The Ricochet Podcast - Court and Sparklers

Episode Date: July 2, 2014

Lileks is off this this week, so it’s just Robinson and Long for our annual 4th of July Spectacular Show. And yes, we were supposed to have talk show host Mark Levin, but he had to cancel at the last minute. Not to worry — we’ve still got National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru and our old friend Richard Epstein to guide us through all the Supreme Court decisions that came down this past week. Also, what’... Source

activate program more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism well I'm not a crook I'll never tell a lie but I am NOT a bully Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. This is the Ricochet Podcast, episode number 221. With Rob Long and Peter Robinson, James Lylex is on vacation, which is why I'm doing this. We're supposed to have Mark Levin on this show. Well, he had to cancel at the last minute, but no worries. We've still got National Review's Ramesh Panuru and our old friend Richard Epstein to guide us through all the Supreme Court decisions that came down this past week.

Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Hello and welcome to the Ricochet Podcast number 221. You know, we used to in the old days number these by volume and number. But 221 means roughly four years? No, it can't possibly have been four years. This is Rob Long. I'm coming to you from sunny Southern California. And along for the ride for me is Peter Robinson, my co-founder of Ricochet in Palo Alto.

Peter, how are you? I'm very well, Rob. I'm very well. We are without James. James will be back in two weeks, I believe. Yeah. So can't you tell because it's a little choppy? I forgot how we used to do this.

Because the old days and early days and ricochet podcast days, I sort of did this and then brought you in with the same kind of language and we kind of talked and we had no idea who was listening and we fumble around but james has raised the standard so high we thought we were doing fine in the old days now we're doing exactly the same thing and we oh no wait where's james he always would begin with coming down in three two i know i never energy would start all. And you and I would kind of sit back and think, oh, it's gotten so fancy. The podcast that you're listening to is brought to you by Audible.com, the internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 100,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature, including fiction, nonfiction, periodicals. For a free audiobook of your choice, go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet.

We are also sponsored and we're very happy to be sponsored by Encounter Books. So for 15% off any title, go to encounterbooks.com and use the coupon code ricochet at checkout. This week's featured title is Faithless Execution, Building the Political Case for Obama's Impeachment by Andy McCarthy. And by Ricochet.com, we also bring this podcast to you. Peter Robinson and I founded Ricochet.com about 221 podcasts ago. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're a member, we thank you. We're happy to have you. If you are listening to this podcast and by the tens of thousands you are and are not members, we really need you to go to Ricochet.com and join. It's the fastest growing, most interesting, most civil, most witty conversation on the web between and among our contributors.

And we want you to be part of that so we can grow and grow fast. There are many – yes? What's the difference between a Thatcher membership, a Coolidge membership and a Reagan membership? Well, the Coolidge membership is our most practical membership. It's our standard membership named after St. Calvin Coolidge, president of the United States when that really meant something. The second level is – and you get access of of course, to the site and to the conversations. You get to start your own conversation. You get to do a lot of other stuff.

You get all the podcasts too. The second level is the Mrs. Thatcher level. And we keep saying Thatcher level, but I prefer to call it the Mrs. Thatcher level. I don't know why. And you get all the stuff. Lady Thatcher. Lady Thatcher. But for some reason, Mrs. just seems better.

All right. You get all the stuff from the Calvin Coolidge level. Plus you get a few extra goodies, which I encourage you to check out. And of course there's the final – the highest possible level. And I think we all know that would be called the Reagan level. And in fact, we have some this week. We have some Thatcher members, new Thatcher members, Jim Beck, NYCBR, Al Sparks, and we have a new Reagan member, Hodge. So thank you very much, you guys, for throwing your hat in with us and for making a big, big contribution to the growth of Ricochet.

If you're listening to this podcast and you're not a member, what are you waiting for? Join Ricochet today. Rob? Yes? Yes? What are you waiting for? Join Ricochet today. Rob. Yes. Yes. You know, it's been a while since you and I have set eyes on each other. And in the absence of James, who would have 10 or 12 items to hit us with before we go to our first guest. Don't give up.

Our first guest is fascinating. Mark Levin will be joining us in just a moment. But for our opening chat segment, I'd like to interview you. I overheard you say, as we were getting, I overheard you say, just two items. I overheard you say, as we were setting up, it's sort of a slow morning. I went to the shoot last night and I didn't get back until two. Right. That is just the coolest throwaway phrase anybody could possibly utter.

What shoot, what happens at a shoot, and why does it take place so late? Well, the shoot itself doesn't go that late. The shoot is for the show on TBS called Sullivan's Son. I still am a part of. I show up. I'm kind of emeritus now. But when I show up, everybody is happy to see me. So I try to go there as often as possible. Now, could I just establish that you are a decade roughly,

not quite, I think, but more or less a decade younger than I am. And even at that, you're the senior man on this set when you turn up? Well, yeah. I mean, I created the show and ran it for two years. So yeah, there's a little bit. It's very strange because you have to sort of tread lightly. You can't, you know, I'm not running the show. I'm not the boss.

I'm just the emeritus kind of guy who comes back at the end. But, but being very careful about it, writing one of these shows is a, is a kid's

game. It's like the trading pits on wall street. No, it's really not. Oh, it's not? Unfortunately, one of the problems with American television now

is it has become a kid's game. But the truth is all of the successful shows you see around, the ones who actually do really well and actually capture an audience, they're almost always done by people who are accomplished or have some silver in the gold as they say. Got it. So what actually happens at a shoot? Oh, you stand there. You fix jokes. You kind of stay on your feet for a while and you try to be sort of affable and avuncular with everyone around.

