The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3545 Trumps Health Care Emergency Sounds Bad Scotus Update W Mark Joseph Stern

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

  https://youtube.com/live/0SaiSMQo2-c It's Fun Day Monday on the Majority Report On today's program: As ACA subsidies expire, 24 million Americans facing massive increases in health care premiums. Trump is asked what his message is to those 24 million Americans and he replies with "don't make it sound so bad" and accusing the reporter of being a "sycophant for Democrats". Mark Joseph Stern, senior writer at Slate covering law and the courts, joins Sam and Emma to discuss the Supreme Court's recent activity and the key cases to watch in 2026. In the Fun Half: In the wake of Rob and Michelle Reiner's murder, Donald Trump posts on truth social a deranged and tasteless rant about Rob Reiner having "Trump derangement Syndrome". Erika Kirk joins Bari Weiss for a town hall that was a total crap show. Dave Rubin spends 10 minutes on a segment about how Megyn Kelly unfollowed him on X and isn't responding to his texts, but he doesn't care because he has so many friends. It literally doesn't matter to him. All that and more. The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: FAST GROWING TREES: Get 15% off your first purchase.  FastGrowingTrees.com/majority TUSHY: Enjoy 30% off with code TMR at boxiecat.com/TMR AURA FRAMES: Exclusive $35 off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/MAJORITY. Promo Code MAJORITY SUNSET LAKE: Use coupon code "Left Is Best" (all one word) for 20% off of your entire order at SunsetLakeCBD.com  Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com

It is Monday, December 15th, 2025. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Mark Joseph Stern, senior writer covering courts. and the Law for Slate and co-host of the Amicus podcast. So we look at the most recent rulings by the Supreme Court and get a preview of 2026.

Also on the program today, at least 15 killed at a shooting at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia. Two killed and nine injured in a shooting at Brown University. House to vote on Wednesday, expected to reject Affordable Care Act subsidy extension, shattering the health care market, potentially leaving millions without health care, starting in just about two weeks. Meanwhile, Senate bracing for another government shutdown in about a month. Most conservative government in about 35 years wins in Chile's presidential election. And we're back.

Measles cases top 1900 as it spreads rapidly in South Carolina. Federal appeals court allows Trump to continue to withhold reimbursement payments to plan parenthood. Rob Reiner and wife stabbed to death, son in custody. And two Army National Guard, U.S. Army National Guard killed in Syria. It's a rough weekend. Yes, we still have troops in Syria. All this and more on today's majority report. Fun day?

Not so fun day today. I mean, gosh, really, really horrific news, one after the other this weekend. Yeah. We will get to some of it. I mean, you know, it's not generally that we cover stories like these on this program. Obviously, Australia has very serious gun control laws. They're already responding by this by increasing gun control. This is the biggest mass murder they've had in probably three decades.

1996 is when they had their mass shooting, which resulted in them banning semi-automatic automatic rifles. They did a mandatory buyback program, and they got over 600,000 weapons back in that effort. They also created this mandatory nearly one-month waiting period when purchasing a weapon. So this is their first mass shooting since 2002. It had great effect, but it doesn't, I mean, obviously take away from the fact that this was a horrific. event even, you know, with that. Yep. It's crazy to say about a country, their mass shooting

30 years ago when we've had how many since then? Yeah, more mass shootings this year than days. And of course, we won't even have a conversation about gun control in the wake of what happened at

Brown. And it means it goes, it almost goes without saying. There's not even, it doesn't even seem to be an indication that anybody even brought it up. And one after Charlie Kirk. Yep.

Um, well, we will get it all, you know, into that. Uh, the, in terms of, uh, political stories in particular, and in terms of the material implications of politics, we are now about, uh, two weeks away, less, maybe. from locking in an increase in premiums. In some instances, like three to four, five times more a month for people. We're going to have millions of Americans who just simply cannot afford health insurance. There are about 24 million Americans who anticipate a or should be anticipating getting a large increase in their premiums. And again, this will be locked in.

I think we're still in open enrollment in some of these things. Maybe actually it ends very close to today. Here is Donald Trump being asked at the beginning of the weekend. Now, just keep in mind that Trump is fading in and out of the impact of dementia. And so, you know, make what you will of this. He can't even hide himself.

We will play you later what he wrote on truth social regarding Rob Reiner's murder. Perchialogy. Stunning narcissism and sociopathy. Like the moral rot that he has dragged us all down to is indescribable. Yep. Here is Trump. At the end of this year, those extended Obamacare subsidies expire.

What's your message to those 24 million Americans who will see their insurance premiums go up? I'll make it sound so bad because, you know, obviously you're a, you know, a synco fan for Democrats. You're obviously a provider of bad news for Republicans. Let me just say something. The Republicans, I think I can speak for Tom and most other people. I think what most Republicans want to see is what I want to see. And I leave it to them, and hopefully they're going to put great legislation on this task right here.

We want to see all of the money that's been squandered and given to an insurance company because Obamacare is horrible health insurance. It's far too expensive, and it always has been. But what it really is is a way of making insurance companies rich. We want the money not to be paid at all to insurance companies. You know, insurance companies have gone up 1,700 percent over a short, meaning the stock, 1,700 percent over a short period of time, and they've taken in hundreds of billions and even trillions of dollars. And we want the money to go to the people.

They'll go in the form of an insurance account, health care account, or any other form that we can create. We have a lot of different forms. We want to give the money to the people and let the people buy their own great health care. Okay. So just to be clear, the way that you're supposed to react to this, if you're one of those 24 million people, is, oh, my health care has now quadrupled in price. And the good news is the government's not going to be subsidizing it.

