The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump Had His Own Brain Freeze Moment Like Biden This Week

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

Biden’s frozen moment at the debate had many suggesting he drop out of the race. However, few are talking about Trump appearing to short circuit this week during an interview. Plus! Jay Willis, the Editor-in-Chief of Balls & Strikes, joins the podcast to break down all the decisions that the Supreme Court made this week. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal.

We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Balls and Strikes Editor Jay Willis, who's going to talk to us about all the fuckery that the Supreme Court just handed down this week and give us a concise recap about why we should be concerned. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. No. Unless there are clips of the things and music, I don't want it. I'm not going to start off good. Here we have Marjorie Taylor Green, beloved congressman, friend of the pod.

Showing her usual lack of self-awareness, rearing its head like a gargoyle. Oh, God. Not like a gargoyle. A person who abuses her position in government to meddle and Democrats, elections should be nowhere near public office. Agreed. Yeah, fair. Was that part of her resignation speech?

Unfortunately, that was during her long-winded speech about how we have to impeach Secretary Mayorkas for his handling of the border and her usual life quest to get President Biden impeached and somebody impeached every hour because her shit does not stink. She's really just a piece of shit. You know, like honestly, again, I look at the state that she's from. When these motherfuckers were given the opportunity to vote this piece of trash out, they said, no, she represents us and we love it. I would love to know what she has ever brought back to her constituents, what she has ever done.

And as a matter of fact, one of my friends was on Capitol Hill the other day and took a picture from in front of her office where there's a sign out front that says something to the effect of gender is a man and a woman. It's science and it's fact. That's what this fucking idiot has out in front of her office as people go to visit Capitol Hill. Oh, God, you just really, I'm sending you all my doctor's bills. Like, that's what's happening. And then the thing is, like, the people in her district who keep voting her in, I have absolutely no doubt that they will turn around and blame Joe Biden for any economic woes they're facing. What they think she's bringing home is this fight against all these things that are supposedly going wrong in the country.

They think that's what she's delivering for the district when, unfortunately, they've been misled down a very dark path. Yeah. Well, speaking of bullshit propagandists, here we have the Money Honey, aka Fox Business's Maria Bartaromo, who loves nothing more than to put a well-spoken voice on Trump's insanity propaganda, and she's going to show us what she's got here. It's rural America. I don't like leaving my house in the middle of New York City, okay?

I'm sorry, but I used to walk all over the place. I don't walk anywhere anymore in New York City. I mean, there's so many cases of murder. John Lansky, it's hard to keep track. There's Rachel Moran, the Maryland mother, right? Then there's the 12-year-old girl, Jocelyn Nungary, way in here, John Lonski. No, none of this had to happen, but, you know, this begins with Joe Biden's toleration of illegal stress, illegal immigration. You're breaking the law.

Make it stop. I'm not even sure what the point of this is, but New York City's murder rate is one of the lowest for large cities in the country. Andy, what are you doing here? I know. I know. I know. It's pointless.

But it's just every time they say something like this, I just, I'm triggered. Danielle is what I'm saying. The one good thing about this was when she said she doesn't want to walk around New York City. And I'm like, bitch, stay in your house. Yeah. Like that's like, you're a fucking menace. So maybe, you know, stay in your home. I'm good.

The sad thing is, is Andy obviously being a former employee and knowing that they've done these for years. And Danielle, you and I often working a block away from Fox News, we know this to not be true because I unfortunately see these assholes on the street walking around just fine like there's not a care of the world. Oh, of course. Eating, dining out at steakhouses, shopping at Rockefeller Center, taking their kids to take photos during Christmas time. Yeah, horrid. It's so scary. Oh, my God. I can't believe I live here in this wonderful, multicultural land of plenty. I was just in a place that was bragging about Jesse Waters eating lunch there all the time and I thought, I need to not come here again. They like put that in their description? No, the guy was bragging to a table of all men in the most tacky suits I've ever seen in my life about this because he clearly found his audience by just looking at. at these bros.

Did they work for Trump? Because you said tacky suits and a bunch of white guys eating at a restaurant. In Midtown, no less. Speaking of, Jesse Waters of the Five is here to spot his usual bullshit. There's a lot at stake plus the progressive movement. They are this close to locking this thing in. They have opened the borders. They've changed the entire culture of this country.

