermajority. Everyone should read it. It's such a pleasure to get to meet you. I hope we get to do it again. You've written a bunch of books. I'm sure you'll write some more. Everyone should read it. It's such a pleasure to get to meet you. I hope we get to do it again. You've written a bunch of books. I'm sure you'll write some more.

I love the show. You cannot know how excited everyone I work with was that I was going to come here and see you all. You work with a lot of women. I do. Yeah. We like that. I like that. My colleagues were excited.

My kids were skeptical. That's their job, right? That's their job. Love it. A whole different conversation. Having listened to the Rick Rubin episode, I want to talk about punk rock. Were you a punk rock enthusiast? In 1978, I came in second place in a village voice contest for most knowledgeable punk

fan in New York. Whoa. Well before the man rebranded it as New Wave. Oh. Wow. Oh, coolranded it as New Wave. Oh. Wow. Oh, cool. That's a different conversation. Oh, we could do ours.

The Supreme Court is hardcore. Yeah. And you're punk rock. You're trying to ruffle it. Michael Waldman, so nice meeting you. Your kids should be proud. They'll be defeated by your excellence. That's what we're looking for.

That's the plan. Proud. They'll be defeated by your excellence. That's what we're looking for. That's the plan. Next up is the fact check. I don't even care about facts. I just want to get in their pants. This is a bit of an Easter egg. We've both been given medical toilet paper.

We have. And I'm very excited to use it. Are you super duper excited? Mm-hmm. So we've been given some medical toilet paper, upcoming guest, and it's going to analyze our microbiome. Yes. Our gut health. Yeah.

What do you think you're just going to say? I'm nervous to get mine. I think I have some gut health issues. Well, don't you want to know about them? Yeah. I just don't know if you can fix them. Then it gets into it. Or what if they tell me I've got to stop having nicotine lozenges or something?

Or ground beef. Can't be ground beef. I'm watching, and I can't recommend this enough, Chimp Empire. Have you seen it? Nope. Never even heard of it. On Netflix. It comes up.

It's new. It's a four-part documentary series about two warring chimp groups. It's Game of Thrones. It's totally Game of Thrones. They've scored it the same as Game of Thrones. I'm obsessed. We started it with the kids on Friday. My cousin and his kids.

Yep. And we're through three of the four episodes and it's riveting. It was all I could do not to go watch the fourth episode after the kids went to bed last night. Wow. That invested. But anyways, boy, they kill a lot of monkeys and eat them. Bummer. And you see the way they just eat the whole monkey.

Hello. Hi there. Oops. Are you in Washington? What on earth is going on over there? That's my agent. They're phantoms? The ghost.

Oh, my God. The ghost of Daxma's past? Okay, fixed. Okay. Well, I have a grievance. Okay, let's go. So, I ordered some jeans from, I'm going to say it, from Net-A-Porter. Uh-oh.

And I order a lot of stuff from there. And it's not a cheap establishment. Okay. And they sent me the jeans. They were the wrong size. They sent the wrong size. I just had this too. That's really

frustrating. I ordered the right size and they sent the wrong size. And I know why they did it because on the tag, like the paper tag, it was written out as my size. And then when you look because on the tag like the paper tag it was written out as my size and then when you look at the actual tag on the jeans it was the wrong size so there was a handwritten size that was wrong like you know on the tag that you would remove uh-huh the sales tag yeah there's a size on there yeah that sticker was misplaced. Okay. And then anyway, so it doesn't fit. I emailed them and said, I need to exchange this. Yeah. It's already so annoying that I have to do

anything to have to send it back and get a new one and all of this. And they're out of the original size. That's exactly what happened to me. I ordered some white linen pants. They sent size 23, That's exactly what happened to me. I ordered some white linen pants. They sent size 23, which made it extra annoying because I got four pair of pants. Three of them were the correct size. And then this errant size, which you wonder, like, why would I have one, right? Right.

Went to order in my size. All gone. Yeah. No more white linen slacks. So annoying. It's heartbreaking. And it was really annoying in the way that they responded because they said, basically like, we're out of the size, but we invite you to return the original pair. I'm like, you invite me to return so that I can get my money back?