Yep. So maybe they're going to give me essentially an eighth or a tenth of what the increase is. And then, and they want me to pay the health care. health insurance with that. And so things are going to be great. Like, I don't even understand their logic. It doesn't matter. Like, basically he's essentially saying it doesn't matter if you're paying more for health insurance rates. At least this is taking more out of a cut of the profit of the insurers because, or even though that wouldn't be the case actually because they're raising rates. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. He's just co-opting the left-wing critique of the

Affordable Care Act, which is a correct. one in order to say, well, this is why we're allowing the subsidies that cheapen your marketplace insurance to expire. He's co-opting only one half of the formula, which is that what the ACA does is subsidize the private health insurance. And he's not coming in with the other half of the critique is, which is, should be, this should be government run and we should barely have to pay anything. There shouldn't be anything private at all, and that's why it's not working.

And why is he able to get away with that? I don't know, because the Democratic Party has spent since 2010 defending the Affordable Care Act. Taking money from that industry to fund their campaigns. I mean, we're the ones who are called unrealistic. It's bit us in the ass in, like, one of the most catastrophic ways, I mean, historical ways over the past decade and a half, that we made this bargain with this private industry, which we all know doesn't, shouldn't exist. exist. And what did it get us? Like 12 years of peace on the issue? Yeah. I mean, it expanded coverage, but it is wildly insufficient and also... And now it's going to like have people

thrown out on it. Right. And it didn't protect. I mean, there was the patient protection part that was better, but it still allows for like this mass denial of care. That was what the whole, that's, in many ways, what Luigi allegedly was upset about. That that that's the problem with having this private middleman. The, I mean, this is what drives me crazy. I mean, I have not been able to shake that answer that McMurrow, who's right, and incidentally tomorrow, we're going to have on the program. We're going to have Abdul Al-Asaid. We're going to have Abdulazade on the program who's also running for Senate in Michigan. But this Mallory McMurrow, and I had not been paying attention to it, But her response of like, do you really want to give the government control when you have a potential of the Donald Trump control over all of our health insurance in the form of Medicare for all?

And it's like, hello, it was so disingenuous. Because first off, understand, the U.S. government pays the health insurance of over a third of Americans today. Medicaid, Medicare, well, VA is actually not just that they don't pay for the health insurance. They actually implement the health care. But between Medicaid and Medicare, you're talking about a third of Americans as it is, and maybe S-chips, which is essentially the same thing, but for younger, for kids. So, and here we see with a stroke of the pen, essentially, or not even a stroke of the pen, 24 million are going to get booted off. And gosh knows how many are already going to, you know, having or struggling trying to just pay for their health insurance, period,

because these same health insurance companies that are going to lose 24 million or potentially lose millions of that. 24 million, they're jacking prices up on other people because the risk pool has become more problematic. So this is just already a crap show. And it was very disingenuous to say that the reason why you wouldn't want Medicare for all or some single payer system is because you wouldn't want the Donald Trump in charge of it. Donald Trump's in charge of whatever he wants to be in charge of at this point. It's absurd. And there would be a lot more cohesive response. months, if we weren't talking about 24 million people whose health insurance were going to go through the roof and maybe two or three million who are going to basically can't afford it.

But if we were talking about 300 million, Donald Trump wouldn't touch us with a 10-foot pole. But we'll have more to say about this later. Got a couple of words from our sponsors. In a moment, we're going to be talking to Mark Joseph Stern, senior writer, covering the courts for Slate. get a couple of words from our sponsors. And it doesn't matter whether you're planting now or later. There is a place. This is also one of those sponsors I was using for years before they became a sponsor.

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Just go to auraframes.com. Use the promo code majority, and you'll kill it. All right. We're going to take a quick break when we come. back Mark Joseph Stern, senior writer covering the courts and law for slate and co-host of the Amicus podcast. We'll be right back. We are back, Sam Cedar, Emma Vigland on the Majority Report. It's a pleasure to welcome back to the program, Mark Joseph Stern, senior writer covering

the courts and law for slate, co-host of the Amicus Amicus podcast. We say it both ways here. Mark, welcome back to the program. Thank you so much. Happy to be back on. So, okay, we got a lot to catch up on. Let's start with what happened. I guess it was now, well, all of this has happened really in the past two weeks. Texas had gerrymandered their new districts at the behest of the Department of Justice, who basically said, you should do this racially.

And it was reversed because of that. And then the Supreme Court, we're not clear why, decided to say, oh, no, let's let this stick. Just walk us through all of this because this is, it's unclear whether it's like a, the beginning of, or I should say maybe the end of the end of the Voting Rights Act. Well, that was a really good summary, actually. That's the outline. What happened was the Trump administration wanted the Texas legislature to do a mid-decade redistricting, which is very unusual, right? Usually this occurs at the beginning of the decade after the

census, but Trump and his allies wanted a more favorable map for the House of Representatives in 26, so they could hold on to their majority. So the White House pressured the Texas legislature to redraw the map to create an even more extreme partisan gerrymander. And initially, the Texas legislature refused. Didn't want to do it. It felt that it would be sort of brazen and look very bad and incur backlash. And so then the Department of Justice sent the legislature and the governor of Texas a letter claiming that the current map essentially gave black and brown Texans too much political power by putting them in districts together. And so the Department of Justice, again, under Trump's direction clearly, said, you need to unpack these districts that have a lot of black and brown

