Strict Scrutiny - Project 2025 (cont.): DEI for Men With Terrible Personalities

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Jon Lovett joins Melissa and Leah to climb inside the mind of one of Project 2025’s biggest boosters: J.D. Vance. It’s nasty in there! Then, Leah and Melissa discuss the proposed SCOTUS reforms. Finally, Leah chats with Olivia Warren and Deeva Shah about misconduct in the federal judiciary–specifically, the investigation into certified creep Judge Joshua Kindred. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky

Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court. It's an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the last word. She spoke, not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity. She said, I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks. Hello and welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. We're your hosts for today. I'm Leah Littman. And I'm Melissa Murray. And as promised, this episode contains the next installment of our

deep dive into Project 2025, or as we're calling it, Disaster Peace Theater. And to be clear for all of you who are expecting a more linear trajectory, we're actually going to go out of order today. So we are going to cover all of Project 2025, but today we are going to cover most of part three, which is labeled the general welfare. This is basically all of the social policy issues that Project 2025 is tackling. And it's the biggest segment of Project 2025. So we wanted to cover all of it. But because it's so huge, because they literally want to reform every major social issue of the last 80 years, we decided to break this up into a couple of different segments. So we're going to wrap this up in another episode, but we're going to dig in and get started today. We may also cover today one of their ideas for

the economy if we have time. We know Project 2025 kind of suggested that it had wrapped up and that the director of the project, a former Trump administration official, announced he had stepped down from the Heritage Foundation. But we don't think that makes Project 2025 any less relevant. The plans have already been drawn up. We also don't think that makes Project 2025 any less relevant. Like, the plans have already been drawn up. We also don't think it's true. Right. So there's that. Well, for reasons we're about to explain, like, Project 2025's database for potential

personnel for a second Trump administration still exists. Like, they're going to need that in the event of a transition. And there's a project put together by Court Accountability Action, State Democracy Defenders Action, and American Oversight Action that has profiles of all of the Project 2025 personnel network creepers. And they already have some judicial profiles up. And we'll add more if you want to check it out. It's at project2025admin.com. But basically, we're staying on it, and we think you should, too.

Think of Project 2025 as your most comfortable couch and just settle in, have a seat, get really, really comfortable. All right. So after we go through that part of Project 2025, some of the social issues, maybe some of the economy issues, we're going to then pivot to discuss the recently announced SCOTUS reform proposal. And then Leah will have a conversation about another aspect of the federal courts that's absolutely crying out for reform, and that's the federal courts as an actual factual workplace with employees who may be in need of protection. So yes, this is another jam-packed summer episode. But before we can enjoy some Supreme Court reform dessert, we have to eat our vegetables. In this case, radioactive vegetables that were grown in a meth lab of conservative grievance. So it's time to talk about Project 2025.

And to help us dive deep into the conservative ecosystem as part of Disaster Peace Theater, we are delighted to be joined by the high LSAT scoring John Lovett, Crooked Media co-founder and host of Love It or Leave It and co-host of Pod Save America, also recently an epic competitor on Survivor. Who else could be a better guest to help us help America survive the wilderness of the Heritage Foundation? Welcome back to the show, John. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. So excited to be here. Such a lovely topic. We're really excited to have you back. And for those of you who are just recent listeners to Strict Scrutiny, get on it.

Get on those back episodes because this is John's second time on Strict Scrutiny. Long-time listeners will recall that we had John on an episode last summer that was a retrospective on the Dobbs decision. And in that episode, John played with Oscar-winning flair, the part of one Samuel Alito. And he did such a stupendous job of channeling the male grievances of Samuel Alito that we felt compelled to come up with a new role for him today. And so, ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary listeners, today, John Lovett will be playing the part of J.D. Vance, Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States. We thought this would give us an uncouched, if you will, opportunity to ask one of the people who's most into Project 2025 about Project 2025. So, Jon, are you ready to channel J.D.? Yes, I am. I mean, it is a challenge to play someone younger.

You know, that's hard. It's hard to accept that JD Vance is younger, that the Republican VP candidate is younger. But I'll do the best that I can. I don't know if I can do so much of it as an impression. But I'll try to inhabit, I think, the philosophy as best I can. That should work great. And we should note that Kate, unfortunately, couldn't make this segment. And a strict scrutiny with just Melissa, me, and John Lovett has the potential to be both messy and feral. So before we get started, I think we should settle on a safe word that John will allow you to break the fourth wall and temporarily step outside of your role as JD.

So I would propose as a safe word, so fucking. What do you think? Oh, I like that. I like so fucking. Yeah. No, I see. That's good. So fucking. Got it. Perfect. We'll be listening for that. So the social welfare components of Project 2025 are really frightening, although some of them are also a little funny or perhaps revealing. So the first question for you, J.D., is on our last episode, we talked about how Project 2025's foreword calls for a federal ban on pornography. It says that porn should not be entitled to any First Amendment protection and generally seems to call for the adoption of Clarence Thomas' views on the First Amendment.

So the question I would put to you, J.D., is why are you guys so obsessed with porn? Well, for two reasons. The second reason is... We here at J.D. Vance HQ, we don't define pornography the way that you know it when you see it types might deform pornography. You're picturing lovemaking in a brightly or dimly lit room, whatever your preference. speech, not just explicit sexual material, but by the words of Project 2025, anything that includes what they described as gender ideologies, right, which could be a whole swath of materials that most of us would not consider to be anything close to pornography. Senator J.D., can I ask a question

about that? Based on that definition, so pornography is a much broader term than perhaps we liberals are used to. So it's not just you know it when you see it, but it's basically anything that puts forth a kind of radical gender ideology. So with that in mind, is the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, pornography? It definitely creates a lot of emotions in me. And I can't tell if it's, you know, the fine line between a kind of, my blood pressure is up. Am I hot? Am I mad? I don't know because I've never been in therapy.

So it's probably porn. So it's probably. It's definitely, yes. It's definitely illicit. It's porn adjacent. It's illicit. And I remember photos of those suffragettes and I saw ankle. I's porn adjacent. It's illicit. And I remember photos of those suffragettes and I saw

ankle. I absolutely saw ankle. I mean, I know as Milholland was running around naked on a horse, so anything's possible. All right. So Senator Vance, you like Project 2025. Love it. Also seem kind of obsessed with, not that you like it, no, you like Project 20. I mean, like you are similar to Project 2025 in that you also seem relatively obsessed with women's bodies, or at least surveilling and controlling women's bodies. So let me first lay out some of the ideas that Project 2025 proposes for doing this. So one, there is a section that details potential reforms to the Department of Health and Human Services, then those sections proclaim that the goal of the next Republican administration should be protecting life, quote, from the moment of conception when every human being

has inherent worth and dignity, end quote. This to me seems like a very fetal personhood forward kind of take. I'm eager to hear what you think. Project 2025 also calls for the Centers for Disease Control to ramp up its, quote, abortion surveillance, end quote, and that is an actual phrase, and to withdraw federal funding from states that do not report information on abortions to the CDC. So let's take a quick pause here. We know that you've called for menstrual surveillance and now Project 2025 wants to create a federal abortion surveillance system. So seriously, what the F is up with monitoring women's bodies so closely, especially given your interest in avoiding gender ideologies and women slash pornography more generally?