And then at the end, it was the first scripted episode of my former assistant and his partner. So afterwards, you sit for a while and you have a couple of drinks and smoke a couple of cigars. You make it actually – Which is why the voice sounds like that. OK. That's the first item. The second item is we talked about the politics, which we will not do because we did it on the site.

We did it on the podcast. But in Mississippi, not politics, you were there for the Southern Foodways Alliance. Yes. What is it? Why does it meet in Mississippi? What are you doing involved in it? Well, I'm a member of the board. It is an organization designed to sort of preserve, protect, and document the foodways of the American South.

So we do a lot of movies. We do a lot of oral histories. We do a bunch of gatherings. Jackson was one of our – we had basically a summer symposium in Jackson. So we all get together at Jackson and then members – we go – we have different restaurants we look at and different stories of the American South we look at. Then in the autumn, we have a big one in Oxford, Mississippi where the University of Mississippi is and we – that's where the headquarters of the –

I didn't realize that. I had always assumed – I heard you mention before. I always assumed it had something to do with fancy restaurants in the south. It's almost – it's the culinary counterpart of these projects to document old folk music, right? It's very much like that. Get stuff before it disappears. It's very much like the old – what they called Alan Lomax was the guy who did it and his son then later did it. Traveled through the south with a gigantic recorder and recorded all sorts of music. And Alan Lomax was the first

guy during the, I think it was like, it was WPA project, so it was during the Depression. And it's amazing the recordings he got. And sometimes if you listen to these recordings, if you listen to the recordings of prisoners in Parchman Prison in Mississippi, and you listen to

the call and response they do in the field, it's really quite close to some of the stuff you hear, rock and roll or what was blues then became rock and roll. And then if you go even farther back, it's a lot of the stuff you hear in the fields in West Africa, which of course makes sense. So what have you discovered in the Southern Foodways? What's the most surprising discovery you've made, you personally made, about authentic

folk food, if that's the way to put it? Well, I mean, I love to eat, as you know. So I love that. I love that idea. And I love the idea that you learn things by seeing what people cook. What I love about the South, of course, first of all, that it's despite its troubled history and despite its incredibly low probably the lowest point of American status, right? So

in the culture, if you ever want to make somebody sound stupid, you give them a southern accent. If you ever want to like, you know, roll your eyes at backwardness, you can just mention Alabama or Mississippi. I mean these are – and you can forget if you don't live there that these are very sophisticated places, very smart people. And they have restaurants and they have museums and they're very smart. And they have something to say. And the great thing about the American South is – it's not the great thing, but one of the positive benefits of being so – at the – being so sort of dismissed by the rest of the culture is that a lot of the great southern cultural traits and artifacts have been preserved. Just naturally, it's still there. So you still have people cooking and eating the same way, growing food the same way, thinking about it the same way.

And that's sort of interesting. It's like the South is America's attic, right? It's where all the stuff is. And that's really where you go. And I think that's why I like it. Do you think of yourself as Southern? You grew up or part of your life in Baltimore? Yeah, I'm half a family.

I don't think I don't really think of myself as Southern per se. Look, the great thing about the Southerners is a lot of them don't think of them as Southerners. So you've got people in the Deep South. When you say, oh, I'm from Tennessee, they roll their eyes like you're a Yankee. And of course, the people from the North, from the Deep and the Mid-South, if you say you're from Virginia, they're like, oh, please, that's a total Yankee state. I always say that Robert E. Lee would be surprised to hear that. And then, of course, they all hate Florida. Florida just seems to them to be just this kind of like weird add-on.

But the truth about Florida is that it's the only southern capital that didn't fall to the north, Tallahassee. So I like to remember. They don't like it too north. They don't like it too south. Okay. Segway to the guests. We have James isn't here, so nobody's going to be doing brilliant, extensive segways.

Here's a brief segue at the shoot last night in the heart of Hollywood. Did anybody, did anybody so much as mention the Supreme court decisions that came down yesterday? Yes, they did. And in what connection? Tell us. Well, movie sets are a little like the country. A movie set is a little bit like, you know,

a demographic sketch of the nation at large. You have, you know, the movie budget is divided into two halves, above the line and below the line. Above the line is what they call the writers, director, actor, you know, all the stuff that all those sort of higher paid people, right? Producers, writers, directors, actors. The white collar guys. Yeah, or just like this, like a

little bit more elite. And then below the line is everyone that, you know, does the stuff, actually, you know, hangs the lights and does the sound and moves the dollies and does the actual work. And the reason it's above the line and below the line is because the below the line costs are basically fixed because those are sort of union contracts.

Above the line, those costs are kind of totally, totally flexible because your agents are the ones who are arguing. So traditionally, above the line, they all vote blue, very blue, very democratic, very liberal. Below the line, they vote Republican. They're conservative. So when you walk onto a set, Rhino though you may be, when you're in the Ricochet world, when you walk onto a set, a guy, a camera guy or a lighting guy or a makeup person will say, Rob, over here.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know – A lot of them know me from Ricochet. Well, they're – really? Ricochet, yeah. Yeah. Ricochet National Review, yeah, they know. Fantastic.

And they all like joke. They all know that I'm not supposed to say anything. Like I don't want to say anything. So who said anything about the Supreme Court last night? Well, it was sort of a general conversation that I think – I'm in a very odd position because of course everybody knows that my political beliefs and everybody knows that I'm also – was at one point and kind of still the boss. So no one comes up to me and says, hey, I want to talk to you about your crazy Supreme Court and how they ruined or how they're trying to put women back in the Middle Ages. But people bring it up every now and then. Most people on the left don't care what the decision really was.