voters together to sort of diminish their political power. I mean, that would be. the effect and to remove the kind of racial benefit that is given to minority voters in the current map. That was the pretext that the governor and the legislature needed to enact the new map. They did exactly what the Justice Department asked. They targeted black and Hispanic voters with surgical precision. They diluted their votes. They drew a new map that gave Republicans five extra seats in the House. And a district court blocked it because of all that history. and because what happened here was very brazenly an effort to redraw a map in a way that discriminated on the basis of race in violation of the 14th and 15th amendments in a way that is

not at all compelled by the Voting Rights Act. The judge who wrote that decision was appointed by Donald Trump. He is a conservative federalist society judge, but Texas raised to the Supreme Court and asked for a pause, a stay on that decision. And by a six to three vote, the Supreme Court granted it. Again, without giving clear reasons, we can talk. about what it did say. But the Supreme Court basically said, we don't really see race. We're race blind. We just think this is partisanship. So we're going to let this map fly.

I mean, the amazing thing about this is that they, the whole sort of backdrop of gerrymandering with the Supreme Court goes back. I can't remember now 10 years when you had Anthony Kennedy saying, like, if we knew, if we had a way in which we could assess whether something's been overly gerrymandered. Well, then, let's take a look at it. And as he was headed out the door, I guess this was back in maybe it was 2020 or 2016 or 2018. A case did show up where academics had actually figured out a way to determine if something was over gerrymandered in terms of the way that it distributed the power of the vote. And they still ignored that. And basically they said, look, we don't have a problem with political gerrymandering. The only thing he came

can't do is do it based upon race. And here's a case where, like, you don't have to prove that it was, it was, it was, the intent was racial. It's literally someone wrote it down and said, you should do this because of race. And they said, okay, we'll do it. But yet. So what did the Supreme Court say at that point? So I think what's most offensive to me about all of this is that the district court had,

I believe a nine-day trial with two dozen witnesses, 3,000 pages of evidence. And it wrote a 160-page decision, laying out all of the reasons why this was clearly a racial gerrymander in violation of the Constitution. The Supreme Court reversed that in two paragraphs, paragraphs. And one of those paragraphs didn't even have to do with the merits of the case. So the court essentially said,

we just don't think at the end of the day that race was driving this. We think it was partisanship. And we don't think that the plaintiffs, who are voting rights advocates, met their burden of showing that this was a racial gerrymander. And we think the district court got it wrong. And there's a lot of problems with that. One is that the Supreme Court is actually not a trial court. It was not in the room for those nine days of the trial. It did not see people testifying on the stand and make credibility determinations about whether they were telling the truth, it just sort of decided to play that role

and overturn those findings. But that is not permitted by the law. The law here imposes what's called a clearly erroneous standard, which means that the Supreme Court could only block this map if it found the district court's findings to be clearly erroneous. In no universe were those findings clearly erroneous. There was a paper trail. There were statements on the floor of the Texas House and Senate.

There was just a huge amount of evidence that this map could not have been drawn without racial data used to sort of draw those squiggly lines in exactly the right way to harm black Texans. And yet the Supreme Court just said, we don't agree with that. And so they overturned it. And then the next piece of it was, they said we're too close to an election. So the district court shouldn't have intervened. That's my favorite. Yeah. Yeah. So can anyone remind me when that election is? I believe it's November 2026. So almost a full year out from when this, this decision came down by the district court. And why did the district court come out late? Why did this decision come down in the fall of 2025?

Because Texas drew its maps late at the last possible minute. The district court acted as quickly as it could have and issued a very strong decision in a remarkably short amount of time. But still the Supreme Court said it's too late under this so-called Purcell principle. It's the eve of an election. direct quote, so this new map can't be overturned and it needs the same place for the next election. They're using the Mitch McConnell excuse except just using it in the judiciary. And also, I just wanted to back up for a sec because that three judge panel that ended up that they overturned that decision the Supreme Court did with that short explanation you talk about, had a quote from Chief Justice John Roberts that headed it. Like, can you just speak a little bit about what that lower court was saying with that.

that two to one decision and how they basically called out the chief justice of the Supreme Court prior to maybe almost anticipating this decision. Yeah. So the quote at the top was that the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race, which Chief Justice Roberts said in a notorious decision where he blocked an integration plan for what were still racially segregated public school districts in Seattle. And I think the reason the court led with that was not to try.

the chief, but actually to show him, like, look, you have said that we need to be living in a post-racial society and the course need to sort of impose this race-neutral colorblind vision on the country. What Texas did here fundamentally clashes with that, whether you think they did it for purely partisan reasons or because they wanted to shift some communities around to different incumbents, or because maybe they thought they wanted to benefit certain Hispanic voters who had supported Donald Trump, so they created a few more Hispanic districts. It doesn't matter because they still used race. And that is what you, John Roberts, have said, is the ultimate evil under the 14th Amendment.

And I guess that just didn't work on the chief because he evidently did not buy it. But I think it's a pretty strong argument that, you know, it's stronger in light of, and we mentioned this in the top, Sam. You know, the Supreme Court is about to gut the Voting Rights Act in a different decision called Calais versus Louisiana. And in that case, the Supreme Court is almost certainly going to rule that states and courts cannot draw congressional maps for the purpose of empowering black and Hispanic voters. So states cannot say, we want to make sure that black and Hispanic voters have their voices heard.