Well, you know, I recently took down from my website all of the information I had there about my restrictive position on access to abortion. I'm also on the record in interviews describing, A, the argument against allowing women to have access to abortion, even in the cases of sexual assault and incest, and B, creating a logic for a federal law or a federal rule that would prevent women from leaving a state that bans abortion to get to a state that permits abortion. Because my view is that there is no need to balance the human being, that is the woman, in any way. There's no need to consider their interests in this whatsoever. Did you just concede that women are human beings? That sounds borderline pornographic to me. It's also not in the Republican platform. Yeah. So is this you going rogue? Yeah, no, I look, I misspoke. I obviously misspoke. And, you know, I'm doing a lot of I'm doing a lot of press

these days as part of my rollout of my new personality. And I just went a little far there. And also, by the way, is that how it's said? Woman? Woman. I've never heard it pronounced. I've seen it. I've read it. It's W-O-M-B-A-N since a woman is only a woman. Yeah.

Yes. A woman's man. I've never heard it think of women as sort of like a suitcase in which fetuses are transported. And that's sort of how I, that's what, with kind of arms and legs. It's like those pneumatic tubes that you used to have in the drive-thru at the bank. Yeah, that's right.

And you put your checks in and deposit. Yeah, that seems right. That a woman ought to be quiet until she goes, and a baby comes out, you know? Like that of the tubes. I'm doing the tube sound. So that- It was good, J.D.

That conception of womanhood is actually quite helpful to explaining some other parts of Project 2025, which lay out a plan to implement a nationwide abortion ban without having to go through the inconvenience of Congress passing a nationwide abortion ban. So it calls on the Food and Drug Administration to reverse their approval of Mifepristone, the first drug in the two-drug medication abortion protocol. It calls on the Department of Justice to enforce the Comstock Act as an abortion ban. The Comstock Act was enacted in 1873 after much lobbying from vice crusader and compulsive masturbator Anthony Comstock, and it prohibits the transition through the males of materials intended for immoral purposes, including abortive patients, contraception, sex toys, and even information about contraception, abortion, and sex toys. And it's never been taken off the books. So, J.D., what are your views on Anthony Comstock?

Do you feel a special kinship with him? Yeah, look, and that's why I think illicit materials like sex toys, which I do include. And the 19th Amendment. I include things like, yes, sex toys, abortion medications, chaise longue, anything of that nature that is, I think here's sort of where, here's the reason I think it's so important that we have Project 2025 to pursue these policies, which I think these sort of, you know, these coastal women, that you're women, coastal women, we mean. Technically, I'm in the Midwest, but, you know, we'll. What's strange is that the E, that it's, you say women, you know, so it's a strange word and it makes me very suspicious. But fundamentally, we are trying to claw back what we view as decades and decades

of losses, that we believe that the conservative movement has lost over and over again in our war against cultural leftism. And that whatever logic there was for removing things like no-fault divorce, for allowing women to have control over their bodies, that all of that freedom has destroyed the traditional family structures. And we must, we must, we must preserve those structures, start reclawing back some of those prerogatives so that we can prevent divorce, so that we can prevent the kind of cosmopolitan leftism that has decimated the traditional Christian family structure. So I guess, J.D., when did you all decide that incels were kind of like

the core swing population that you wanted to target? Because a lot of the platform seems pretty incel-adjacent or appealing, including the recommendation to reverse the protections of EMTALA, the federal law that would actually prohibit states from denying emergency care when that emergency care is abortion. So I guess, like, are incels the plan to get to the White House? Such a great question. You know, it's just a kind of happy accident. We didn't set out to become a campaign directed solely at the kind of boiled minds of internet-d dwelling, angry men. But because we've only been talking to ourselves about this for so long, we've kind of coddled our own brains a little bit. You remember when when the Chicago Tribune got into a room, and a bunch of marketing executives and senior executives

and branding people sat there all night had coffees and chicken fingers and all the rest, and they came out the next day, and they were looked exhausted in their eyes and they said we're naming the company trunk you're gonna call us trunk now and everybody was like hey you fucked up because you spent too much time just talking to each other you got so far from normal you didn't realize it your baseline moved and now you sound weird that's what happened to these people because normal people know that hey yeah like nobody thinks divorce is a good thing, but banning divorce doesn't make happier marriages. But they've talked themselves into a way of believing that they have no choice but to

restrict basic freedoms. And that's just not going to fly with anybody except a bunch of people who believe the permissiveness of the sexual revolution is why they're so lonely and angry. So, J.D., are you advocating for DEI measures in the Republican Party and in the Chicago Tribune? Well, yes, absolutely. Sure. You've caught me in a gotcha.

Look, I do believe we need some kind of policy to help men with terrible personalities, that no diversity, equity, inclusion policy has included the curdled minds of bitter men who are looking for blame for their problems outside of anything other than their choices and their behaviors. Those people live and exist and they need work too. And sure, I decided that the blame for those men's problems exist in say, Nancy Pelosi, and I don't know, Glee. But of course, the problem with that is all of my efforts to blame like academic Marxism for the downfall of the American family forces you to ignore that divorce rates are higher in red states than blue states and divorce rates are higher among non-college educated than college

educated people. That if you want to find people that are living by the values that J.D. Vance is trying to espouse, you kind of have to go to the people he seems to despise the most. And that's interesting to me. Wait, I lost, I broke character. I have to go to the people I despise the most. Just say Sofa King. Sofa King, Sofa King. I'm going to help you out, Senator Vance, help you get back on track by going back to Project 2025. Because some of the things that we've outlined so far, the restrictions on EMTALA, the effort to claw back no-fault divorce. That's a lot, but it doesn't even begin to exhaust Project 2025's plans for reproductive freedom, or, as we might put it, anti-freedom. So we want to note a few other Gilead Forward proposals

that are deeply nested in Project 2025. And then we're going to pivot, Senator Vance, to ask you about your party's pro-family platform. Gilead Forward is great. I'm sorry, I just have to say Gilead. You forgot Sofa King again. Sofa King, Sofa King, Sofa King. I just like, it's like, it's an, it has bite. I'm getting a hint of cherries and there's a Gilead finish. All right, I'm sorry. And it has legs. Okay. So one of the things that Project 2025 does, it proposes ending Planned Parenthood's participation in the Medicaid program. Medicaid is the means-tested federal health care program that provides access to health care for under-resourced Americans. And Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of women's health care in the country.

And although it's known, perhaps best known and reviled by the right for providing abortions, it actually also provides a lot of other women's health care, including mammograms and pap smears. Sounds like pornography to me. I mean, there it is. It's also the principal provider of these kinds of services in small communities and rural communities. So ending Planned Parenthood's participation in the Medicaid program would actually make it harder for many women in these smaller and rural communities to access the health care that they need also make it harder for women who, because of a lack of resources, depend on Planned Parenthood for these health services. So that's one aspect, like let's stick it to Planned Parenthood and in the process stick it to women who just want a mammogram. There's also a proposal to weaken the Affordable

Care Act's health insurance guarantees, and this proposal would allow employers to refuse to cover contraception if they have a religious or just a moral objection to doing so. And there is also a very ominous call for new rulemaking on women's preventative care services, basically allowing the government to decide afresh whether the ACA's coverage of women's healthcare includes coverage of contraception. So, J.D., what's the plan here? What's the goal? Like, you are very pro-family, you say, but you don't want women to have pap smears and mammograms that might allow them to catch certain health problems

in advance and address them so that they can go back to their families and raise their children. What's the deal here? So, two points. First of all, is it not pronounced pap smear? I actually believe it is pronounced pap smear, not pap smear. A smear is a topping for your bagel. A pap smear is something that potentially discovers cervical cancer. Very different. This is why we need the traditionalists from Clarence Thomas to Republicans in Congress, to people talking about the culture all to work together.