They just like to say we're going back to the Middle Ages, war on women. They just like that. That's just something that – that's a thing you get to say that you don't have to think about and you don't have to understand the nuances of. You don't even have to understand that right now those rules, the Hobby Lobby rules, are already being applied according to the Department of Health and Human Services to other organizations. You don't have to explain that at all. They just like the idea that a bunch of right-wing evangelical Christians who hate women are going to deny access to their female employees

to birth control. And you can kind of like go blue in the face trying to explain, well, that isn't even remotely the case. You may as well say Hobby Lobby is trying to steal their lunch. It's not even accurate. But it's – you can't. These are just giant cultural differences. Got it.

Got it. And – yeah, go ahead. But do you try? Here's a question for you. You've been in Hollywood for a couple of decades now, a quarter of a century actually. You arrived there as a babe. Have you changed a single mind? That's one question.

Second question is are you aware of conversions, whether you were directly responsible for them or not? Yeah, there are a bunch of conversions after 9-11. Oh, really? OK. And there were a bunch of conversions. There are no. Oh, really? Okay. And there were a bunch of conversions. There are no conversions now because the religion is Obama. So no one's given that religion up.

But there are conversions every now and then. Or if not conversions, because I kind of feel like people's party affiliation when they get older is really just in many ways it's just kind of the sports team you support. Acknowledgements of mistakes. Right.

Yeah, not really with this president. Really? Yeah, if you're for Obama, you're not going to – you just – it's just – it's all too – it's too wrapped up in your self-image. It wasn't a rational decision in the first place. It's like the Thomas Sowell quote that now you're complaining and you haven't made this rational decision. It wasn't rational. It was emotional and so you're not going to give it up even though it's obvious. And so I actually find people say the most amazing things to me.

They'll say – I've been thinking about that. You have a point. I mean one of the problems with Obama is that he just wasn't – he wasn't tough enough. And you guys have been obstructing him. Right, right. And you say, in what? Name one thing. Yeah.

And like, well, you've been really negative. Like, OK, well, all right. But what's the thing he and like well you know you've been really negative like okay well all right but what's the what's the thing he wants he can't get and they stopped they like they never never occurred to them that those were the words that brock obama says over and over and over again oh the republican congress won't let me do anything that's patently a lie that's completely untrue. That's a total excuse for being a terrible president. He's not in trouble because of things he hasn't gotten. He's in trouble because of things he has.

Exactly, exactly. So that's interesting that that's the way the conversation runs in Hollywood because we know from poll numbers that in the country at large, people are turning against Obama. There are conversions. It's not as if the Republican Party is shooting up in the polls as Obama drops, but people are walking away from Obama. And I have to say, friends, this would be three or four conversations I've had in the last couple of months with people much, much more successful. Well, let's just put it this way, richer than I am. But they're business figures. This is back east and then there's one with whom I've had this discussion in public so I can mention his name. But the business figures back East, New York, that we were wrong. We were just wrong. We thought that guy would be good for business. He's been terrible. We may not feel it in Manhattan. You may not feel it in Northern

California. But in the country at large, it's hard to find a job. The economy is bad. We made a mistake. I've heard that conversation from several very, very rich people who now intend to fork their money over. In fact, part of what's going on is that contributions are going to GOP Senate candidates. They want to stop Obama. So there are conversions taking place, at least in the business world. And here's the one

this still show still hasn't aired. But when I recorded my uncommon knowledge interview with Steve Wynn, casino mogul in Las Vegas, what would this be two weeks ago now? Resort mogul, excuse me, resort mogul. That's his word. He does. He actually loves the hotel. The weird thing is you'll have to make up your mind on this yourself when you hear him talk about it. I asked him about it. But the weird thing is he seems really to tolerate the gambling. What he loves is the hotel business. But that's a separate matter. and then elaborated to me when we were chatting a little bit after the shoot that he'd been – he'd supported substantially Democrats all his life until he got to Obama.

And then what concerned him, I said, wait a minute. You are the chairman of a publicly traded company. What do you think you're doing being so controversial? Why are you attacking the president of the United States? And Steve Wynn said, wait a minute. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm not attacking him on any matter that doesn't touch on my business and in particular on my employees. about the difference between what they could get through their unions. He has no objections to unions. He works well with his unions, what they could get through their unions as opposed to what was going to be happening with Obamacare. And this guy, he turned – Obama had turned him. It was very clear.

So that just doesn't happen a lot. Yeah, but it didn't really turn him because he's still going to support Harry Reid. I mean that's the problem with a lot of these guys. No, no, no. He's done with nope no in fact he spoke very knowledgeably he's one of the people who's raising money for for republican senate candidates well good for him i mean i that i my concern is that we say when we do this often with voters we say um they they've turned to us because they vote for us. But there's a political conversion,

which means that they're open to voting for the Republican. And then there's the philosophical conversion, which I think is harder to get. Where I'm going to stop petitioning the country, petitioning the government for stuff. I'm going to stop asking for stuff. I'm going to stop expecting the government to provide me with things. I mean that's a hard one the argument right baby the argument is hard to win but we weren't we're not going to go back into cochran versus mcdaniel and there's no news on that we have to wait for mcdaniel whether he challenged so on but one of

the really interesting things to me about the result in mississippi was that the mcdaniel supporters and it was roughly half of the people who cast their votes, Cochran only won by a tiny percent. Small, small. Small percentage. It was close to 50-50. The McDaniel voters said in effect, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know Thad Cochran brings home the bacon and we're sick of it. Isn't that a remarkable thing?

That document had made sure every Republican voter knew that he viewed his job in the United States Senate as bringing home pork to Mississippi and they voted against self-interest. Right? Well, I think part of the problem is – part of the problem there is that you have a perfect expression of what is in fact a pretty smart rule, which is you want the most conservative possible candidate to run in a safe state. So you want your Senator Ted Cruz because he's in Texas. You don't want a rhino from Texas. What's the point? Because you know you got to have a few rhinos from Delaware and various other states. So you understand you're going to have to play that game.