We're going to draw a few districts that give them a majority so that they have meaningful representation. And the Supreme Court is very likely going to say that that's unconstitutional. So it'll be a violation of the 14th the 15th Amendments to try to help and empower racial minorities in voting. But it seems that it will no longer be a violation of the 14th to 15th amendments if you draw a map on the basis of race to disempower black and Hispanic voters. But even if, I mean, I think there, I mean, it seems to me what their argument is, is that and I just want to when, just to go back when you had said trial court as opposed to the Supreme Court, the trial court. the trial court is where the facts happen. And then after that, like an appeal court, which the Supreme Court is ultimately the court

of ultimate appeal, is really arguing not on the preponderance of the facts, but rather on how the law is applied to those facts. And so the idea that they come in and say, well, it really, even though the fact court found that it was about racial, we don't think it really was. because are they arguing, and this is the other part that I wanted to speak to is that they offered no standard. So like if saying, hey, the way, the problem with these things is that you've over power, you've given too much power to black people.

You're undermining, you're basically stripping white people of their electoral power. And presumably also like, and Latinos because they thought that they were going to win the Latino vote like. they did in 2024. We don't know, but I guess presumably the Supreme Court saying, like, well, it's okay to use race as a surrogate for politics as long as it's really

genuinely a surrogate, which is insane because they're just very fortunate that for the most part, it's white people who vote for Republicans overwhelmingly versus Democrats. Yes. And there was a case from last term in which that same issue kind of bubbled up two terms ago out of South

Carolina, where the court laid down a rule that's a lot like what you just said. You know, oh, well, it's okay for a state legislature to just pretty much assume that black people are Democrats and gerrymander them out of political power on that basis because they're not really acting out of racism. They're just using race as a proxy. And that was a direct contradiction of years of precedent that had come before, which said that you cannot use race to stand in for partisanship. You cannot just target people because they're black and say we assume they're Democrats. But that's now allowed under Supreme Court precedent.

And I guess it's just very difficult for me to see how a state could draw a racial gerrymander that this Supreme Court would find to be illegal. Because they've rigged the game to such a degree that every sort of malicious use of race that the legislature comes up with is just a. explained away, oh, it wasn't really about this. It was about that. To the point where it really does feel like there's a sort of neo-Jim Crow creeping in where there's this pretext and everybody knows its pretext, but the courts are going to accept the pretext because they don't really believe that people of color should have more voting power. And another reason I say that is, you know,

if the principle that courts can't strike down election laws now extends to a year before an election, right? That it's too close to an election, one year. out, then it basically gives every state like a year-long loophole to enact some kind of openly unconstitutional law. And if a lower court strikes it down, then the Supreme Court can say, well, you're too close to an election. It'll cause voter confusion and mayhem. And so this is giving a lot of wiggle room, not just for 2026, but for 2028. I think the bigger ramifications here are for the next election cycle, because I bet you that starting in 27, we're going to see a lot of last minute changes to the maps and to the voting rules. And all of those state legislatures are going

to invoke the principle that the Supreme Court just laid down that a year out from the election is too close for courts to intervene. Haven't they, though, like, it seems to me in the past couple of years, they've intervened plenty of times when we're closer to an election. Or am I just imagining that? Well, you know, some of the justices are kind of principled on this. Others aren't. So Chief Justice Roberts has generally counseled the court to just stay out no matter what. But Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh have all argued for intervening much, much, much closer to an election to change the voting rules when they want to change the voting rules to help Republicans. So that happened in 2020. And again, in 2022, where there were courts that had protected voting rights relatively close to the election, issued these decisions.

decisions that said, yes, you can vote even if you're, you know, X, Y, Z. This map is unconstitutional, needs to be replaced. And in those cases, those justices were like, we want to step in and make everything better for Republicans. But when the lower courts are trying to do it the other way, those justices are not principled or consistent at all. So there's not a lot of consistency on the right flank here. All right. Let's move to the other, I mean, really sort of incredible consequential case, the slaughter case, which is about Donald Trump's ability to fire someone from the FDC slaughter. And the FTC is one of many supposedly independent agencies that make it hard for the president to fire. And these, tell us about this sort of novel approach to agencies.

like how long have we had this concept of semi-independent agencies since 1790 when congress it's relatively new uh yeah only about 200 plus years old um it's much newer than fire yes and maybe that's the benchmark that the supreme court is using now um you know this is an interesting area of the law because what what happened was in the 1980s people like anton and sculls Develop this theory of the unitary executive, that the president alone makes up the entire executive branch. So he has to be able to hold all the executive power. And that means being able to fire pretty much any executive official he wants, specifically

the heads of any agencies that included independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and many others. And in the intervening decades, actual historians, like real, you know, credible historians have looked into the history here and said, that's just not true at all. That's not what people understood the Constitution to mean. That's not in line with historical practice. That is just not the reality of our founding charter. And what they discovered is that starting in 1790, Congress started to create agencies

that wielded a lot of power whose members, or at least some of whose members, could not be removed at will by the president, including something that was called. called the Sinking Fund Commission that dealt with the nation's war debts, which was a really big deal that consumed a lot of political and legal energy in 1790. And Congress said, we're not going to put this all under the control of the president. We're going to make sure that some people on this agency can't be fired by the president. And it went on like that in a kind of unbroken chain through to today when Congress has created a ton of different independent agencies and said the president can't fire their heads at least without good cause.

And they get a term. I just want to be clear on this. Like, you get a term. You get appointed for a five-year term or a six-year term or a four-year term. Yes, yes, yes. It's not indefinite. For the FTC, it's seven years. And these are staggered terms.