Yeah, it's a nice little invitation. No, that's so annoying. Now, I have to do all this work. I don't get the jeans. Yeah, you just get a refund. I just get a refund. I don't even get a credit. I don't get anything for their error, and I really don't like that. How big were the slacks? Would they fit me? They were two sizes too

big. Two sizes too big. Do you think how many sizes bigger than you am I? More than two. Six sizes too bigger? Who knows? I just don't know. But I'm mad. Okay. Well, I'm sorry you're mad.

Is there anything I can do? No. Okay. But also there is a good thing that happened also. Oh, okay. So a grievance and a gratitude? Yeah, I'm trying to even it out. Okay.

This is not, I'm still mad at Net-A-Porter. Okay. Okay. This is not, I'm still mad at Net-A-Porter. Okay. But Dyson, I am happy with because Dyson heard about my chicken issues, my chicken smell. Oh, okay. And sent me an air purifier. That goes next to the stove or something?

That goes in the house. I do have it in the kitchen. Yeah, well, you should get it quite close to the source. And it's so nice. And it works really well. Oh, good. And I made another bolognese. I was going to bring you some, but I forgot.

I really was. And then in the car on my way here, I thought, oh, I forgot. And it turned out really good. But, you know, lots of meat smell in that purifier. I don't mind a ground beef smell, to be honest with you. I like when I come into the house and it smells like rich ground beef. It's fine when you're eating it and cooking it.

It's the lingering after that's the problem. It's when you come in the next day and it still smells or it's on your clothes. Like the clothes piece is really bad. If you smell like bolognese, I'd be excited. No. Okay. Or you can be, I'm not telling you not to be excited. Thank you.

You can be as excited as you want to be, but I'm not. But you found that it really sliced the smell in half, cut it down considerably. That's wonderful. So I'm happy with Dyson. I'm not happy with Net-A-Porter. Okay. All right. Well.

Those are my updates. How is you and Rob? Rob, hi. Hello. You guys went to a pizza party on Friday together. We did. How was that? It was great.

Yeah, we brought David, our little sinny, along. Oh, nice. And he had a good time? He did. His first time eating pizza. No, it's not. Yes, it is. He's never had it before. It was a chain event, so they were doing Pizza Hut,

but fancy. High-end Pizza Hut? Yeah, they had like a tri-tip steak pizza. Did they capture, though, what the beauty of Pizza Hut is, which is that super buttery, crispy crust? Yeah, I think so. Pan pizza?

I never got the pan ones when I went there, so I'm not the right person to ask. Monica, you know your Pizza Hut pizza pretty well. I like pan and I like thin. You like thin. Yeah. But I like pan. It was just like Pizza Hut,

but so good. And then made me wonder if Pizza Hut, I haven't seen a Pizza Hut in a really long time and I didn't know if it was gone. There's one in Target at the corner. Oh, there is. It's like built inside upstairs. Okay.

Carly takes the girls there occasionally. Oh. Yeah, there's three of them nearby. Oh, there is. Okay. Carly takes the girls there occasionally. Oh. Yeah, there's three of them nearby. Oh, there is. Okay. And they're open. Oh, all right. Well, I just never, it's never on my radar anymore.

Did it make you want to order one? A little bit. It made me nostalgic. You should order one and set it on top of your Dyson purifier and then leave your apartment and then come back in and see if it smells like pizza. That was another thing. When we were down the block, we could smell it. And that was exciting.

What was the locale? Did you bring the box? I have it at home. Oh, okay. We got a caricature and it's drawn on a box. Oh, fun. And we're going to put it in here, but Rob's hoarding it. No, we have.

We'll put it in here. We'll find somewhere. Yeah. The ceiling'sing it. No, we have. We'll put it in here. We'll find someone. Yeah. The ceiling's got room. Anyway, it was very fun. We had a good Friday night out. Liz was there. Liz happened to be there.

That was exciting. Oh, there was bird poop on my butt. What? That was a big, horrible grievance. A bird pooped your pants? Yeah. How'd that happen? I have no idea, but I...

Was it writing on your shoulder and then it dripped under your seat? No, you know I don't like animals. No, I must have sat in it. Maybe not that day. Oh. There was white on my skirt. We identified it as bird poop. Liz tried to get it out.

With a soda water or something? No, she just tried to scrape it off. With her fingernail? Yep. Okay. Picking up guano under her nail in the process. And then eating with her fingernail. I know. Then I had to live with it.