If you look at the cities, it's almost over. If they can drag him across the finish line and install Kamala, we have a DEI presidency that they can celebrate for the rest of the administration. That's all they need to get to. It's just 90 minutes. It's all it takes. I, you know, I have nothing to say. I have literally nothing to say.

Mm-mm. I have nothing to say that is nice. Go ahead, Andy. Talk about your old friend. Yeah. No, I just, I'll, I think I've said this before, but at the point where I just, I wish they would just start using the N-word. Mm-hmm. I'm tired of hearing things like DEI presidency and DEI this and woke that.

Just, just you want to say it so badly, Jesse. You're dying to be able to say it. Just do it. Be a hero, Jesse. Do it. And this is why DEI was trending. And this is why I love what is left of Black Twitter because they were like, you know, using things like, hey, what's up, my DEI? Hey, like, you know.

just using it in the way that they are signaling, right? This is not a dog whistle. So it's like, oh, they're changing the culture of this country. What I mean? What exactly does that mean? You mean this country that had been called a melting pot or a salad bowl or whatever the fuck it is that you want to call it? What do you mean changing the culture of this country?

You mean making it more diverse, more accepting, more welcoming to people other than stupid fucking white men that are paid way too much money to spout a whole bunch of bullshit on a network with a bunch of other ignorant motherfuckers? You mean that? Like, I wish I had that plan in place. I mean, to be fair, that is what he means. Yeah, we often talk about how mad we get when the proper follow-up question doesn't get asked.

And obviously, the only way that's ever getting asked on the shows of Jessica Tarlov asks it. But the proper question is, is when did our melting pot in the diversity we get from immigrants start being a bad thing, Jesse? I'd love to hear your answer. Love to hear it. Yeah. 2008. Yeah, I wonder what happened there.

Well, to close us out, here we have sleepy Donald Trump, seemingly falling asleep in an interview with Corey Lewandowski on Newsmax. Made some recommendations that maybe Joe Biden has to have a drug test before this debate. You've made some great remarks. And let me just remind our viewers kind of what you've said and, you know, what your take is on it. Sir, I think you said that Joe might need a shot to stay up for the debate. I hear that he's practicing standing for 90 minutes is his debate prep. A little different, I think, than what you're used to at some of the rallies you've participated in recently. Well, if I have to practice standing, we have ourselves a big problem.

Now, I had heard that too. He's practicing how to stand or something standing. And what is he practicing doing? Coherent sentences? Is there a shot for that? I don't know if there's a shot. I think there might be other forms of pharmaceuticals that one could take. Sorry, allergies.

Allergies. Allergies. Aside from this just being hilarious because every accusation is a projection from them. I also want to understand Newsmax having Corey Lewandowski. This is a man who's been filmed hitting a woman. Let go from the Trump pack after. sexual harassment, accused of sexual assault. Like, this is your new employee.

Great work, everyone. Great work. I mean, they looked at him and said, you know, that's newsmax material. Mm-hmm. Oh, boy. The Supreme Court had a busy week, and I want to get right into it with the editor-in-chief of the always indispensable balls and strikes.org, Jay Willis. Jay, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me. If I could for a minute, I do want to take listeners sort of inside the game. It finally happened this morning. I was getting ready to write. I reached into the fridge to grab a LeCroy and I cracked it. I grabbed a beer instead. This has been a long time coming. We knew it was going to happen.

It seems very fitting that it happened today. So, yeah, let's get into it. Was this accidental or on purpose? Oh, accidental. Oh, okay. I grabbed the can. I raised it to my lips and I was like, wow, that is not Beach Plum. We're going to go with it.

It sounds like a wise choice, accidental or not. All right, so let's start with the big decision that was handed out on Friday where the court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts, overruled what's known as the Chevron Doctrine or Chevron Deference. This was something the court itself had come up with back in the ancient times, 1984, and which basically said that the courts had to give administrative agencies the leeway to interpret ambiguous laws. This was one of the things we pretty much knew was coming, but it's still like, God damn it. it, Jay? Explain the ramifications of this because they're huge. The legal doctrine sounds like it's kind of in the weeds, but that is, of course, a boon to the conservative legal movement, which enjoys reshaping the law in ways that sound boring and are difficult to make compelling to an audience. So I will do my best to get around that. This case that overruled Chevron, it's called Loper Bright,