So you serve your term. And because it's staggered, because they aren't all appointed at once, every president eventually does get control over every agency, right? Over their four years, like eventually, if there's a Democratic majority and a Republican president, the Democratic majority on the agency will cycle out, and the Republican president gets to replace them. So it's not like they're entirely independent or nonpartisan,

but they are designed to have some kind of insulation from the partisan pressures emanating from the White House because Congress said, look, antitrust for the Federal Trade Commission, right? Antitrust is a really powerful tool. You can wield this tool to crush corporations, to block billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions. we don't want this to be at the whim of a president and his cronies. So we are going to create an agency, the FTC, whose leaders have a buffer from the president

who can't be fired because they don't do something that the president wants them to do. And that is the judgment that in my view, in the view of a lot of people, the Constitution permits. The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to structure the executive branch, to create these federal agencies. But the conservatives, the unitary executive boosters, they all claim that the independence here is anathema to our constitutional design and that the president simply must have absolute power to fire the heads of these agencies anytime he wants for any reason he wants. That's the slaughter case. And it's a guarantee that the Supreme Court is going to embrace that reasoning.

Okay. And also to be clear, it's also to maintain at least some type of institutional stability. Right. Right. I mean, like, you know, you don't want the interpretation of antitrust to change every six months. You know, it seems like a straightforward in that respect. Okay. Well, so the Supreme Court's going to give the power to Trump. Yes. Which, you know, theoretically means that President AOC or, you know, or whomever in 2020.

28, knock on wood, can come in and theoretically fire all of the agency or, you know, all of the people in these agencies, regardless of their terms. I mean, I'm not even clear why you have terms at that point. Really, like, because it seems to me theoretically, if you can fire anybody at will, you could just rehire them and extend their terms at will. Like, I don't understand, like, what the restrictions are. But where does that leave us with the Fed? Because for some reason, like, if the president has this power, why wouldn't the president

have this power? Like, you know, what would constrain it? So I think this is where the whole theory really falls apart. Like, you can set aside the history and just focus on the practical realities. Even the most hardcore unitary executives like Brett Kavanaugh, who's been on this forever, will not accept the logical consequences of their beliefs. you are correct that the Federal Reserve cannot be reasonably distinguished from the Federal Trade Commission or any other agency in the government. It does much the same thing. Rulemaking

regulations. It deals with monetary policy. It's been delegated a bunch of sort of tasks from Congress. And it carries them out to ensure that we have like a stable market, a stable economy. And it has been understood for a very long time that that independence is crucial. to protect this country from being driven into a recession by every president. Because all of the data and all of the history shows that when the president takes control of the central bank, when the central bank is directly subject to partisan pressures, then it leads to bad places. It performs worse.

And you can see that now with Trump trying to pressure the Federal Reserve into slashing interest rates prematurely. So the Fed's Board of Governors are protected against removal, just like the federal trade commissioners are protected against removal. But the Supreme Court has treated. treated them differently. And it already actually allowed Trump to fire slaughter, the FTC commissioner, over the shadow docket. So, like, it's really inevitable how that case is going to go. But it didn't allow him to fire Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor, when she was removed or attempted to be removed by the Trump administration. And the court has not given us a clear distinction there to explain why. What the court did, in my view, is essentially put out a

call to very smart lawyers that read between the lines something like, hey, we don't want to give the president total control of the Federal Reserve, but we really want to go whole hog on the Unitary executive theory for all these other agencies that we hate or that we don't care about. So can you, smart lawyers, please devise some kind of facially plausible theory for us that we can embrace to explain why the Federal Reserve is different. And right now, as we speak, very smart lawyers are trying to concoct that distinction. And I will be happy if the Supreme court embraces that distinction because I don't want Trump to be able to fire Lisa Cook or other members of the Fed. Like it will be good for the country, but it will also be stupid and incoherent

because everyone with a brain understands that what they are doing there is just accepting that the unitary executive theory can't mean what they say it means or else the consequences would be catastrophe for the country. Is it like a potential theory that if the second word of the name of the institution starts with an R? Then you can't fire them. Like, what is, do you, like, let me put it this way. I imagine you have seen these smart lawyers attempting to work this out in some type of, like, law journals or articles or whatnot.

Like, have you seen anything that comes remotely close? So when the Supreme Court put out this call, it's sort of first draft of the idea was that the court said, we think that the Fed has a unique history and a distinct structure that may distinguish her from these other agencies. But every agency has a unique history and a distinct structure. Like no two agencies are exactly the same. So that doesn't make any sense. So what we've seen instead is this effort to argue that the board of governors on the Federal

Reserve don't exercise the executive power. That controlling monetary policy is more of some kind of quasi-legislative power or an almost judicial power. And so it doesn't slot neatly into the executives' authorities. and so the president shouldn't be able to take control over that sort of functioning. But that is a dead end, logically at least, because what the court is going to say in slaughter is that there's no such thing as quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial powers. There's only three.

There's executive, legislative, and judicial. And every single component of the government has to fall into one of those three. And so I don't see how they can claim that the Federal Reserve is the one little piece of government that just floats around in this weird liminal space outside of the three branches. Like, I think everybody knows it's part of the executive branch. And so maybe a smart lawyer will still come up with some backup theory. I mean, maybe they will say it's because the second word of the agency starts with R. That would be about as coherent as what I suspect they will land on.