I had to just be okay with it. On the front or the back? Back. Right on your butt cheeks? I think so. Okay. Yeah. Not great.

Was it a black skirt? Blue. So the white really- Showed up. It showed. I couldn't see it because it was in the back. They all acted like it wasn't as big of a deal as I was making it. Like, oh, no one can even notice, but I think they were all just being pretty nice.

It was like the denim was textured and had little like flares of things. So it just looked like... When you got home, did you lay it flat on your bed? No, I didn't even look at it. Oh, my gosh. I haven't looked at it since oh wow okay i probably hung it back up and it'll probably wear it again to do the whole thing all over again exactly um and you had your cousin in town oh what a trip what a lovely visit my cousin justin his wife leanne the children desmond nomi so fun delta had been planning every second of the day whole week leading up to nomi nomi woke up at 1 30 a.m excited to come on friday when justin went into her room she was wide awake reading a book oh my god that And she had been up since 1.30. She was so excited to come.

It was so sweet. How old is she? She is nine. Okay. She's exactly between Lincoln and Delta. But she and Delta have some crazy connect. They were inseparable. They never were six inches apart for three days.

What book did she read? No clue. Dax, you never ask the important questions. Like what book was she reading? Yes. That's a huge indicator about who she is. Yeah, maybe that I didn't want. Like if she was reading Mein Kampf, then I wouldn't like her anymore.

I would be like scared but impressed if she was nine. Scared and impressed. In German? Yeah. When I was home last, I went to the basement and there was a whole bunch of my old belongings and i saw some of my babysitter little sister books oh the ones i was obsessed with the ones i would read to pass the time i thought about bringing some back for the girls but then i couldn't remember if they were like like what if they haven't aged well i would need to read it to make sure and uh i don't have time for that i don't mind if stuff doesn't age well to be honest

because it's a good example for them to see how it's changed yeah but we're constantly watching movies from the 80s and there's like you know like yeah men regularly in in the 80s in movies just grabbed women and squeezed them and felt them up. It is a normal part of any movie. Yeah. And so when we're watching those, well, that's curious, isn't it, that guys did that? But what if it has like extreme Christian values and I just can't remember? That's okay. I believe that you guys are fine with it, but I don't want to really impart that necessarily.

So I'd have to read it. I'd have to pre-screen. Maybe I'll hire Mackenzie to read it. I'm just kidding. I won't. Anyway, I left them all there, but I had so many and I got so nostalgic about it. Yeah, babysitter little sister Karen. Send Mackenzie back to go

get them and then read them Yeah she's got a flight to Georgia No she should drive You don't want to pay for it Oh yeah it's cheaper to drive Yeah What am I thinking Ever drive an electric car

And stop at charging stations So you cut down on fuel costs as well Yeah good call I have big news What Huge news I told both you already But act like you haven't heard it.

We're starting construction on my house in two days. Oh, wow. Congratulations. Thanks. It's really exciting. It's been such a long time coming. If people don't remember, I bought the house in January of 2020. And it is May of 2023.

And we are breaking ground on Wednesday. What patience you've displayed. I've had a good team. Shout out Bill. I want to just shout out Bill. What's up, Bill? Bill, we love you. We need more than Bill.

Big Bill. Is he big? Yeah, he's tall. Big Bill. No, I don't want to call him that. Okay. He does jujitsu. Okay.

Brazilian Bill. No, he's not Brazilian. But jujitsu is. Buff Bill. Buff Brazilian jujitsu. Buff Bill's kind of good. Big buff Brazilian Bill. I don't want, no, I'm not, we're not.

That sounds great. We are not objectifying Bill. He's a beautiful man. Beautiful Bill. Okay, and when I say beautiful, I mean his character. Yeah, beautiful Bill. Okay. So shout out to beautiful Bill.

He brought champagne for us. I know. Alcoholic Bill. Boozy Bill. Boozy Bill. No, he's so nice. Bubbly Bill. How about bubbly bill how about bubbly it was bubbly yeah champagne is anyway congratulations thank you i'm excited oh on that topic i hosted the um homeowners association meeting oh at our house how did it go first of all it answered a question i've long had

how many houses do you think are in this neighborhood? Oh. Right? Because when I try to explain to people the neighborhood, and then there's X amount of houses, and I'm totally guessing. 82. Great guess. Do you have a guess? 45. I always said 40.