You understand that you're going to have rhino Republicans from Maine. That's the way life is. You're just going to have them, which enables you to have more sort of committed activist Senator Ted Cruz is from safer states like Texas. That's a pretty good rule of thumb. I did a little asking around actually and I don't know. I mean to me, Mississippi is a very strange state and there's always a Faulknerian story behind everything. That's right. The way there really isn't in California.

There really isn't in New York and some other states. There just really isn't. Mississippi is a little more Falknerian. And one of the problems is that not that people, not that the establishment loved Thad Cochran, but they were, the establishment, of course, was

I think only a small part of this, but they knew McDaniel and they were worried. Right. They were worried about his ability to run statewide. they were worried. Right. They were worried about his ability to run statewide. They were worried about him, you know, just personality issues. And that may be true, may not be true.

Who knows? I don't know. But that's what I heard last week. Gotcha. Gotcha. So another question for you, Rob Long. You've been in Hollywood for a quarter of a century. As far as I know, the most extended absence you've taken from Hollywood has been – let's see.

It seems to me you were in New York for a month recently on business. You took that steamer trip across the Pacific. But now you're talking about leaving Hollywood for a year to move to New York. Is this just an impulse? Were you just in a bad mood one gloomy day? No, no. I mean, I kind of – I need to change it up. So I've been here for 20-something years, 26 years I think. And it's – you got to change it up.

You got to change things up. All right. And also like you want a little difference helps you write better. Like it helps you write different stuff more. Like there's a certain pattern you can fall into that's not so good. I mean for instance, I wrote two books many years ago and I've always wanted to write more. I just haven't had a chance to or I haven't been able to do it or I've been distracted and I have a feeling that if I'm in New York, the daily patterns will be disrupted enough that I'll be able to do it. And when I brought up the books, I brought the books for this reason because this podcast

is brought to you by Audible.com. That's a segue right there. That was beautiful. That was a segue. Dazzling. I didn't see that coming. Yes, thank you. The internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 100,000 downloadable titles

across all types of literature and featuring audio versions of many New York Times bestsellers. For our listeners, Audible is offering a free audiobook to give you a chance to try out their service. Make your picks here. The great thing about – I'm sorry. That was a phone call. The great thing about Audible is that they will soon have my book on Audible. So if you don't get enough of me here, Audible will soon be carrying my book. So for a free audiobook of your choice, go to audiblepodcast.com.

What's the name of the book? You are the lousiest self-taught writer I've ever encountered. What's the name of your book? The book is Conversations with My Agent. It's brilliant. Thank you. All right. And you're reading it yourself?

I don't know yet. We got to work that out. I kind of hoping they asked me to do it. You know, audible is really awesome. They're like, they're really smart. And they, and they, they asked that they, they, they, they do it all. They handle everything. And I'm so I'm gonna I put my bid in. Fantastic. Fantastic. Okay. Sorry. Okay, go ahead. Take do another dazzling segue. It. Speak your bids. Sorry. OK. Go ahead. Do another dazzling segue. It's not really a segue. We are joined right now by a friend of mine, somebody I admire a lot, a great writer, very interesting guy, very smart editor at National Review, columnist for Bloomberg Review, the American Enterprise Institute, a lot of other stuff. You've heard him. He's incredibly, incredibly bright, and I think he's going to help us sort through a little of the stuff that happened this week with the Supreme Court. Please welcome to the podcast Ramesh Panuru.

Hey, Ramesh. Hi. How are you doing? Good. How are you? I'm doing very, very well. You got Rob Long here in L.A., and Robinson out there, up there in Palo Alto. How rough, how rough is this Hobby Lobby decision going to be for the image of the right-wing court?

Well, I think that, you know, whatever credit the court may have thought that it got for itself by not getting rid of Obamacare, it has gone right back to where it would have been in terms of liberal opinion, which I don't know if you saw Hillary Clinton the other day suggesting that this sort of decision was basically reminiscent of the Taliban. Right. Wow. I just made a point in the corner that not only was the law that was the basis of the court's decision enthusiastically signed by her husband, but her own health care plan, the Clinton's fabled health care plan of 1994, actually had more sweeping conscience protections for employers than the Roberts courts has just insisted on. Hey, Ramesh, is the decision, is it properly, is it constructed in a way that pleases you or is it too narrow? Are you happy with the decision? Well, I think there's always a case for deciding the case that came to you and not making a more sweeping decision than you have to make to decide the case in front of you.

And if you buy that case, then I think that Alito got it perfectly right. And he did it in a way that, you know, didn't really tell us how he's going to decide some future cases that aren't on this exact point. But the basic argument is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act says there's no absolute right to act on your religious views. But if the government's going to make you act against those religious views, it's got to have a compelling interest, and it's got to have chosen the least burdensome way of doing it. And this can't possibly pass that test. And on that business, the least burdensome way, one of the things that struck me as just a howler in Justice Ginsburg's dissent was the notion that this decision was going to undo – I don't know that she used these words.

But the idea was that it was going to deny access to contraception to untold tens of thousands of women, which is ridiculous. Is it not on the face of it? Isn't access to contraception, walk into any drugstore and you can get it at, I don't want to go into the details here, but you can get all kinds of contraceptives for five bucks. Is that not part of the argument here? Yeah, absolutely. You know, and Alito was very tough on this point, responding directly to Ginsburg's dissent and saying the number of women who will be denied access to contraception as a result of this decision is zero. Right, right. Good. And in fact, Hobby Lobby, again, you know, to not to pick on Hillary Clinton, but she said, you know, go ahead, go ahead.