Well, I want credit. If that, that's what they end up doing. I want to persuade it. It's what James Madison would have wanted, Sam. I think you've read one of his treaties on the letter R. Yeah. And it's important. I mean, but we're really at that point, right?

Like, I mean, obviously, I'm, I'm joking, but we're at that point. Like, they're just, that's the functional equivalent of what they're doing is that they just don't even feel like they necessarily need to even write that in some of their shadow docket findings. I mean, let's talk about birthright citizenship. Like, it's pretty explicit in the 14th Amendment, right? Like, if you're born here, if you're born in this country, you're a citizen. Right. And that's what it says. So why are we talking about this?

Well, because there are, I would say, obviously a lot of white supremacists. in this government who don't want to allow the children of immigrants to become birthright citizens of the United States. And also a lot of ambitious law professors who want to get appointed to the federal judiciary in Trump's second term and are therefore making up some kind of historical basis for Trump's theory that birthright citizenship isn't actually in the 14th Amendment. So to start, as you said, like take out the 14th Amendment, read it. it's the very first sentence that all persons born here are citizens.

That was specifically designed to overturn the Dred Scott decision that helped set off the civil war, which had held that black people more or less could not be citizens because of their race. And there were debates in Congress during ratification about whether this would apply to the children of immigrants. And the answer was, yes, it would. There were some members of Congress who argued that it should be rewritten. to exclude the children of immigrants. But members of Congress understood that the version that ultimately passed

was the version that granted birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants just like the children of enslaved people. And so that has been like pretty well-settled history for about 150 years. The Supreme Court heard a case called Wong Kim Ark. It decided in 1898 that said the children of immigrants

are automatic U.S. citizens. But Trump wants to take away that citizenship from the children of under. undocumented immigrants and from the children of what he calls temporary immigrants, which are like visa holders. So people who are here on a student visa or a business visa or something of that kind. And their argument is that the 14th Amendment says you are a citizen of the United States if you are born here and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. And they are arguing, the administration is arguing that the children of those immigrants, those two classes of

immigrants, they aren't fully subject to the jurisdiction of the United States because their parents aren't lawfully domiciled here, that they don't have lawful residents here. And so they should not fall under the 14th Amendment's guarantee because there's this secret loophole that nobody knew about until now, aside from a few fringe, like white supremacist scholars, in quotes, who claimed that the children of immigrants aren't subject to our jurisdiction. So that is the theory that they are presenting. They're trying to drive an 18-wheeler through these four or five words in the 14th Amendment that do not mean what they say they mean. So what parts, what, like, what are these people who are born in this country? What part of the jurisdiction of the United

States are they not subject to? Because it seems to me like, you know, I could get one of these people to maybe, I don't know, do some type of scam for me. if the U.S. government doesn't have any jurisdiction over them, if they can be in the country, at least temporarily, and can't be arrested for certain things? Or what is it like what, where do they operate outside the law? Yes. So the theory proves too much, as lawyers like to say, because of course, these immigrants and their children are subject to the jurisdiction in the United States. Otherwise, they couldn't be arrested. They couldn't be detained. They couldn't be held. against their will in the way that the Trump administration wants to do because they wouldn't be subject to our jurisdiction. All that that phrase means is that they are subject to our laws,

which everyone agrees immigrants and their children are. We know why those words appear in the 14th Amendment. It was because there were members of Congress who were concerned about the children of diplomats, certain tribes that had not been folded into the United States polity yet, and the children of invading armies, if there were ever an invasion of the United States. And they said, these are the three categories who are not subject to our jurisdiction

because diplomats have diplomatic immunity. Their kids are not subject to our jurisdiction. At the time, certain tribes were not subject to American laws. And of course, invaders, you know, it's the law of war. It's not typical law. And those were the categories

that were meant to be excluded, not the children of immigrants. And that is what the history bears out. And even though there are a handful of conservative scholars, who have tried to sort of mangle that history, I think it's clear enough that even I, a real skeptic of the Supreme Court,

believe that the court will, by a lopsided vote, uphold birthright citizenship, and strike down Trump's policy. So do you think they took this case just as a way of saying, like, let's just stop digging around with this because this is, you know, we're going to put this to bed?

That's part of it. It also makes them look good to rule against Trump. It gives them political capital to rule in his favor on other cases, but still say, hey, look, we ruled against him here. But yes, I think that they just want to put this to bed for good because it's an annoyance. It's going to draw a huge amount of attention to the court, which they despise.

And it's ultimately just a very simple question with a simple and straightforward answer that they would like to provide and move on. This is sort of their, like we said gravity's real. So we're obviously not in the bag for anybody. Yeah. All right. Lastly, speaking about being in the bag, there was a case that you wrote about just less than a week ago. Yeah. There is a mandate in New York State.

I think this came out of New York State, right? Yes. That if you go to school, you got to get certain basic vaccinations so the kids are protected. We now have a huge measles outbreak. South Carolina is like it's just like starting to rip through there. It's very difficult. Measles don't present for three weeks while you're still, while you're actually contagious.

Yeah. And the Supreme Court is now saying essentially that there is a religious, well, okay, take us through this because this whole religious exemption to our laws has been like a burgeoning sort of. business for the Supreme Court. More and more are our laws have a get out of free jail card if you claim a religious exemption. Right. So New York used to have a religious exemption in its own statutes for the school vaccine mandate. And it repealed that exemption in 2019 because there was a measles outbreak in schools where children were not vaccinated. It was the worst measles epidemic

in the state in 25 years. And so the legislature said, look, we can't have this anymore. We have to protect everyone. We're getting rid of the religious exemption. And this case is a challenge to that repeal of the exemption. And so this sort of lawsuit argues that, in fact, the First Amendment of the Constitution through the Free Exercise Clause guarantees parents the right to send their children to school without getting them vaccinated. The lower courts ruled against that claim and said that is not true.