Because you liberals, you liberals have built a society in which people think they should have access to basic healthcare like contraception to the point that they think it would be ridiculous for the insurance they have to have through work, not cover it. This is what you've done. You spent 50 years making people want to have sex for fun. And now when people expect that to be covered through work, if I have a company, I have to kind of subsidize your sex life by making contraception affordable and accessible to you. And that's a violation of my basic Christian values. And so we're coming after you to make sure that if you're that you can't get in, you can't get contraception through the government, that you can't get contraception through work, that you're gonna have to pay for it out of pocket, because we find what you do disgusting.

Look, the conservative position on Planned Parenthood is that even if they claim the resources from the federal government are not going towards abortion services, that money is fungible and they're able to shift money around. And therefore, in one way or another, tax dollars are going towards abortion. The fact that, you know, a huge percentage of the care Planned Parenthood provides has nothing to do with abortion isn't of such importance to them because they don't want to have any of this subsidized in any way regardless, right? I mean, they don don't want they want private employers to be able to deny insurance for these basic things they also refuse we fuck i'm sorry i keep forgetting that i'm supposed to be

you so became yeah like so it's like these positions are so abhorrent that you can't even adopt them for faith he's dissociating look look, I know that because you are women, I'm back in character. First of all, let me explain it to you in words that you women will understand, because I know that you only got to where you are because of DEI policies that prevented more qualified white men from being in those positions because of an ideology that would allow basically anyone to be a pilot. And now you may say to me, but wait, JD, because of the overturn of Dobbs, there are Planned Parenthoods that aren't able to provide any abortion whatsoever. That would seem to suggest you would be okay with allowing those places

to continue providing the basic healthcare that is a lifeline for millions upon millions of women. And you'd be wrong about that. And that's because you haven't thought it all the way through. And I'm not going to I'm not here to explain everything to you, you know, because because like, even though we're all lawyers here, we all know that it was harder for me to get in. And then I am I am for sure smarter than both of you,

because you guys only got in. Definitely no DEI for veterans at Yale Law School, JD. And obviously, this also applies to my wife, which is not something I'm going to talk about with you because you won't understand it that that was very responsive and very helpful i now very much understand uh why you would like to withdraw health care uh to to whirlwind sofa king sofa king even just saying this i can see in your eyes that you you both couldn't help but get mad at me like like even though i'm in character i feel like you're furious and that's okay that's part of what that's i'm in character. I'm going back in. I'm going back in. This is why you're going to get an Oscar. That what you liberals call contraception in many cases are a form of abortion based on our deeply, deeply radical ideology. And you all can try to backdoor your way to allowing women to have access to reproductive care, but we're not falling for reclassify mammograms and pap smears also as abortifacients, right? So one step removed.

Or pornography. Listen, listen, listen. It's going to take some really smart white men to figure out how to classify mammograms as an abortion, but we'll get there. We're going to get the smartest white guys in a room to crack this thing. If we have even one DEI person in that room, we won't be able to figure it out. They'll spoil the whole goddamn bunch. But if we get enough of these white smart guys together, I think we can do it. I just don't even think mammograms, honestly, they make me uncomfortable.

They make me uncomfortable. They make women uncomfortable too. I think it is actually the point. Maybe we can cover more of the pro-family policies of Project 2025. So while Project 2025 maintains that it is pro-family, that doesn't seem to extend to all families because this part of Project 2025 contains repeated calls to redefine marriage and to marshal all of the powers of the federal government to do so. So in its proposal to revamp the Department of Health and Human Services, Project 2025 redefines the term family to apply only to, quote, families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children, end quote. The same section also talks about the importance of working fathers to families.

So it's seemingly envisioning working fathers, married mother, and their children. And it lays out some specific ways the federal government could redefine marriage along more traditional lines that seem to specifically all anti-discrimination protections for queer people. Also, there is a plan to use the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice to limit the Supreme Court's holding in Bostock, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, only to hiring and firing, not to apply in schools, healthcare, or other employment decisions. So, J.D., marriage equality happened, and it's been happening, you know, for more than 10 years in some states. Like, why can't you, in Justice Scalia's words, like, just get over it? I'm so glad you asked.

Well, you know, listen, at Yale Law, I met a lot of gay people. And I even considered some members of the LGBTQ community to be my friends and took great care to support them when they were going through their transition. That being said, you're combining two things, because I don't think you understand it because of how you got to where you are. You're combining our discomfort with homosexuality and the gay lifestyle with our frustration at the erasure of the difference between men and women. You know, one point I've made is that I consider universal childcare to be a subsidy to a kind of lifestyle that is supported by people such as yourselves. What do I mean by

that? Well, you all think it's great to have two working equal parents, right? And so you want subsidies to create things like universal childcare. We support what God wants, which is a man who works and a woman who just like, you know, knows how to mill flour, you know, like those kind of basic skills that you all come to naturally that you're fighting against by doing things like reading books and understanding the law and going and, you know, being on bicycles, which, again, makes me a little bit uncomfortable. And so we're trying to get back to a place. And by the way, there's another place in which your cosmopolitan libertine debauch bacchanalia that you call a job, a job that you call reading legal briefs and having equality with your husbands, that this is where your freedom is impinging on the rights of people to have a traditional home because you create an economy where both spouses feel like they have to work and we want an economy where women can stay home. And you're against that. And we're for that. And that's what we're trying to do.

And if we have to create new laws to incentivize that behavior, that's what we're going to do. Okay. Wow, JD, that was really illuminating and very frank and embracingacing. A little shocking for me here at my job to think about having to give all this up to go mill flour and churn butter, but I'm going to put that on the back burner. You mentioned universal childcare, which is apparently just a sop to working women so they can leave their kids in the government's care and then go off to the bacchanalia of their office jobs. Accordingly, Project 2025 proposes to eliminate the Head Start program. This is enormous because Head Start is always mentioned as the template on which to build a federal program for universal daycare or childcare. So we don't have universal daycare in this country right now. But if we were to get

there, Head Start, which is a federal program that's existed since the Johnson administration, would be a very natural place for us to start. But we can't do that if there's no Head Start program to begin with. And interestingly, although it is bent on cutting Head Start, Project 2025 does want there to be child care. So they have provided for increases in federal and state subsidies for religious and home-based daycare. So this way, when you stay home to churn the butter and mill the flour, you could also get paid some kind of subsistence wage to care for other people's children in your home while doing that? Is that the plan? I'm glad you asked that because obviously, once again, you misunderstood.