You're good at it. Go ahead. Go ahead. Hobby Lobby doesn't want its employees to have access to contraception. Hobby Lobby covers 16 forms of contraception. There were a few forms of contraception that it objects to because it thinks that they're abortifacients. Right. Explain that actually. So the Hobby Lobby, the company said we don't have an objection, a religious objection to contraception per se.

We have a much narrower objection, and it's a profound objection, and it is to the destruction of embryos. Is that not correct? That's right. That's exactly right. Their concern is that so-called contraceptives that may act after conception. Right. So they're not sort of – they're acting as abortifacients in their view. Right.

And the government in its responses doesn't actually contradict that point. It does concede that those particular contraceptives can act in the way that Hobby Lobby is claiming. Hey, Ramesh, what does it say to us about the current politics, if that's the right word, of the court, that this decision was written by Samuel Alito and not by the chief, not by John Roberts, not by Scalia, and not by Thomas, and not by Kennedy? Is what's going on here that Alito is able to bring Kennedy over? Well, you know, that's an interesting question because Kennedy did go out of his way to write a concurrence where he seems to try to kind of soften the decision as much as he can. You know, he says he talks about Ginsburg's respectful and powerful dissent,

which was neither. It's hard to say, you know, Alito may have really wanted this one. It may have just been that the arguments that were heard in January, Alito hadn't written an opinion about them and he was due. But it was a kind of an amazing end to the term with Alito ruling, making both of the blockbuster decisions on Monday, the other one being a labor union case. Right. Can you explain that second blockbuster to us for a layman like Rob and me? Give us three sentences on what we need to know about that one. Sure. Well, Illinois had decided that when somebody who's on SSDI, the Disability Insurance Program, is giving that money to a caretaker, in this case, this guy's mother, some of that money has to go to SEIU, the union, because she's a home health care worker now and she has to be unionized. His mother objected to that and she sued to the Supreme Court and Justice Alito ruling for five of the justices said, you know, this really does impinge on her right to free association. And, you know, she's not really a government employee here.

So you can't treat her that way. And for that matter, in some future case, we may revisit this question of whether full-fledged government employees can be forced to join a union. Wow. Okay. Ramesh, while we're talking legal talk here, what about Boehner's suit against the president? It had long been, as best I could understand it, I don't have your legal knowledge, but as best I ever understood it, it had long been, as best I could understand it, I don't have your legal knowledge, but as best I ever understood it, it had long been understood that Congress does not have standing to sue the chief executive for failing faithfully to – and whatever the phrase is from his constitutional oath – to execute the laws. That Congress can't do that. And now there's some new novel legal theory that Congress, in fact, can bring suit against the president, and Boehner is doing so.

Good move, bad move, and what's the legal basis on which John Boehner now feels he can bring suit? Well, you're exactly right that that has been the traditional view of it, that Congress lacks standing and that if the executive and the legislative branch have a difference of opinion about their relative powers, they've just got to duke it out in the political arena using the tools the Constitution gives them and not drag the courts into it in general. Now, I haven't spoken to the lawyers who are behind this lawsuit, so I'm not sure what their counter argument to that is. But what I have seen is people making the point that if you don't have this kind of lawsuit, then there's no real remedy that you have to just impeach the president and that's the only thing you can do. I just think that this may be one of those situations where all you can really do is publicize what the administration is doing that's wrong and try to raise the political cost to it of doing that in the hopes that you can restrain future administrations from acting this way. I understand that's not a fully satisfying answer to people, but that may be the constitutionally correct answer. The problem is if you look at the administration's response to this,

this sort of dismissive response that Obama makes, which is, well, I'm not going to apologize for doing the people's business when Congress doesn't want to. I mean, that is really just an outrageously lawless way of thinking about these things. That's saying that there's some whatever it takes to get the job done clause in Article II of the Constitution. There isn't. Hey, Ramesh, can we just talk about politics for one second? But before, we're going to be joined in a minute by Richardard epstein to talk a little bit more so please stick around for that i'd love to hear you uh join us for that but it

seems to me what we're looking at uh we've been looking at probably for the past three months is this attempt by uh democrats to find an issue for november to find the thing that's gonna get them some traction for november i mean i think accounts, Barack Obama is aware that he's facing a bloodbath in November. What he's looking for is some issue that will galvanize the left, his base. Do you think this war on women thing – do you think this – Peter, I talked about this earlier. This kind of bizarre over-interpretation of Hobby Lobby. Do you think that's part of that or do you think it's kind of a spontaneous freakout on the left that they would freak out about anything? Well, a little bit of both.

It is an odd moment in our politics. It is so – it is completely normal for an opposition party to define itself against the incumbent party, right? Sure, sure. I think it's a temptation that you can sometimes fall too much prey to and you forget to do what I think is very important political work of defining yourself positively. But what's weird is for the governing party to define itself in those negative terms, which is what we're seeing with today's Democrats and what I think we saw with the administration's reelection campaign in 2012. And so I think that there are two basic prongs that one is the Republicans are greedy plutocrats who are, you know, indifferent to middle class people and poor people, which is somewhat true.

Right. Well, of course we are. And two, that we're social extremists. And that's what they're going to try to do and try to revisit the success of the 2012 campaign. The problem is that kind of campaign works best on what's called low propensity and low information voters. And such voters tend not to turn out in midterm election years. Right. So, by the way, I thought Obama's remark yesterday, it's being presented or at least was presented last night as kind of an unscripted moment in the middle of a speech. I have a feeling they scripted it.