There is no religious discrimination here. You still have to get your kids vaccinated. The Supreme Court set aside the lower court's decision. Now, it didn't declare a new rule, but it said, look, we want you to reconsider this decision based on our own ruling last term in the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, which you may remember, which was the case about LGBTQ books in schools, where the Supreme Court held that parents have a religious right to prevent their children from seeing books in schools that feature LGBTQ characters. Because the Supreme Court said, there is this massive right, this sort of huge, like, all-encompassing

radical new rights that parents hold to direct the religious upbringing of their children. And this right is so powerful that it overrides the interests of other people, including LGBTQ students who want to see themselves represented in these books. the children of LGBTQ parents who advocated for having these books on the curriculum, right? The Supreme Court said, we don't care. Parents have an absolute right, pretty much, to control the religious suffering of their children. And so what the Supreme Court said in this case was, we need you, lower courts, to go back and apply that principle to this case.

And if you apply that principle to this case, it pretty much leads you in the direction that parents have a fundamental right to send their kids to school without getting vaccinated. if that violates their religious beliefs. That is where the court seems to be going with this case. It's not all the way there yet. But by setting aside that lower court decision and saying, you need to reconsider this, it sent a very strong signal that at least four justices,

probably more, really want to sort of enshrine an exemption to vaccine school mandates into the Constitution. So, and we should say, you know, this is, this case is around the Amish. and so, you know, you obviously need to have a sort of pre-existing religion. But I subscribe to the Old Testament. I want my child to be able to stone adulterers and others, for that matter.

I think there's a couple others. How is it that my kid is not allowed to throw stones at? at people in a circle when it's part of my religion. You're just going to have to trust that Sam Alito knows where to draw that line. That's pretty much it. But why would you draw the line? Why would he draw the line? Like, why?

Listen, okay, I get the fact that, you know, I think we, I think there's still agreement on the Supreme Court that vaccinations, you know, like a measles vaccination inhibits of the ability for other people to get the measles. There's like a 6-3 agreement on that, I would say. Well, I feel like everybody agrees that at least that measles are communicable, that a vaccination prevents the communication of that measles. Okay. Well, if we can't inhibit the spread of measles because of people's religion,

why can we inhibit the spread of stones being thrown based upon my? religion. I have no idea, but you know what? I will tell you that if a state tried to pass a law banning corporal punishment in all schools, including religious schools, I bet this Supreme Court would strike it down and say that there are some parents who believe that their children need to be spanked or paddled when they are bad in school and that the state does not have the ability to undermine or override those parents' wishes. So this does lead to some very weird places. And the court is just sort of saying trust us. Like we will know where to draw the line. I'm not joking when I say that, but there's no limiting principle. I mean, it was just as Scalia who said that we shouldn't go down

this road. It was just as Scalia who said we shouldn't have religious accommodations to neutral laws that restrict religious exercise because that way lies anarchy. He was afraid of anarchy. Now the court is sort of embracing that path, but saying we will stop before it gets to anarchy. And I think that's probably true. But where they really stop is when it gets to Christian nationalism because they're not going to be issuing laws or striking down laws that, you know, are interfering with Muslim religious worship. They're not going to be protecting the children of, you know, I don't know, other religious minorities seek children. They're just going to be focusing on Christians. Almost all of these cases involve Christians. And they're looking at it through a kind

of Christian supremacist lens and saying, if it offends Christians, then we are going to strike it down. And I just want to say briefly, this case was about the Amish because they found the law firm that brought the lawsuit found two Amish parents who are willing to sign up. But it is a challenge to the entire law. So if those two Amish parents win, then the entire law will be struck down. And any religious parent in New York State will be able to claim the exemption for their kids. So the Amish thing is kind of like a stalking horse for a much broader assault on the statute. Well, it's also, I mean, can you view all of these decisions too and even the deployment of the shadow doc?

as a way for the court to give itself maximum authority and discretion? Because if there's less paper trail and less precedent and everything you're saying about all of these cases is about empowering themselves. I mean, this is why the legislature needs to step up. We had our guests on about the third reconstruction, how we need that, about how in times of democratic expansion, the legislature is the one that steps up and the courts are the ones that restrict it. Like, this is what we're seeing right now.

They're giving themselves even more and more authority, basically. Yes, and I think, Emma, where that really makes itself clear is in the cases about Trump and executive power. Because if they had to issue a full written opinion in every one of those cases, they would at least be laying down some principles that the next Democratic president can embrace. But in a whole lot of these cases, including especially the impoundment of appropriations and the destruction of federal agencies by executive order, they are not issuing reasoned decisions. It's a shadow docket order with no reasoning or like one sentence of justification. And so what that means is that Trump can destroy the Department of Education and the Supreme Court will let him do it. But if President AOC comes in and tries to destroy ICE or CBP or some agency that she doesn't like, the Supreme Court could say, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on.