I'd say 40 or 50 houses. 75. So you're, Monica, you're dead on. Unless it's Price is Right rules. Then you're fucked. Why? Because if you go over, you're out. It's not closest to you. We are, I'm never playing that.

That's so stupid. And then I guess. Well, you had to narrow your range. So let me update mine. I'll say 50, 75. Okay. Oh, wow. Well, you got lucky.

I hate men. Abending the rules to get what they want when a woman has earned it. Yeah. So there were 75. Houses. Okay. People at least in my backyard. And here's what happened.

Well, not everyone went. But multiple people are five people in the family. Oh, the whole fam comes. Oh, yeah. There were kids here and the kids jump on the trampoline. Here's what happened. Well, not everyone went. But multiple people are five people in the family. Oh, the whole fam comes. Oh, yeah. There were kids here and the kids jump on the trampoline. Here's what happened. Our esteemed leader, and he's phenomenal, truly, John. He emailed, hey, would you host?

And I was like, absolutely not. No, I don't want to host anybody. I don't want anyone taking out my Saturday. And I thought, if I don't respond absolutely right the second, it'll never happen. And I panicked, wrote, absolutely. We'd love to host, which was shocking to Kristen, as you might imagine. She's like, you said we were going to host. This seems not like you at all. It seems like something she would have done. And I would have been like, I don't want to host everyone. So I, the better angels of my nature, rapid response, contrary action. I said, yes.

Then, of course, I'm not really looking forward to, I get weird with people in my space. I'm not great at it. You've observed this. And by God, it was so delightful. A, the gang that set it up was so nice and efficient. And they ran it really well. Everyone had a lovely time.

Got to hear about all the neighbors and how long they've lived here. There's a woman that's lived here for 63 years. Wow. Grew up in a house and now lives in it as an adult. Cool. Yeah. So some of our neighbors have been here for 63 years. So found out one of the neighbors owned the house we have.

They bought it off of the couple that was the obg to all of the motown record right that whole story we've already told on here yeah that checks out they bought it off those people okay love it so exciting and it was just a very joyous neighborly affair and i'm so grateful i took that contrary action good it was fun was fun. I really liked it. Nice. Good. Lauren came, my sister. Yep. TV sister came. That was nice. Okay.

So this is for Michael Waldman. This was a very fun episode. Supreme Court. Learned a lot. Thought it was fascinating. He's one of, and here's the risk of this job we have. We meet so many fun people and we connect with a lot of them. And then you really kind of want them in your life, but then you get realistic about how much job we have. We meet so many fun people and we connect with a lot of them. And

then you really kind of want them in your life, but then you're, you get realistic about how much time you have. Michael is one of those people. I had so much fun talking to him. We read all the same historical books and I thought I would love to go to dinner with him. Yeah. He's so interesting. I really enjoyed it too. And I, I liked the subject. We haven't really talked about that much on here. And it was good. Supreme Court? Yeah.

Yeah. It was cool to sort of deep dive into a new topic. Okay. So Washington's, there's two stories, there's two slaves that are talked about. William Billy Lee was his personal servant. That might have been the one you were talking about. Who he took to Washington. Or not to Washington, but to Philadelphia. Yeah, I think because you had

mentioned he had a right hand. Yeah. So I think that must have been him. That feels right, yeah. He was the only slave whom Washington freed outright upon the former president's death. All the others were to be freed upon his wife's death. And then there's another guy, Harry.

And this is the one that I believe Michael was talking about where he— Made him return to Virginia occasionally. Yeah. So I think—so there's two that are written about a lot. At the time of his death, the Mount Vernon enslaved population consisted of 317 people. Part of that was because Martha's family, Martha, Martha's family had slaves. Oh, a ton. Yeah. It says a little less than half, 123 were owned by George Washington and 153 were owned by the Custis estate, which is her. Is it Custis?

Sure. Martha Custis. And her husband her. Is it Custis? Sure. Martha Custis. And her husband had been really rich. Martha's? Yeah, so her husband died, made her really rich and her sons, but they were not entitled to the money yet. So George came along and he got basically half of it, which was his wife's, to manage.

But then he had to manage all of his son's inheritance until they were 18. Wait, oh, she had a husband before George who died? Who she had the kids with. He never had a child. Oh, right. He raised stepchildren. Yeah. And they all died.