So here's what you're missing. First of all, you should know that my conservative friends have built up a body of incredibly dubious research that says Head Start is bad. And we believe that wholeheartedly. And that dubious body of research is something that's very, very important to us. And to insult it is basically a slap in the face. You're hitting on the main point, but probably by accident. It's not that we don't want children to have access to pre-K or care when they're young. It's that we want it to be the right children, and we want it to be the right care. Our children need to have... Right being the operative word. Yes. And so we want to subsidize churches, and we want to subsidize homeschooling parents. What we

do not want to do is basically create what amounts to another public education system that brings what we view as like something we need to prevent that public education system from either going younger through universal pre-K or older through access to free public college. We're trying to shrink it, right? That's why we have created a culture in which we try to make being on a school board or being a teacher in a school an awful experience wherever we can. That's why in places like Florida, we're making teachers afraid to speak. That's why we're creating these bounty programs that mean a parent anywhere can create misery for a teacher if they say the wrong thing. And that's why we're trying to fight universal pre-K. Look, our children need these things because they're going to be future leaders. They're the boys. They're going to be the boys.

Certainly the boys. Well, and those leaders need wives. Listen, what are those boys going to eat when they get home at night? They're going to have to eat dinner. Speaking of, this is a good point. What are they going to eat? We need women vibrating with frustration at being unable to use their intelligence, making delicious stews. You won't even need microwaves. Ideally, women's brain vibrations will cook the food.

J.D., hold on a second. I want to get back to the food. Okay. So this is an anti-redistribution fever dream that you've conjured here. And a big part of it, as you have now alluded, goes right to the heart of food. Like, what are the kids eating? So in addition to gutting Head Start, Project 2025 also proposes shifting the federal food stamps program.

So this is WIC and SNAP, which provides food and nutrition to under-resourced Americans from the auspices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to Health and Human Services, which is a little weird. But they also propose, in addition to that shift in where it's going to be administered, they're also planning to eliminate any means testing for these programs. So eligibility for these programs is going to be much more limited for needy families and children. So can I just ask a question? If you want people at home eating the delicious stews that their stay-at-home mom's minds vibrated into being for them, why are you kicking all of these poor kids off the food stamps

program when this is a major way that some families support themselves and feed their children? Is this the party of life? I'm so glad you asked. And as always, you've missed the point. There is a culture of dependency. And we have people that are receiving a subsidy, going to the store and buying food for their children so that their children can eat. If we take away that subsidy, those parents

will have no choice but to go out and find some other way to provide for their families. And if they're unable to do that, and those children have nothing to eat, I think we can all agree it's the child's fault for the inability of their parent to provide. I think it is important that we make sure that the problems of life are visited on children. Yes? Well, in your biography, autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, you do note that there were some hard times in your family where you did have to depend on government assistance. So is this snap for me, but not for thee? Like, why are you against it now when you know that this was a major bridge in your upbringing and a major help for many of the people in your community? I think for once, that's a good question. And

I think you're getting to the heart of it, which is I have a ton of unprocessed trauma. And because I have not processed the trauma I experienced in my youth, I have not been able to transmute that experience into a kind of empathetic, consistent worldview that I could apply as a public figure. That absent that hard work, my bottomless ambition is kind of flailing around like a fire hose, kind of loosely attached and sprays in any given direction, you would think that I would have developed a kind of sophisticated way to kind of imagine how we could help children in the situation I was in. So, you know, to answer your question, why have I gone from

in the book suggesting that one kind of worldview around what my childhood was like to now as a political figure embracing a view that all these problems flow from some malign group of globalists and liberals, because I need therapy. So it's interesting, you would think that if that was the kind of solution or need here, maybe product 2025 might propose to expand the ACA to cover therapy. But I guess we'll put that to the side for a second. But Leah, we've talked about this a lot on the show. I mean, I think all of America is kind of living through a dystopia now because certain members of the Supreme Court just haven't had the kind of therapy that they need. Indeed.

Are we all going to have to pay for a lack of therapy that they need. Indeed. Are we all going to have to pay for a lack of therapy? We should expand the ACA's therapy to them as well. You know, I think up until this point, we have kind of noted how Project 2025 is anti-family, anti-Reaper freedom, anti-LGBTQ, and just anti-freedom. It's also anti-redistribution. You know, the section on SNAP says that SN Snap sends money to, quote, low-income people with low-income in quotes as if to suggest Snap is benefiting people who aren't actually low-income. But there are some people that Project 2025 seems to be very pro. It seems to be very pro-finance bro and tech bro. And these parts of Project 2025, I guess, read to me, JD, like an honest-to-goodness plan for a catastrophic explosion of the U.S. economy. So I was hoping that you could use your

big white man brain to explain economics to me. So here's what Project 2025 lays out for the Fed, the Federal Reserve Board. It says, ideally, that we should, the United States should abolish the federal role in money altogether and move to a system of, quote, free banking. This would mean unregulated money. So giving the economy over to tech bros and finance bros and taking it away from Janet Yellen. So I guess, J.D., like, do you think crypto, an unregulated currency that's not backed by the federal government, worked well and that we should just make all of the U.S. economy crypto? Yes, I do. I believe that this is a great policy. I think unregulated private money is really good. As everyone who's ever tried to use their Delta SkyMiles can tell you,

it's seamless and perfect. And you never need to worry about it suddenly being debased or valued. And an unregulated digital currency in which the government cannot prevent against fraud, massive amounts of theft, international money laundering and a host of other very serious issues, insider trading, bribery. The kind of people that do these sorts of things, they're the good ones. They're the good ones. And look, the law is meant to punish our enemies. The law is meant to protect us. That's the purpose of law. And people don't seem to, obviously I understand why you don't understand it, but even some men don't understand it. That the law is meant to protect the people we like and punish the people that make us uncomfortable. And, and that's, that's why we do what we do.

That's why this section is, is here. You know, we need, we look, I think anybody who has used Amazon or Google in the last couple of years can tell you they're perfect now. They're perfect. This is how, this is what you want. You want a kind of unrestricted monopolistic tech sector to slowly take over more and more facets of our life, including our ability to buy things, including the amount of currency in circulation in our society, because that's how you prevent any shenanigans. So just to be fair to Project 2025, as an alternative to eliminating the federal role in money, it also suggests, well, maybe Congress should just say the Federal Reserve Board will no longer ensure macroeconomic

stability, i.e. prevent a recession, that the Fed would no longer address interest rates or eliminate full employment from the mandate of the Federal Reserve Board, i.e. that would no longer be their goal. So to my mind, the plans basically ignore all lessons we've learned from the past 200 years of financial history. And it reads something like, some tech bros dreamed up while high at Burning Man. So is this where you guys came up with it? Yes. It was actually, it wasn't Burning Man.

Yes, it wasn't Burning Man. It wasn't, yes, it wasn't Burning Man. It was actually, it was this conference that only men can go to in the woods. The name escapes me because I was on so much ayahuasca at the time. But that's where we come up with this idea. You see, you know, when you're as wealthy and disconnected as the group of people coming to build a stable, healthy, economic order, not just in the United States, but around the world. We don't care about that because we haven't really thought that much about it. And we basically take the grievances directed at its wanton imperfections and use that to build out until we get to an ideology

that says we can destroy everything. And what's cool about the horseshoe theory is it actually helps us gather some disaffected people at the very, very, very far left to create a little coalition of people who want to destroy everything that they see. And we'll be fine because I'll be in mark zuckerberg's

a hawaiian bunker with his cows and then once the fire is put out by i by time or rain uh we'll emerge and build the beautiful utopian uh society um and that that i think you both won't be a part of because unfortunately unfortunately you don't have bunkers. Because your pea-sized woman brain couldn't see two moves ahead. I don't even know what to say, J.D. And again, sofa king, sofa king, sofa king, the antipathy in your eyes. It's like unbelievable. Do you know how hard it is to point at are actual proposals that these people put in writing these are things that have

basically been said to us right right, in so many words, time and time again. And now they are running on this as a platform. And it is fucking terrifying. Can I just, out of character, Sophie King, I think what is so terrifying about all this is, you know, there has always been this kind of burn it down fanatical fringe on the right. It has always been revanchist, has always been hateful. It has always had a twinge of or more than that of violence to it. But for decades, it was something that even Republicans, I think, are abhorrent, held at bay, right? And there was this understanding that the Republican Party was a conservative movement with a nationalist fringe.