But he said, so sue me. Literally, the president of the United States said, quote, so sue me, close quote, to thelate Boehner's lawsuit with what the Supreme Court is doing and portray themselves as martyrs to some kind of Republican legal onslaught. Right? Isn't that what's going on? I think that's the only way to read it. And one point that I think it's very important to make in response to that is this concern about the Obama administration's lawlessness is not confined to his partisan enemies. When you look at two of the decisions last week, where the administration's legal position on the recess appointment issue and on a free speech issue was rejected unanimously by the

Supreme Court. So that's the liberal democratic justices, the four of them, the two of them who were actually appointed specifically by Obama, all saying this administration has gone too far. And there's been a long series of such unanimous decisions. Okay. Ramesh, question. Politics, but also remaining on this sort of legal theme, looks as though the Republicans are going to do well in November. My little theory, which I've been mentioning from time to time on podcasts, is that for the first time in who knows how long, probably not quite since Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, but it's been a long time, the action will shift to the Senate, from the House to the

Senate. That's where the most articulate, determined, colorful, that's where the best stories are going to be. That's where the intellectual and policy energy will be. And the leadership there will be well-trained lawyers, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee. If Tom Cotton joins them from Arkansas, he's now running for the Senate from Arkansas. I guess he's a point or two behind, but could turn that around. Tom Cotton, also a product of Harvard Law School. What can they do in the final two, presuming, the premise here is that Republicans win the Senate. What can they do in the final two years of the Obama administration? What good can they do? If this happens, of course, they'll have a Republican House and Republican Senate for the first time in the Obama administration.

And one key thing to do is to do the same sorts of things that George Mitchell did to President Bush in the early 90s, which is send popular legislation that forces a choice on the president, veto this legislation to stick with the liberals or demoralize the liberals by signing it, showing that the other side has good ideas and giving them some momentum. That's the number one thing they can do. But the other thing they can do, the Senate can actually hold hearings that aren't completely neutered by a Democratic majority on administration misconduct. And I'm sure that Senator Cruz and prospective Senators Cotton and Sasse and others will be very good at that. And then make the case for all the positions we're talking about and against the lawlessness of this administration with a higher profile that

will come from a being in the majority and b from the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign where some of these senators will be playing got it got it got it and so and that legislation you said enact legislation what sort of legislation i have this is a segue to stuff you've been writing about recently, Ramesh. I'm trying to set you up, baby, to promote your own stuff here. The reform agenda. The reform agenda. Go for it. Yeah, I think that Republicans should have a cost of living agenda that tackles the cost of higher education, the cost of health care, the cost of raising children, and the cost of energy.

I think there are conservative reforms where you're talking about tax relief, deregulation, competition in each of those areas, where these are deep concerns of the American people. These are basically the top economic concerns that people have, the reason that people are worried about the future of the American dream. And they're all areas where I think liberalism for reasons of ideology and reasons of coalition politics can't really offer substantial reform. Well, let's return a little bit to the court because that's something that I think – the importance of the Supreme Court sort of rears its head every few years and suddenly people remember, oh my lord, it really does matter who's in the White House.

It really does matter who controls the Senate judiciary. These are important issues. So to talk a little bit more about the Supreme Court, we'd like to welcome for the podcast – to the flagship podcast really for the first time in a while, Richard Epstein, who you all know from Law Talk, the other podcast we do about the law. They go into this a lot more in depth in that. So if you're listening to Ricochet podcast, please find the Law Talk podcast and listen to that. That's a much more in-depth sort of exploration of the recent Supreme Court cases. We want to bring him in here to give us – give our listeners a little bit of a larger view and maybe mix it up with Ramesh a little bit. So please welcome to the podcast Richard Epstein.

So Richard, what are the problems – people feel this disquiet even on the – even people who agree with Hobby Lobby was how close it was. Are we looking at a court that every now and then delights us by ruling correctly but basically is shifting inexorably to the left? I don't think this is a case in which the court shifted itself to the left. And I think in order to understand it, you have to pair it with Harris v. Quinn because both of them are essentially freedom of association cases. And the question you have to ask is to what extent can the government compel certain kinds of financial circumstances or contributions for causes that it wants? You read them in this particular way. A leader who wrote both of these opinions said,

with respect to closely held family corporations where they're bona fide of religious beliefs, it's not the job of the state to decide whether or not it's a substantial interest. Once these guys verify to their own bona fides on this, and they're obviously, this is not the least restrictive means of doing it. And in the other case, the issue was whether or not there had to be required campaign contributions to a labor union in the form of union dues by creating this ersatz employment arrangement in which it turns out that a child who has quadriplegia and serious retardation is now regarded as a worker or as a client and the mother is regarded as an employee and so therefore to get her medicaid benefits what she has to do is to join a union

um to negotiate against her son um that's essentially what this thing is about and alito said, no, you can't do that either. There's a really fundamental point at stake here, which is once you start with the labor statutes and once you start with the anti-discrimination rules and you apply them in situations where there's no common carrier monopoly power, the law becomes inherently coercive. Because what it says is to two people, we know that you could arrange your own deal to your mutual satisfaction but if you want to keep yourself into business, oh employer, you have to agree to take a union, you have to agree to do this, that and the other

thing and there's just no obvious limitation on the kinds of things that the state could coerce. Now it won't go too far because if it goes too far, it will break up all of these arrangements but it will go a lot further in the pursuit of its interests than any parties would do in pursuit of their own private interests. And since the New Deal, sort of public coercion on private employers has now been regarded as a de facto background norm. So anybody who wants to get out from it for religious reasons or free speech reasons has an uphill fight. They should not have to fight that particular battle. The basic rule is that the government should mind its own business and allow private voluntary arrangements in competitive

and in various kinds of religious and social markets to operate on their own, free of government control. There's no reason whatsoever to centralize these things and to impose a sort of dogmatic view from the top. What you are seeing here, I'll just end in this sentence, is the bitter fruit of a progressive revolution that took roots during the Roosevelt years. But if two more Judge Ginsburgs on the court, and it would have gone a different way. Well, even one more Judge Ginsburg on the court.