it's about, as you say, the power of agencies versus courts. Congress, as you may know, it sucks at writing laws. And even if it were good at writing laws, laws are really complicated to sort of write and tailor and think about in a nation of, you know, 300, God knows how many million people. So most of these laws outsource a lot of power to executive agencies to enforce. And this is how the day-to-day work of governing gets done. Just to take a simple example, the Clean Air Act says, we Congress decree that there should be clean air. And the scientists at the EPA, you're in charge of figuring out what it means to have clean air and how to get there. Chevron is this case about when a statute is, as they often are, ambiguous, when it's not really

clear what it means what the agency has the power to do. The idea behind the Chevron decision is that if the answer isn't clear, the court says, look, we'll defer to the agencies on what powers they do and don't have. The idea is that we Supreme Court justices, we're not experts in what clean air is. So we'll let the scientists say, at the EPA handle this. Now, I want to stress, as you've said, that conservatives hate this. They have hated this for a long time because conservatives hate regulation of all kinds, because having to provide drinking water without literal fucking poison in your bottle of Desani,

that reduces the Coca-Cola company's profits by a fraction of a percentage every year. So today, the court finally got rid of this Petky Doctrine. It says courts will no longer defer to agencies, but that federal judges in all their wisdom, When a statute is ambiguous, they can step in, they can figure this stuff out for themselves. You know, I was reading through the decision and reading what people who are far smarter than me about this kind of thing were saying about it. And the one thought I kept having was, in what world are judges better able to determine what an agency's regulations or what the laws mean? And as you say, these regulations can be super complex. They can involve things like industry specific knowledge, deep scientific knowledge.

But here is the court saying we know. know better than the experts and the scientists at the agencies themselves? Yeah, I'll do my best at sort of breaking down some of the several different reasons, which this decision is bad news. The first, just like on a practical level, is that Chevron is this like really longstanding principle of law, judges and agencies and companies, right, have sort of relied on Chevron as this background principle in doing their work for decades now. And the idea that we are just sort of tossing this rule out the window calls into question

like settled law on lots of stuff that might affect you every day that you probably with good reason like fortunately don't have to think about that much. The quality of your water, again, the quality of your air, the safety of your food and cosmetics, stuff like that. Going a step further, as you say, like, when you're talking about the scope of an agency's powers, like courts kind of suck ass at determining this, literally yesterday. The court handed down a case about the EPA's ability to regulate ozone emissions, I believe it was. Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for the court, the bad guys won.

But I'm bringing this up because his opinion included multiple references when he meant to be talking about nitrogen oxides, a pollutant the EPA wanted to regulate. He wrote nitrous oxide instead, which you may know better as little laughing gas. Yes. Which like, this is funny shit because it's funny. when like a sanctimonious asshole like Neil Gorsuch screws up so publicly. But it's also a reminder that like if an EPA official is writing this policy, making this decision, they probably don't accidentally call the nitrogen oxide laughing gas.

Judges are lawyers with small staffs and no expertise. They can't be expected to do this well and certainly not better than again, the actual scientists who should be in charge of this stuff. And then the last thing I want to say is like when we talk about these decisions going to judges, you got to remember who these judges actually are. It's not just any random guy in a robe. It's the Fed Sock freaks who are working to reshape the law in the, fucking, graven image of Ronald Reagan as we speak. You're taking these to Matt Casmeric, the guy who tried to ban the abortion pill. You're taking these to James Ho. You're taking this to Neil Gorsuch, a Supreme Court

Justice, who thinks the EPA wants to regulate your dentist anesthesia. The problem with Chevron, the challenge with Chevron when talking about it in the media is it feels technical and it sounds abstract. But what it's ultimately doing is it's taking power from the accountable branches of government. You know, Congress is delegating to executive agencies. Executive agencies are under the purview of the president. Looper Bright is taking power from those branches of government and giving it to these life-tenure judges. Like, this is a terrible idea unless you are a Republican judge who has been longing for this outcome for a very long time. Yeah, and Justice Kagan got at that in her dissent. She wrote, I'll just a brief quote,