But over decades of right-wing propaganda, of using those people to win elections, this became a nationalist party with a conservative fringe. And these ideas that used to live and were safely ensconced in stupid fucking conferences of like-minded assholes has now bled out of that and metastasized and taken over this party. And the kind of cowardice of people that let Trump take over became their way of operating, and it allowed all this stuff to flow in behind it. And now these people are in charge, and they have written this plan, and they will be in the government. And so ideas that were laughable because they were so stupid and dangerous now have a real possibility of being implemented by people in charge. And so it's this mix of people will not understand how stupid and dangerous this era was,

how it was both at once all the time. Do you know what would have stopped all of this from metastasizing or at least would have caught it early? Ruth Bader Ginsburg retiring? A pap smear, a mammogram, all those things. Did you hear mine? I'm sorry. I wanted to relate it back.

I'm sorry for mine. What did you say? He said it was Peter Ginsburg retiring. But like, I thought about that and I was like, would Peter Ginsburg retiring

have prevented all of this? I'm not sure that it would. Right? Like, it would have helped. It would have helped. Would a pap smear help this? Probably not.

No. But I did want to just relate it back. We have 90 days until this all comes down to the wire. Like, what do we do? Like, we got to do this, right? It's go time. Yeah, I think the-

Or Project 2025 is like our real lived reality. I mean, look, I obviously can come on here and pretend to be a J.D. Vance, but what has been very heartening in the last few weeks is that Project 2025 has touched a J.D. Vance. But what has been very heartening in the last few weeks is that Project 2025 has touched a nerve. And I think the reason it's touched a nerve is because it allows the left to do something the right tends to be far better at, which is suggest to people that there's some kind of conspiracy of people out to get them. In this case, there really is a group of

interconnected right-wing groups and individuals building a plan for what they will do. They built it in secret. They launched it not realizing how it would garner such attention. And now they're trying to backtrack, but it is the plan. We know that despite whatever they say, because there's no other group of people. There's no other plan they're working on. There's no other transition strategy. This is it. It is off the shelf. And so it has, I think, ignited in people, finally for good, a sense of like, wait, wait, these people are out to get us and we have to expose them. And it wasn't something that the Biden campaign did.

It wasn't something that Democrats started talking about. It was something that people started talking about. It was something that people don't pay attention to politics started talking about. It was something that people started talking about. It was something that people don't pay attention to politics started talking about. And so I think that now plus the new enthusiasm in the positive direction for Kamala Harris together gives us a real fighting chance. And I think that that attention on Project 2025 has been very, very good, because people are a nerd to Trump's nonsense. They know we they have heard us call Trump radical for a decade, on some level to believe it, and on some other, they go outside and the birds still chirp and the sun still shines. And so this has been, I think, a new way to really help people understand just how scary

the future could be if we lose. All righty. Well, thank you for joining us once again and for gamely channeling, for the most part, JT fans. That's not all the SCOTUS news. So, Leah, what happened this week? So we wanted to have a quick discussion about Supreme Court reform, since there are now more real proposals for court reform on the table. So President Biden officially announced

his proposed Supreme Court reforms, and there are three. One is term limits for Supreme Court justices. Second is a binding code of conduct to bring some ethics to one first street. And a third is a constitutional amendment to overturn the court's immunity decision that Biden says put presidents above the law. So we wanted to pause to note that this is kind of a big fucking deal. And I think it should be celebrated. Like four years ago, Joe Biden as a candidate was against Supreme Court reform. He is a long-term institutionalist, you know, has had faith in institutions, even as those institutions have fallen short of their ideals. You know, when he was a candidate, in order to kind of take the steam out of Supreme Court reform, he promised to appoint a Supreme Court commission that he then promptly defanged once he became

president by not allowing them to make recommendations and instead just issue some kind of book report. And that person, right, fast forward a few years, the leader of the Democratic Party is mainstreaming and endorsing Supreme Court reform. Like, that is now the position of the leader of the Democratic Party, and Vice President Harris has endorsed it. So am I wrong to be kind of taking a moment to celebrate here? No, I don't think you're wrong at all. I mean, I actually said on Twitter, X, whatever the fuck

we're calling it, that this was huge. And like all these people flooded my mention, it's not huge, it's never going to happen. I'm like, okay, well, I didn't say it was going to happen, but I do think it is huge. Like, I think there are lots of institutional reasons why it's unlikely to happen before an election, why it may be a hard slog to get it to happen even after an election. But the idea that Joe Biden, who was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and knows all of these people very, very well, is now talking about reforming the Supreme Court, limiting terms to 18 years and looking for a constitutional amendment

to overrule Trump versus the United States shows you that even he is fucking over this court. I mean, like that's how bad it's become. And so in that sense, I think it is huge. Like, he is mirroring and reflecting what I think a lot of people who are by nature institutionalists are feeling. Like, this court is totally off the rails and has arrogated broad swaths of power to itself. And this state of affairs is absolutely untenable. And so we can leave for another day whether any of this is actually going to happen. But just acknowledging that it is a massive problem, I think, is the first step and a big one and a huge thing for the Democrats to make court reform part of their platform going into an election.

So, yeah, I think it is a big deal. And I think you're right to celebrate it, even if we don't get very far with this in the next six months or even in the next year. Right. At a minimum, it changes the Overton window. these reforms, we could just snap our fingers and pass all of them would be sufficient to kind of address the problem, you know, that is the Supreme Court. There's still a long way to go in getting these reforms across the finish line and also in thinking about other, you know, ways to address the Supreme Court. And to that end, I just note that, you know, Senator Chuck Schumer, you know, the leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate, introduced a bill, the No Kings Act, that would seek to reverse the Supreme Court's immunity ruling by statute and eliminate the Supreme Court's jurisdiction to hear, you know, immunity appeals from the lower courts. And so it does seem like the Democratic Party, the leadership of the Democratic Party has kind of gotten the message and internalized it in a way that,

at least for now, I'm just going to find promising. We should also note, like, the reforms that Biden put forth are also, I think, relatively modest. Like, he doesn't say anything about packing the court or recalibrating the number of justices on the court. These are, I think, the kinds of sort of modest measures that you can expect from someone like Joe Biden, but you probably couldn't have expected it like a year ago.