I mean, look, I mean, the United States is now in the bits of what Justice Scalia rightly called the culture comp. There's a huge battle, and it's between people who are extremely authoritarian on the one side and those people who wish to be let alone on the other. And remember, this is a reversal of roles. There was a time in this country when religious groups were so powerful that they were prepared in many ways to impose their will upon the rest of the population. And as a good libertarian, what you do is you essentially take a suspicious and hostile view for both efforts to create a cultural imperium one way or the other. The word impose, which is constantly used in this debate, should be understood to start with the imposition of these kinds of liabilities, either through the labor statutes on the one

hand or the health care statutes on the other. That's the initial imposition. You will only get peace in this country if people are willing to allow different firms to approach things in different ways. And for the women who don't like working for a place like Hobby Lobby, they can surely go elsewhere. And for those who want to work there, they could take some of their wages and use it to pay in order to get their contraceptives from other circumstances.

And if there are people who are so absolutely determined to see that contraceptives are supplied, they can set up a situation such that the Gates Foundation, which I think is on this side of the issue, can say, we will now dedicate a fund of $100 million, the income from which will supply contraceptive care to all those women who work for organizations that deny that coverage on religious grounds. And that would solve the problem. But we don't like voluntary solutions today. We'd much rather use $100 of our own to muscle somebody whom we disagree with than $50 of our own in order to solve the problem voluntarily. Richard, Peter here. You said at the very beginning that the right way to look at these two decisions yesterday was as questions of freedom of association. Why are you not looking at the Hobby Lobby case as a question of freedom of religion? Because you don't even need to go that far.

The difficulty is if you start putting this thing only as the notion that religious people have associational rights, you get into this terrible bind to figuring out where religion begins and secular activities end. If in fact you have a general background norm of freedom of association, it gives religions all the running room that they need to have and it reduces the pressure that is otherwise placed on the free exercise clause. What's happened is of course we don't do that. So now First Amendment privileges are supposedly of a higher water that is with greater protection. And then you have to police the boundary. And so, you know, Ruth Ginsburg comes up and she says, hey, if you can do this, what about blood transfusions? What about polygamy? What about minimum wage? What about taxes? By the way, as a practical matter, is Justice

Ginsburg correct? She concluded her dissent by saying, I fear the court has entered a minefield. Stale, by the way, a stale metaphor. But still, that's the way she concluded her. As a practical matter, is this now going to open a Pandora's box to all kinds of crazy suits? She's just wrong. I mean, it's a Pandora's box no matter which way you go, because they're going to be constant political intrigues and a constant struggle. And I would much rather have a degree of uncertainty as to how far these decisions run than to have a decision which essentially there's no limitation on what a political majority can do to impose its views, which is what they're doing on a minority.

Now, why do I say they're imposing their views? Because they want the power of the state to tell other people to behave, whereas the religious groups are not going out and saying, you know, we want to pass a statute which prevents single women from getting contraceptives. If they wanted to say that, I'm on the other side of that particular question. So this word impizos is used against the wrong background norm, and it makes every act of freedom into an act of coercion. Every act of coercion looks as though it's an act of legislative wisdom. It's a complete upside-down moral universe. Okay, and what does it tell us that Justice Alito wrote these two decisions? Is it Justice Alito instead of the chief and instead of Scalia or Thomas?

Is it Justice Alito because Alito can bring along Antony Kennedy? I don't think it's political. I think it's a matter of intellectual convictions. Alito has been very strong on this issue. Two years ago, Casey wrote a case called Knox Against the SEIU, the union situation, in which he called into question the accommodation made in a case called the Boo decided in about 1978, 77, I think, in which it said that public unions are fine so long as they only negotiate business issues with their state employers, but they can coerce individual workers to contribute to their political operations, which of course they would love to do. And he clearly thinks that that accommodation is too fragile and would rather have a system in which anybody who wants to opt out of a public union is free to do so along the lines that Governor Walker proposed in

the state of Wisconsin. I think this is a case in which his B is in this particular bonnet. He is not a First Amendment absolutist. Remember in the Snyder case, he was the one who had some serious doubts about the question as to whether or not the freedom of expression was so strong that it could result in activities that resulted in serious intentional infliction of emotional distress. I think, in fact, on this case, he probably is more of a closet libertarian than most

of the others on the Supreme Court. I had dinner last night with a friend of mine. He said, Richard, you've had a very successful academic career, but how come in the entire ranks of legal academics today, you can't even find a single consistent classical liberal who's younger than you are. Not saying that he was. I said, well, that's a serious problem. I wish it were otherwise. But I'm certainly not going to lay down and become silent because it turns out that I can't get the bulk of my colleagues to follow along with me.

Hey, it's Rob Long again. I'd like to bring Ramesh in because you mentioned something, Richard, that I thought was really interesting about the culture comp. We'd rather spend $100 to coerce somebody than $50 to make a choice. That seems to be a problem in the country as a whole. We were talking a little bit about what might happen in the midterms, what might happen in general, and that the conservatives or the republicans might win an election, but they may not win and persuade the people. The people will just vote the republicans in to sort of be a slightly more efficient administrator of the liberal welfare state. So Ramesh, how do you win the culture comp? What I've been doing is issuing dire warnings now for at least 30-odd years from the time that my attention shifted from being a private lawyer worrying about the intricacies of proximate cause to a public lawyer trying to figure out what the proper line is between state power and individual freedom.

I mean I have only one vote as a citizen. I have only one voice as a citizen. It tends to be louder and more consistent than the random voice pick from the population. But I have to tell you, when you start looking out there trying to find out people who are with me, it's a pretty fun list of folks. We have one here. We have one on. We have one on right now. Ramesh Panuru. Oh, I know Ramesh.