Everyone died. Everyone died. I know. He was managing all this wealth for the son and then the son was really a ne'er-do-well. He was not, he's getting kicked out of every school he was a braggart he was lazy and he basically had to turn over this fortune to him which left them in a bit of trouble and fueled more shitty behavior oh so the the current

conversation about expanding the supreme court they want to add four more. People who are for it want to add four more spots. So there would be 13. This is Article 3, Section 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the authority to change the size of the Supreme Court. Congress has used that authority seven times before.

To restore balance and integrity to a broken institution, Congress must expand the Supreme Court by four or more seats. That was in the op-ed. The problem there, I think, is if the—let's say the Democrats did that right now to try to get to be a more neutral set of 6-3, 6-6, let's say, or whatever they'd be going for. Then why not the next Republican adds four more? And then you get in an arms race with justices. And I don't think we need more of them.

I agree that it's dangerous for that reason. Yeah. I do. But I'm definitely for term limits. Yeah. I am too. It'd be saving them from themselves to some degree. Yeah.

I'm kind of fascinated by Supreme Court because my aunt's a lawyer. And so it's come up in conversation a lot because they all have legacies, basically. And there are things, like I know my dad has once said, what were we talking about? Ironically, it might've been abortion. Before, and it was like,

Roberts wouldn't want that on his legacy. There is this component to, if they're the Supreme, if they're the chief justice, they walk away with a, so I don't know. That part's kind of interesting too. Yeah, because it's like in the Warren era.

Yeah, the Warren court and the Roberts court. Yeah. Whatever decision then is filed. It's like reflective of them. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. It's such an interesting world.

It's one I could have seen myself getting into in another life. Not being a justice, but being in that world. You would love to be a justice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well... I really think that's for you. Mm-hmm. Here's some arguments and then decide. Yeah, I think so. Mm-hmm. I could have done it. Why don't you run?

Well, that's not how it works. Okay. I was going to play the clip of Trump and Biden, the son. Oh, okay. Because we had talked about it. More divided. The nation can't stay divided. We can't be this way.

And speaking of my son, the way you talk about the military, the way you talk about them being losers and just being suckers, my son was in Iraq. He spent a year there. He got the Bronze Star. He got the Conspiracy Service Medal. He was not a loser. He got the, he got the bronze star. He got the conspicuous service medal. He was not a loser. He was a Patriot and the people left behind there were heroes. And I resent, I'm talking about my son, Bo Biden. You're talking about, I don't know, Bo. I know Hunter got thrown

out of the military. He was thrown out dishonorably discharged. That's not true. got thrown out of the military. He was thrown out dishonorably discharged. That's not true. He wasn't dishonored. Cocaine use. And he didn't have a job until you became vice president. Once you became vice president, he made a fortune in Ukraine, in China, in Moscow, in various other places. He made a fortune. My son. And he didn't have a job. My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people we know at home, had a drug problem.

He's overtaken it. He's fixed it. He's worked on it. And I'm proud of him. But why was he giving tens of millions? But he wasn't giving tens of millions. Anyway. Boy, I almost threw up listening to the whole thing all over again.

Yeah, I don't. What a phase. I'm glad to be on the other side of. For now. Yeah. I won't consume it this time. I'm not going to fucking watch debates. No.

I already know how they go. The only people that don't know how they go is seemingly CNN. Well, yeah. I mean, we get into that a little bit, but I agree. I don't think CNN should have done it but they're doing it because of this conversation about having it be less political having the media be less political like that what's his name the new cnn guy i forget his name but he like came in and made this big statement about changing c CNN and making it less liberal.

And making it unbiased. Yeah. Chris Lich. Yeah. And he's from like. He oversaw the Colbert Late Show. Yeah. He has like a weird past.

Or like a Hollywood past. Which is. Anyway. So in some ways, I see that it's a lose-lose to an extent. We're saying we need unbiased media, but then when they do... I don't know.

I don't know. It's a trick. I think that's tricky. They didn't invite DeSantos to do a town hall. They invited Trump to do a town hall. So it's not just that they're doing candidates. They did Trump to do a town hall. So it's not just that they're doing candidates. They did Trump because of ratings. And they also did Trump because they thought they were going to get him.