So term limits has massive support among Americans. It's actually kind of the norm around the world for other constitutional courts. I mean, to me, the most sort of startling proposal is the constitutional amendment for overruling the immunity decision. And I mean, if that's the biggest he's going to go, great. But for people saying like, this is the Democrats trying to take control of the courts with court reform, like this ain't it. No, it absolutely wouldn't do that. Yeah. Now we will have the next segment on another slate of possible reforms to the courts addressing workplace issues in the federal courts. But before we do that, some

housekeeping. It can be so frustrating to see what the world should look like and feeling like each day it gets further and further out of reach. But as Stacey Abrams would say, one piece isn't going to fix the whole puzzle, but that doesn't mean we can't do something somewhere soon. On her new cricket show, Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams, Stacey is joined by organizing experts and progressive leaders to break down the biggest issues in politics right now, crowdsourcing solutions and sharing stories of action that will make you feel less alone

and help you motivate your friends and family to make a difference. You can listen to the trailer right now, wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss the first episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams, which drops on August 15th. On another note,

the election is a little under 100 days away, and now is the time to volunteer, donate, and canvas your ass off for progressive candidates and initiatives up and down the ballot. Sign up for a shift at votesaveamerica.com a time to volunteer, donate, and canvas your ass off for progressive candidates and initiatives up and down the ballot. Sign up for a shift at votesaveamerica.com and pick up a canvassing kit for yourself or maybe for a friend in a swing state. It has all the essentials for a day of door knocking, including a clipboard, pens, band-aids, a tote bag, and more. The Crooked

Store gives back with every order to support organizations doing incredible work across the U.S. to make sure every voice can be heard. Head to crooked.com slash store to get your kit next. So for this segment of the show, I am delighted to be joined by two of my absolute favorite people, Olivia Liv Warren and Deva Shah. Liv is a criminal defense and civil rights attorney in North Carolina. At Thomas, Ferguson, and Beskind, she was previously at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. Liv testified to the House of Representatives about her efforts to report the misconduct and harassment she was subjected to when she was a law clerk on the Ninth Circuit. Deva is a lawyer at Kecker, Van Ness, and Peters in California. She has spoken at conferences, advised courts, and testified before Congress about the need for protections for judiciary staff, including law clerks. Welcome to the show, Deva Edliv. Thanks, Leah. Great to be here. I'm so excited. is a rather non-exciting piece of news, which of course is the resignation of Judge Kindred on the District of Alaska.

That resignation happened as a result of the judiciary's investigation into Judge Kindred, which resulted in a now public report about how the judge created a hostile work environment, harassed his law clerks, and I have to phrase it this way because I am summarizing the report, engaged in inappropriately sexualized relationships with the recent law clerk and prosecutor in

the U.S. Attorney's Office. But reader, the allegations described in the report suggest far worse than that. The report describes how his former law clerk alleges the judge sexually assaulted her twice immediately after she finished her clerkship with him and began work at the U.S. Attorney's Office. But the judiciary's report declined to decide whether that was in fact true, writing that whether or not the relationship was consensual, it was inappropriate. Okay, I am basically going to ask questions and turn it over to both of you since you are the experts here.

So first, in the immediate aftermath of the report I just very succinctly summarized, you know, after that report became public, many in law Twitter expressed hope and optimism about how the fact that the court produced this report and made it public was a sign that things have gotten better and maybe even just plain good after the earlier stories about misconduct and the judiciary's response to it. So basically all good, right? Oh, absolutely. I am on an aircraft carrier in 2005, and there is a mission accomplished banner behind me. 10 out of 10, no notes. In all seriousness, Leah, I am horrified that the first words out of everyone's mouth were

not direct quotes from the report. The law clerk suffered in silence. That should have been all caps and something that everybody had at the front of their minds and was everyone's focus. It doesn't just say they suffered in silence. It says they suffered in silence for years. Liv, you're so right. I think the first thing that some of us felt when we read this order was not excitement or some kind of hoorrah that things had gotten better. It was horror and then pain about what had actually happened to these law clerks.

They shouldn't have had to experience the harassment that they experienced. But then what was a prolonged and I would say harmful investigation and the resulting fallout. And so things haven't gotten better. I think the order's lack of focus on the clerks shows that I don't think that things are getting all that much better. And think the order's lack of focus on the clerks shows that I don't think that things are getting all that much better. And there are a lot of open questions that are highly concerning about whether this kind of misconduct is taken seriously. And I think the first instinct on hearing these kinds of things should be, this is horrifying. But that's not really what happened. So could I ask you just to follow up on the specific responses we kind of got from Law

Twitter or what seemed to be the consensus response? So Leah, turning to the responses from what I would call the legal glitterati, I think that they reveal the insular and really harmful relationships between legal practitioners and the judiciary that make it incredibly hard for the American public to get accurate information about what's going on in our third branch of government. And I think they're disheartening for two reasons. First, people commended the Ninth Circuit and the chief judge in particular for releasing this report. Federal law required the release of

this order. It was not bravery. It was not- Good job following the law, courts. Exactly. Snaps. It was the United States code that is in fact quoted in the order and cited too explicitly. So I'm not going to say that was knowingly misleading by members of the bar. I hope it was misleading because otherwise I have to imagine that they just are incapable of conducting legal research, and I hope that's not true either. But I think it's also important to talk about why they have these commentary and why this relationship exists. It is incredibly financially beneficial to leading lawyers to have a good relationship

with the judges on the federal courts who are deciding their cases every day. And it's especially important for them to be close and have a good relationship with Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit, Mary Mergia, who is responsible for appointing counsel in certain cases, including cases with indigent defendants or pro se litigants that might raise really significant issues that could go to the Supreme Court. So the flattery has a purpose, and it's just dollar signs. It's always dollar signs. So as someone who was a sacrificial lamb for other people's prestige trains, I'm not super thrilled. Let's start with the process that the report lays out for what happened when there was an initial allegation of wrongdoing.

So it's not clear that there ever was an allegation, which I think is important. It's written very carefully in the passive voice to say that the chief judge received information. So we don't know how or if it was simply overhearing staff or law clerks or what happened. But at some point, the chief judge receivedconduct, which I think is really important. It took a couple of months to then put together a special committee, which then appeared to hire outside counsel to investigate this process. That took nearly a year from the time that the committee was assembled for them to produce a report. And I do want to say they conducted 21 interviews and have 1,039 pages of discovery. And to some listeners, that might sound like a lot of information.

To any of us who litigate cases, this is such a basic investigation. They made a big deal about needing to go through 700 pages of text messages. I have an excellent college intern who can get through 700 pages of text messages in a morning, if that. This was not rocket science. It wasn't a difficult investigation. It shouldn't have been. We're not looking into what's happening in compliance at Boeing. This is like, there's a bad guy over there and he has a phone. Could someone go look at it? And I think a lot of litigators I've talked to and work with assume that discovery in these kinds of cases is like the discovery we see in federal court. But the discovery mechanisms that are generally available to civil litigants in federal court are not the ones that are codified in the judiciary's reporting procedures.