she wrote, a longstanding precedent at the crux of administrative governance, thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority. The majority disdains restraint and grasps for power. I mean, that's calling it what it is, isn't it? I think that's right. And that's been a theme of some of these dissents from the liberals in administrative law cases recently. There was another case, also issued just yesterday, as you said, there's a lot going on right now that limited the securities and exchange commission's ability to penalize like white collar criminals, basically. And also in dissent in that case, Sonia Sotomayor says, like, look, this is a power grab. This is judges, unelected judges stepping in, substituting their judgment for the judgment of Congress,

for the judgment of the accountable branches of government. Like, this is just sort of like the one of the several sort of lies that provide the foundation for the conservative legal movement. This idea that what they're doing in rolling back regulation, what they're doing is judicial restraint. And it's not really that. It's the siphoning of power from those other branches of government. Like, it makes it so that, you know, the importance of conservative ideology of Republican politics, the importance of that prevailing at the ballot box is necessarily less so when their life tenure judges can just sort of act as a perpetual veto on laws, on administrative rules that they don't like.

Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say I'm old enough to remember when, you know, judicial restraint was supposed to be a thing. Another big decision on Friday was Fisher v. the U.S., where the court ruled, in an opinion again written by the chief justice, that federal prosecutors improperly charged hundreds of January 6th defendants with obstruction. Walk us through this. So yeah, as you may remember, the previous presidential administration ended with a mob of pro-Trump rioters storming the capital, hoping to hang the vice president, Mike Pence. Some of those people have since been prosecuted in D.C.

and in courts around the country. And one of the charges that some of those people have faced is a provision of a law that makes it a crime to obstruct official proceedings. Remember that these rioters, wanted to stop the certification of the electoral vote count to prevent Joe Biden's victory from becoming an official. Now, this statutory provision comes from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. It's a law that Congress passed in 2002 after sort of the collapse of Enron. It's basically a like anti-financial crimes law. And the text is pretty broad. But again, it makes it a crime to obstruct official proceedings. One might argue that the certification of the electoral college would count. But the Supreme Court decided that no, that provision of the law, it's narrow. It only applies to document

destruction, which was sort of frequently at issue in the Enron scandal. And I don't want to overstate the implications of this case too much. Like, not all the January 6 rioters have been charged under this provision. Most of them have been charged under more than one. It won't be the end of the prosecution of Trump himself, so on and so forth. But I think this case, Fisher, I think it's important because you can just take a step back and look at whose claims, look at whose interests this court cares about, look at whose arguments they'll be solicitous of. If you are a white-collar criminal forced to pay back investors you ripped off, that's the SEC case from yesterday, oh man, these justices want to hear from you. If you are a crooked politician who takes bribes

for official favors, Snyder, another case decided yesterday, the court wants to hear from you. If you are a literal January 6th defendant, the court cares. It wants to step in. It wants to hear for you. These are the people whose interests are getting time and energy are getting validated before the court. And I think that says a lot about the direction in which it is going, which in my view is bad and getting worse. Yeah, I want to talk about the Snyder decision that was handed down. And in that decision, the court drew a distinction between a bribe and a quote unquote gratuity and ruled that the provis.

or the section of the U.S. Code that deals with theft or bribery concerning programs that received federal funds, it ruled that under that code gratuities, in other words, payments made to a politician after the fact, are not illegal. And I guess my big question here is, huh? I think you put it really articulately there. Thank you. I mean, the Snyder decision, the opinion is by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and whenever he gets put in charge of something, you know you're going to get some real brain dead shit. And that is most of the Snyder decision. You are right. It distinguishes between bribes, which are super illegal, the receipt of a favor in exchange for, you know, a political favor, and gratuities, which Kavanaugh sort of defines to mean the exchange of good

that takes place after an official favor has been doled out. And this is a great illustration of the dangers of lawyer brain, where you can look at the exchange of, you know, goods or money or whatever for a political favor. And you can think the law should distinguish here based on exactly what time this transaction went through. Just like, what the fuck are you talking about? There's a section of Kavanaugh's opinion where he sort of goes down the parade of horribles route. And he says, well, you know, if it's not clear what government officials can and can't accept, would a college professor get in trouble if their students took them out at the end of the semester for celebratory Chipotle. And like, first of all, the statute at issue here applies to dollar amounts of more than

$5,000, which you got to eat a lot of Chipotle to get to that. But like, again, stepping back from the sort of technical legalese here, no one fucking thinks that's a bribe, man. No one's talking about that. Like normal people read a decision like Snyder and they think, this can't be real. This can't be actually how the law works. But when you have sort of pedants like Brett Kavanaugh parsing the text, torturing it to arrive at their sort of preferred result, this is what passes for like the development of the law at the highest court in the land. And I want to stress too that Snyder is not an outlier.