We never said that presidents could destroy any agency. We just said that Trump could destroy this agency and we didn't tell you why. So I think that the shadow docket abuse does help the conservative. conservative justices preserve maximum latitude in those executive power cases and others, but those especially, to in a future administration say, will different rules apply? And we never even said what the rules were in the first place. What if I, in my house, we keep kosher or halal and we're sending, I'm sending my kid to school and they get free lunch. But I know for a fact that the utensils that are used in these free lunches or even the counters, sometimes they mix, you know,

milk and meat or sometimes they, they serve pork. Can I say like, wait a second. I have my kid has a right to a meal, but he can't eat this because of the way that you prepare it infringes upon my religious values. So you guys got to have separate facilities. for milk and meat and for pork. You have three or four different facilities. I mean, in theory, you could raise that claim. I'm sure the school would respond and say, well, it's just too difficult for us to create separate facilities. But I'm reminded of the case a few years back where there was a Muslim man who wanted to have his imam in the death chamber with him as he was executed.

And by a five to four decision with the conservatives and the majority, the Supreme Court wouldn't let him. have the imam. Does anyone really think that the court would have ruled the same way if it were a Southern Baptist who wanted to have their own personal preacher in the death chamber? I mean, surely not. And in fact, the Supreme Court wound up kind of backtracking when Christians began raising those same claims to have their faith advisors in the death chamber with them. There's always a special kind of benefit to Christians in these cases that you don't frequently see extended to religious minorities. And I think part of that is just built in. Like Christianity is the majority. majoritarian religion in this country. And so it's, it's what we swim in. It's in the air that we breathe.

Everybody expects there to be sort of little accommodations here and there for Christians. But if a minority religion needs some kind of accommodation, it becomes this whole big thing and people balk at it. You see this in case after case. And it's a subtle dynamic, but it really does start to show itself when there's a religion that says, you know, I want this particular meal in prison because I must have it or else I will be violating my God's commandments. And the prison just says, what, you want us to set up a whole different kitchen so we can make you a special meal? Absolutely not. That seems like a big ask.

But when a bunch of Christians ask that prison to create a special room for prayer where they could have a cross and they could have an altar and they could have some kind of prayer ceremony, nobody batted an eyelash. Like that's how this works in practice and everybody knows it, but it's considered sort of impolite to talk about. Much easier for everybody get measles. All right. Last thing. 2026, what cases should we be looking out for? So I mentioned the impoundment cases. There's going to be a showdown over this.

Whether Trump can destroy federal agencies, whether Trump can take away billions of dollars in funding that Congress appropriated. That is a big one. The Lisa Cook case about the Federal Reserve, that's being argued in January, 2026. So we're going to know whether or not. the Federal Reserve can remain independent from Donald Trump. We're probably going to see more attacks on restrictions against the death penalty coming from this court. We just heard a case about that last week.

There are likely more coming. And then the biggest one is the continued assault on the Voting Rights Act, this Calais case that I mentioned. Like, this could mean that Republicans get to draw themselves 15 to 19 more seats in the South just because they suddenly have a right to discriminate against. black and brown voters. That would be an earthquake in American law, and I still don't think it's getting a lot of attention. So that is the case that is most on my radar that could truly go off like Shelby County versus Holder-level nuclear bomb in voting rights jurisprudence. Mark Joseph Stern, senior writer at Slate and co-host of the Amicus podcast. It's actually

just one word, but two different ways of pronouncing it. Thanks so much to join us. We will link to both your slate work and your amicus podcast work. Thank you so much for having me on. Thanks, Mark. Thanks again. Much appreciated it. All right, folks. We're going to take a quick break and head into the fun half.

And then we're going to jettison Emma. Yeah, I won't be here for the fun half today. Emma Lys Monday is what we're branding it today. So it'll be extra fun, just the boy. Super fun. It's going to be like a, what is it? sausage party. It's going to smell disgusting in here.

I ordered some sushi, got the poker cards ready. Sush with the boys. Sush with the boys. Now you guys can say all of the things that you wouldn't say if I were here, like, fart. Can we say that? Let's just let that hang. It's hanging like a fart. Yeah, exactly.

You'd love to do that. There's some video I saw of like a, of, like, of a woman behind Trump at some, I don't know where it was. And somebody was arguing that Trump had basically shot himself. Oh, yeah. She makes like a horrible face. Folks, it's your support that makes the show possible. You can become a member at join the Majority Report.com.

When you do, you know, like get the fun, the free half, free of commercials. But you also get the fun half and you can IAM us in that. And you can listen to the endless amounts of like, sort of daydreaming we do about more features for members going forward. But someday, sometimes it'll happen. Also, just coffee.coop, fair trade, coffee, hot chocolate, use the coupon code. Majority gets you 10% off. But right now there's a 30% off sale.

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And great coffee So that's a win-win win Matt What's going on? There's a lot of concern over there We have not a great connection Which is weird Hmm

Hmm Hmm Okay Well Well we might I don't know We'll have to take a look at this in the fun house Okay

But yeah For left reckoning left reckoning will not be live tomorrow in the afternoon. It will be live on Wednesday because we have a special guest coming. A famous listener of Michael Brooks show is going to be on the show. Good news. So look forward to that on Wednesday. What is what's happening with you?

Let's go to the fun half and we'll try to. All right, folks, we will see you in the fun half. Wait, the look of good. Three months from now, six months from. now nine months from now and i don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now and i don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now but i think around 18 months out we're going to look back and go like wow what what is that going on it's nuts wait a second hold on for hold on for a moment

Emma, welcome to the program. Hey. Matt. Who? Fun pack. What is up, everyone? Fun pack. No, me, Keen.

You did it. Fun pack. Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. Bradley, you want to say hello? And I don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now. And I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better.