So the fact that here the discovery is ad hoc, it's not really even nearly as fulsome as we would see in any kind of federal court proceeding, just makes this timeline really weird, for lack of a better word, at this point. But also, during the months it took this case to move forward, Judge Kindred was given significantly more grace and leeway than I've ever seen a litigant get in federal court. So this information is buried in a footnote, but Judge Kindred, quote, repeatedly missed internal deadlines, which required staff to follow up repeatedly to determine whether he would submit a response or whether his silence meant he did not wish to respond. And I'll just pause there for a second, because from a civil litigation perspective, this is wild. If you miss deadlines in court, there are sanctions, there's contempt. But then that's not all. The order says that in all instances, Judge Kindred was granted an extension to submit a response. It just I mean, he's refusing to provide answers. It's not just sanctions or contempt. But at some point, a judge here usually would say I guess, like what happened in the interim as they

are investigating this allegation on which they found probable cause or non-allegation or information? So that's a great question, Leah. And that's a question that a number of reporters have asked the judiciary and the judiciary has not responded to. We have no idea if any interim measures at all were taken to protect staff who I'm sure some of whom were involved in the investigation itself and must have had some knowledge. There's no information at all about any protections, check-ins, any basic interim measures that would be taken with anyone else in a private or public workplace in a situation like this. And to Liv's point on that, let's just look at the timeline. November 2022, the chief judge receives information about misconduct. December 2022, so the next month, the chief judge identifies

the complaint and says probable cause existed that Judge Kindred created a hostile work environment, engaged in unwanted physical sexual conduct, and told individuals with knowledge of his misconduct to remain silent. So we have probable cause a month later. And then the order makes it clear that employees continued to work for him for at least 19 months despite a finding of probable cause. I mean, I am sitting here and I can hear the sort of minds exploding of every in-house counsel that I've ever worked with because 19 months while there's a probable cause finding is just bizarre. And it's not just bizarre. I mean, this is the kind of thing where there are normally liability findings almost right off the bat. If this were a private employer, I mean, line up the number of semi-trucks that Taylor Swift's tour takes to move around

for the cash settlement. That is what we're talking about. And I just want to say this process and this order was released with a self-congratulatory press release from the Ninth Circuit talking about their commitment to self-governance and how good they are at it. This is not self-governance by the judiciary. This is not the level of governance that we submit ordinary citizens to in our civil disputes. We should want our judges to be held to at least as high a standard as, say, an Applebee's manager. I love Applebee's. I do too. Yes. But I think that Applebee's and House Counsel would be very proud of the interim measures that I'm sure they could send to a reporter upon request. Indeed.

What did the report say about why it was recommending Judge Kindred resign or be sanctioned? Well, I mean, they couldn't ask him to really resign. I mean, they suggested that he resign, but the remedies here are significantly limited in terms of what actual things can be recommended or put into place. All they can do is make recommendations. They cannot force anyone to do anything here. I mean, they're not judges. They can't do anything. They couldn't pass judgment, Diva. That would be really difficult. So to summarize what the recommendations were based on, Judge Kindred engaged in misconduct by creating a hostile work environment. He engaged in misconduct by having an inappropriately sexualized relationship with one of his law clerks, both during her clerkship, while he was employing her, and then when she became an AUSA. And I think it was like days after she became an AUSA, and I think it was like days after she became an AUSA, and then Judge Kindred engaged in misconduct by making multiple false and misleading statements

throughout the proceedings. And I mean, it almost feels like that's what the order was most upset by, not the other two workplace misconduct issues. But there are pages and pages about the sort of lies and false and misleading statements that Judge Kindred made during the proceedings. And I want to say that there's a really disturbing number of similarities in this report with my own experience in Judge Reinhart's chambers and with what people have spoken publicly about in Judge Kaczynski's chambers. I'm thinking in particular about the judge's fixation. I'm directly quoting from the order

in rating people based on fuckability and his constant need to discuss the romantic relationships and sex lives of his clerks and himself and litigants with his staff. I testified about Judge Reinhart's fixation on ranking women's physical appearance, and a lot of people dismissed it as him being an old man from a different generation. Judge Kindred was in his 40s in 2020. He knew better. This is beyond one problem and one person. It's not just bad apples. This is a systemic problem. And like, not to make light of what is like a very serious problem, but like if they have a desperate need to rate people based on their attractiveness, there are a host of reality television shows, right? That are available to like scratch that itch.

Yes. Might I recommend Love Island USA, but we'll talk about that later. Yeah, this is the claim that Judge Kindred may have retaliated against people who were uncomfortable in the workplace or who sought to do something about the workplace, as well as on the claim of assault, which, as I noted, the report did not actually resolve. Yeah, so I'm going to start with assault because I think we both have more to say on retaliation as we nod vigorously. The assault claim found that the conduct occurred, and to be clear for listeners, it was oral sex. But Judge Kindred and the law clerk disagree about whether the oral sex was consensual and the order found that the record was inconclusive. So this is a classic, he said, she said, and since we already found the judge had been

lying in everything he said, we still couldn't quite make the conclusion here, right? Yes. So even more classic, he said, she said, despite 20 pages of an order analyzing that to the contrary. And I do want to know, again, what Liv said. They do make a finding that the conduct occurred. It's not, I keep hearing words- Well, eventually the judge conceded it occurred. So it's not even like they had to resolve anything. Yes. I mean, and he, I think this is something that's really important. He initially lied about it occurring. I believe he lied at least twice and was only candid with the committee later. And in part, it was to explain why he had to

perform oral sex on the former law clerk and was unable to have vaginal penetrative sex. I'm sorry, I'm a criminal defense attorney. I'm very comfortable with these terms. And I think that what was shocking to me in the order is that it did not include his reason that he provided that he could not have, you know, vaginal sex. And I'm sure we all think that it's because he could not sustain an erection. But I believe the judges thought that would be embarrassing for him and chose to omit that key detail, which they seem to find relevant to his credibility because they then accept his other positions regarding that account, Leah. So it's really interesting

that we are excluding critical details that the committee found helped his credibility when he finally changed his story and told the truth. But we're not excluding details about the horrific and really damaging lies that he told about this law clerk that are now in print. And I'll just note, there are so many occasions that the report references where there are other text messages. There are multiple things that the report says it does not get into further that seem to be pretty damaging. They only have sort of a choice array of what happened, and what they choose to say about Judge Kindred differs significantly from the embarrassing details they choose to include about the law clerks that went through this process and actually

experienced the misconduct. And I think we have to think about this order the way that we think about a judicial opinion, right? And when judges write judicial opinions and when lawyers write briefs, we try to include all of the most helpful facts to make our case. You want to make sure you have the best facts from the record and you want to make sure that you're citing them. And yet this order says there were far more explicit text messages that we're not including. We're just going to include enough to barely support the limited information that we're giving here. And we're not going to include anything that would be more embarrassing than this process already must be for Judge Kindred, but we will include all of his obvious, damning, incredibly misogynistic tropes of lies that he

continued to spin about this law clerk. So just, I don't want to repeat them, but you should imagine what the typical misogynist says about any accusation of sexual misconduct. And then Judge Kindred said some of those things, which are just like repeated in the report. And I'll just know what purpose does this serve other than either scaring others from reporting? I mean, if you are a law clerk and you know that any public order may reference these basic accusations that someone makes against you in the process of lying and covering up their own misconduct, then why would you report? The report says law clerks specifically expressed significant reluctance or discomfort about being involved in the

investigation, and several law clerks requested anonymity. Of course they did. They were reluctant. They should be reluctant because, I mean, look what's in the order. And I think your point, Deva, about the fear around this is so well grounded. And before I go back to the retaliation in this order, I just want to tie this into another order that came out this year from the Second Circuit. And that order, it made no finding because the judge agreed to some voluntary corrective measures. But there were allegations of an abusive workplace that were obviously significant enough to lead to a law clerk being transferred immediately upon the allegations being made and to a judge agreeing to a number of corrective remedies. But the order didn't stop there. Instead, it spent almost three pages, I think it's about a quarter of the order,