They thought they were going to, particularly the moderator, thought she was going to get him. Well, she couldn't just let, the other piece was you can't just have him on and like she would have to push back. Yes. And I think they thought they had him over a barrel and they just learned for the 55th time that's my point there's no getting him over a barrel yeah he's just a liar remember how out he was after grabbed by the pussy it was like maybe he wasn't even going to show up at the debate he was so so humiliated. And he showed up and by all accounts won that debate. I mean, you have to be realistic about your adversary.

So getting him in front of a microphone, freewheeling, shooting from the hip, that's what he does. That's what he's a genius at. That's not the field of battle they need to invite Trump to. Yeah. They're absolutely stupid and arrogant and naive all at once to keep getting in the ring with the same guy, with the same setup. Oh, we'll get a really strong, we'll get Chris Wallace to moderate. He's got some clout.

Everyone respects him. And he's a Fox News, didn't mean fucking shit. Trump just did exactly what he wanted to do. Yeah. I just, how many times? Yeah. I mean, if he gets the nomination, I don't know. Like, they can't not because it's the way the system goes.

We have debates leading up to elections. Everyone could boycott. Everyone could not consume it. You don't need to watch a debate between Trump and anyone to know who you're going to vote for. No one who tunes into a debate doesn't know who they're going to vote for. They're already interested in politics. So it's completely a waste of time. And the only thing that would really have any sway over anything is to de-incentivize this circus. Don't watch. Make

them get shitty ratings. Have it, you know. Yeah. I mean, I know a lot of liberals were very against CNN having him on, very. So I wonder what the viewership was on that. I didn't watch it. I'm sure it was great. Can you check? It's probably a ratings bonanza for CNN. But I just personally know so many people who didn't watch it. 3.3 million viewers on Wednesday night.

And so to compare that to Don Lemon, who was just fired, his show got 600,000 viewers. That's huge numbers for CNN. Well, that's, yeah, there you go. There it is. Okay. Okay. The quote, happiness is the full use of one's faculties along the lines of excellence. That's Aristotle. happiness is the full use of one's faculties along the lines of excellence that's aristotle the quote is the good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity

with excellence or virtue or if there be several human excellences or virtues in conformity with the best and most perfect among them and And then Kennedy often paraphrased, the ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. Okay. He did a little paraphrasing. He did. He made it a little more accessible.

But into his local parlance. He did. Speaking of politicians. Speaking of parlance. Let's see here. That's pretty much it. Yeah. That of parlance. Let's see here. That's pretty much it. Yeah. That wraps it up.

Sure does. Well, I sure liked him so much. Maybe the universal intervene. He lives in Brooklyn, I think you said. Maybe I'll bump into him one day at Emily Burger. That would be great. We'll both be eating by ourselves. We'll glance at each other.

We'll catch eyes. Oh my God, I saw him. Did he see me? And then another couple glances. Then we'll commit. We'll look at each other right now. Hey, we'll say, and then we'll wave from across.

Hey, Michael. And then we'll look a couple more times and it'll be awkward. Sure. But then I'll go, you want to, let's eat together. That's what'll happen. That sounds great. And then we'll go you wanna let's eat together that's what'll happen

that sounds great and then we'll join tables the staff will be ecstatic cause we would've been two individual diners taking up two tops so they're thrilled you did them a huge favor yup

and then he and I it's a win for us are you gonna also get the broccoli salad? or just the burgers? I probably won't fuck around with anything but the burger. Okay. It's good to have also the broccoli salad. It is.

Yeah. Vegetables. Oh, okay. Yeah, vegetables are good. I'm so sad vegetables. This just in. Yeah. Okay, thanks for the tip, you guys.

Yeah. I'll try to get some more vegetables. It's good, that salad. It is. All right, I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll do it. I never would have got it, but when I was there with the girls, not everyone was having

burgers at that time. Right. So someone got broccoli salad, and I know. I eye-rolled, but then I tried it, and it was good. What is this on the menu? Broccoli salad. This is a hamburger pizza parlor. Get this off of here. That's like the most normal thing he's ever said.

Thank you so much. You're welcome. You're normal as hell too. So hot. So normal. So average. Oh, wow. Isn't that the same as normal?

Sure. Help. Oh, he's so vulnerable. Help me, please. Get out. Please woo yourself for me. You're a predator. All right.

I love you. All right, I love you.