The court has spent years now sort of narrowing the contours of what public corruption looks like. And we're basically at the point where, unless you write down on a piece of paper, like, here is cash that I am sending to you, Mr. City Councilman, and you, like, write bribe on the envelope. The Supreme Court will find a way to sort of look the other way and decide that the law isn't implicated there. It sounded to me like, you know, what Kavanaugh is saying is, uh, quid pro quo is illegal, but quo pro quid is A-O-K. If you have not spent a quarter million dollars to go to law school, I don't know how you

look at an argument like that and think that. this court is like composed of remotely serious people. But like regrettably, they have the votes to make it so. And so, Brad Kavanaugh can put this in the U.S. reporter and we all have to deal with the consequences. What else did the court do this week that you think needs to be highlighted? We talked a little bit earlier about the types of people, the types of parties that the Supreme Court cares about. And I want to contrast that with a case that came out today, Grant's Pass v. Johnson. It's a case about city ordinances. primarily in the Western United States that impose punishments, fines, and jail times on homeless

people for the crime of sleeping outside, effectively for being too poor and not having any place to go. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals a couple years ago had sort of blocked the enforcement of city laws like that saying that, look, this is cruel and unusual punishment. Like, it's not a crime to be outside if you're poor. Lots of cities and states, including Democratic-related cities and states, shout out Gavin Newsom. They complained about this, and today the Supreme Court struck that down. Now, the legal doctrine here, you know, how the Eighth Amendments bar on cruel and usual punishment works, it's complicated, but in this context, like, I also think it's only

sort of relevant. There are some people about whom the court cares and things are deserving of the law's protections and some who don't. And I think that's really on display, not only in the cases we've discussed previously, But on this one, if you are a rich asshole or a January 6th rioter, like, great, you'll get your day in court. If you're a poor person, if you're anyone else, basically. Sorry, but like according to Neil Gorsuch, the framers ensured that you are shit out of look. Yeah, it feels like a lot of this goes back to Adam Serwer's, you know, famous, the cruelty is the point when you read something like this.

This episode will drop on Sunday and Monday will be another decision day. And apparently it will be the last day, so we will get the presidential immunity case decision. Any gut feelings there? Will the majority of the court tell us that we are indeed ruled by our god emperor? I mean, with the caveat that all predictions are useless, including mine, if I had to pick, yeah, I don't think that they are going to issue an opinion that says that all presidents are immune from criminal liability always and forever. But to the extent that the court's conservatives had the goal of insulating Trump from criminal

prosecution and federal court before the election, they've probably already accomplished that goal. Even if they sort of give the lower courts, they go ahead to continue with Trump's trials, it's the end of June. We're going to hit the summer. Sports need time to prepare for trial. Lawyers need time to prepare for trial. The closer we get to the election, the more fraught, the act of putting one of the candidates on trial is going to be. The court's treatment of this case is sort of all you need to know in that it was the last case in which they heard argument. It will be in all likelihood the last case they issue during this term before they, you know, leave Washington for the 4th of July. Their strategy here was not to exonerate Trump,

but to delay the resolution of this sort of intermediate case. The bottom line is that it's very unlikely that whatever the result in his criminal trials in D.C., related to January 6th, it's very unlikely that we'll know those before Election Day. If you were a conservative justice who wants Donald Trump to win, that's the outcome for which you're hoping. Jay Willis, always a pleasure to talk to you, even though you, I feel like you never bear good news. Yeah, it's not my role. No, I know, but I always appreciate your expertise. Everybody go, if you don't have balls and strikes.org You're making a mistake. And I'll just say, you're wasting your life. Jay, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me. I also want to say real quick, Neil Gorsuch, you wrote about

homelessness. You talk about the Western United States because you're from Colorado. Stop fucking claiming us. We don't like you on the West Coast. You're not one of us. You're a Georgetown prep boy. Stay in your lane. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Shaman. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studed the Daily Beast podcast at thedailybeast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber.

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