kind of mocking this law clerk for making an ethical allegation against the judge, saying that the judge had accepted a jar of grape jam and that the law clerk was concerned that that was an ethical violation. There's like three pages on grape jam and that the law clerk was concerned that that was an ethical violation. There's like three pages on grape jam in this report and how stupid the law clerk was for alleging this. So the order in that case really reads more as an attack on the law clerk's judgment and the law clerk being a very, very fragile flower and just not being able to withstand an ordinary workplace, even though it sure sounds like that wasn't the actual case. And this order is doing the same by orders of magnitude. It is just mocking people who come

forward and saying, we will put any lies that a judge says about you in print and you'll live with them for the rest of your life. So now I would like to go to the retaliation claim, which in some ways to me was one of the more striking aspects of this report. So what did the report say and do with respect to the claim that Judge Kindred was retaliating against people either involved in the investigation or, you know, who were raising concerns about the workplace environment? Well, I think it's important to note what the report says that Judge Kindred told this law clerk shortly after the two alleged sexual assaults. Again, they're alleged sexual assaults only because the order did not make an explicit finding as to consent. But we know the conduct happened. And he then told her to, and I'm quoting, keep her head down and shut the fuck up, or he would make her life miserable. He also told her friends, at least one friend, to do the same and to keep his head down

and not say anything. So classic non-retaliation, non-threatening. It's basically like I'm threatening to retaliate against you, right? That's like a paraphrase. Yes. And in fact, I will make your life miserable. It's not sort of what might happen. Ooh, it sounded like it could be bad. So nevertheless, despite that, the order goes on to say, and again, I have to quote it, on review, no evidence, and again, no evidence, lends corroboration to the allegation that Judge Kindred impeded any judicial misconduct reporting. I find that baffling for two reasons.

The first is that they say there's no evidence, despite the words that I just said. And the second is that there's no evidence that he impeded any judicial misconduct reporting. As far as we can tell, and as far as we know from this order and from the judiciary's repeated denial and refusal to answer any more questions, there was no actual judicial misconduct reporting. So in fact, there's evidence of threats of retaliation and no evidence at all of any misconduct reporting. And yet our SAGE judges found that there was no evidence that any reporting was impeded. Let me just also note, this is pages 26 and 27 of this order. The section that comes right before the retaliation section is finding misconduct based on Judge Kindred's repeated lies to the investigative committee. And then we go into no evidence lends corroboration because

also Judge Kindred denies telling the clerk this and her friend this. But on top of that, what the order says is that there is no evidence that lends corroboration. There was no formal investigation or JCND proceeding involving law clerks at that time. I mean, what happened is these comments happened in October 2022. And then in November and December is when we have an investigation. So I guess what this order says to me is it's fine for someone to retaliate as long as there isn't a formal investigation pending. Is the advice really make sure you get all your threats and retaliation out before a complaint is filed? And maybe you'll be lucky because maybe no one will file the complaint because you retaliated against them.

I just don't know what the standard is here. And I don't think it's an effective standard. It's so narrow that it almost encourages retaliation as long as it it's like laying out a plan of like retaliate at a certain time and it's fine. The committee has a few lines about resting on the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act's narrow definition of retaliation. But again, I think that is reading out almost any normal meaning of that language. That language includes the word witness, which generally doesn't require a proceeding necessarily to have been started in the way that we interpret this in other areas of the law. I'm with Diva. I think what this says

is judges, make sure you threaten them good and hard. Well, zooming out from that bundle of joy, the GAO, Government Accountability Office, recently released a report that is a more general climate survey of the federal courts as a workplace. Did anything stick out to you in that report? I think what stood out to me in that report is that the judiciary did not cooperate. They claimed that it's because they're doing their own super great workplace conduct survey of approximately 28,000 of the more than, I believe we're now over 31,000 employees that they have. And so the GAO, the auditing office conducting the report said, oh, great, why don't you give us the questions that you're asking, even if you're not sharing

the results, so that we could see if we think these questions will actually assess whether your workplace protections are working. And the judiciary stated that they were not in a position to do so. So I don't know what position they were in, but not that position. The GAO requested interviews with current employees, with employee working groups. Eventually, they were allowed to talk to exactly one current and one former employee of the judiciary. In addition to that stonewalling, the report expresses a particular concern about the lack of protections and guardrails regarding retaliation, that the only way that retaliation is checked at all in the judiciary is through self-reporting.

And again, we have this order saying, judges, make sure you threaten retaliation enough so that there's never any reporting. So I guess I would put to you like any final thoughts on kind of either where to go or what to make of this. You know, I keep thinking about the piece that another strict scrutiny guest, Alexander Petrie, wrote after Dr. Ford's testimony about how the train of a man's career will not stop, no matter how many women throw their pain and blood on the tracks. And I got a really devastating text as I was rage reading and shaking processing this order from a friend who also clerked on the Ninth Circuit, had a worse clerkship than I did, and has never come forward. And she said, I feel really guilty. I feel like this is my fault.

And I feel like if I had spoken up seven years ago when we were clerking or with you four years ago, maybe that would have changed what happened here. And I feel the same way. Like maybe I have not done enough in my unpaid time to advocate on this issue over the past seven years. It is, I feel so betrayed all over again. And I can't imagine how betrayed the law clerks who were in this situation felt knowing how long this investigation was going on, knowing that nobody was protecting them, knowing that people knew what was happening in those chambers. I think we all have a responsibility to speak up on these issues. Leah, you and I have talked about how this is a larger cultural change that needs to happen,

but it is disappointing. And I sit here knowing that Liv spent years of her life dealing with this and that it does feel a little bit like all of the seven years that we've spent working on these issues may not matter. I am a little bit hopeful in that hopefully there are people who are paying more attention to this. Yeah. And I want to build on hope because I'm Midwestern and eternally hopeful. I want to be clear. I do have absolutely no confidence in the judiciary's ability to appropriately manage workplaces and to protect its employees, none at all. But I am really heartened by two things. One is the bipartisan congressional efforts that have

been ongoing since 2020 in introducing the Judiciary Accountability Act. I am looking forward, I hope, to a reintroduction of that bipartisan legislation, and I'm grateful to Senators Hirono and Durbin and Representatives Johnson, Torres, and Nadler, who have been working very hard and speaking out about these issues. I'm also heartened by the very thorough, nuanced, and dogged reporting on this issue. I'm thinking about Anne Maramal and Toby Raji at The Washington Post and Kerry Johnson at NPR in particular. And I'll just add here that in the last seven years of talking about these issues, in a hopeful manner, the tone has shifted. I used to come into

this and people didn't want to question institutions. Reporters didn't want to really question institutions. They would take the statements that institutions were giving and just move along without questioning sort of what do you even mean? What is the underlying information that you're actually providing here? That has changed. And I'm grateful that that has changed because I think we should all be comfortable questioning our institutions. Well, on those kind of hopeful notes, thank you so much, Liv and Diva, for making time for this conversation and also, of course, for your efforts over the last seven years to try to make the workplace of the federal courts and courts more generally a better place to be. Thank you, Leah. We couldn't do it without you.

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