Of course. Of course you do. And Ramesh is one of Robbie George's students at Princeton. Ramesh is now about to tell you, Richard, why your cause will not die when you do. Not that that won't happen for five decades. Ramesh, make him feel better, will you please? Ramesh. Well, let me – if you don't mind, I'll take a slightly roundabout way.

You were talking about that minefield that Ginsburg talked about, the minefield that I think, as Richard is suggesting rightly, is created by the fact of big government, really. What she's saying is we're going to have to get into this business if we say that Catholics don't have to cover contraception and evangelicals don't have to cover abortifacients. What about the Jehovah's Witnesses who don't want to cover transfusion? Let me just point out, it has always been legal in this country for a Jehovah's Witness employer not to cover blood transfusions. And yet, have you ever heard of anybody having this problem, that their health insurance doesn't cover blood transfusions because their boss is a Jehovah's Witness who doesn't want to cover it. No. Free societies can reach accommodations on these points where you're not constantly having these conflicts. And I think one of the points we have to make in terms of winning the culture war is saying we don't have

to have one if we are willing to respect true pluralism on these issues. And there's a lot that's attractive about pluralism, not least that it keeps you out of having these constant battles focused on Washington, D.C. Yes. I mean, look, decentralization, the Hayekian theme is what is here. There is a way in which you can have a combination of private choice and public support. It's called the charitable contribution. And what happens is you give it to all comers. So if the Catholic Church wants to set up Catholic charities to take care of young women, it doesn't have to do so on condition that it gives them advice on abortion. And if there's Planned Parenthood wants to set up the same things, it could do it on exactly the opposite term. The public is forced to subsidize both groups, but it knows that in order to subsidize either of them, it has to be able to get significant contributions from its own supporters. That way you get public support from rival institutions without having the all-or-nothing politics that comes with the change of political administration.

And these tensions were implicit in everything that was said in 1935. If you read the earlier decisions, the justices had some cautious words about how they were going this far and no further, but nobody's ever taken them seriously. And now when you have a big P progressive administration like Obama, backed by a very loud, shrill, and articulate group, they think that they have the chance to push that ball over the goal line, and they don't care whom they squash in the process. So the notions of individual autonomy, which are not absolute, they don't ban taxes, they don't require you to say that common carriers could turn away customers' grounds on race, but these principles now seem to have no role whatsoever. And in this particular centralization, if it's 52-48 one way you win, 52-48 the other way you lose, well, you're going

to fight fiercely over those 4% to make sure that your group remains dominant. And this is the road to political perdition. Richard and Ramesh, Peter here with a closing question for the two of you, because you both have to go back and foster the cause since the only two of you are part of it. OK. Closing question. Ramesh raised this point earlier. It is widely believed – that's a pompous way of putting it. Let's put it this way. Laymen like me, scratching their heads, trying to figure out what the heck is going on, tend to draw the conclusion on the Obamacare decision that Chief Justice Roberts decided to uphold

Obamacare because he was concerned about the reputation of the court. Ramesh alluded to this earlier and said, ha, good luck with that one. Look, look at the way the liberals are attacking the court. Hillary Clinton has already compared this decision yesterday to something like the Taliban question. Oh my God. Yeah, she did. Ramesh is terrible. Shame on her. Shame on her. Exactly. Ramesh go first, then Richard. Do you think Chief Justice Roberts regrets the Obamacare decision on either legal or reputational grounds at this point? Ramesh? Well, it's far be it for me to try to read Chief Justice Roberts's mind. Go ahead, do it. Try it. Should he regret it? Should he regret it then?

If I had to speculate, I would say that probably what happened in Obamacare is not that he issued an opinion that he didn't believe in, but that he was under a lot of pressure, saw a way to reduce some of that pressure and convinced himself that it was the right thing to do. Oh, here's an argument. Turns out to be right. And oh, yeah, it also helps me out. Take some of this criticism away from me. I don't know whether he's had enough reason to regret it. I think that there's been more – there was more liberal celebration of him than fierce conservative criticism of him. And probably in kind of elite legal circles, it's the liberals who count more anyway. You know what? Before you – hold on. Well, I want to stay with Ramesh because Richard can – Richard will remember both of these questions. So let me add one more question before we let you go, Ramesh.

And the question is – I see here it's on the Drudge Report right now. Rick Perry invites president to border. So the president of the United States who is charged with the faithful execution of the laws has unilaterally rewritten Obamacare depending on how you count it, either 36 or 38 times. He has legislated from the White House. He is failing to enforce the law at the border, and on and on and on it goes. We talked earlier about Boehner's lawsuit. If you were John Boehner, if you were Ted Cruz, what would you do if suing the president is the wrong thing? What would you do to cause him to enforce the law, Ramesh? You know, and as I suggested earlier, I think that there is just a limit to what can be done

when you have a bad president who won't execute the laws. You've got the power of the purse, which the modern budget process makes it very hard to actually use. You've got impeachment, which is, you know, politically, it's like a nuclear bomb. And otherwise, it is, you make the case, and you try to make him pay a political price for this. That sounds to a lot of moderners suspiciously like nothing, like doing nothing. But I don't think that is nothing. I think that that is a lot of what the work of politics consists of. Richard?

Richard? Look, I mean I wrote – I think it was for Ricochet, actually, a piece on the Boner lawsuit arguing that the political question doctrine and the standing objections to it are actually much weaker than are commonly supposed. If I'm right on standing, it doesn't have to be Mr. Boner who brings this thing. It'd be anybody who could bring this lawsuit saying, I'm a citizen, like I'm a shareholder. You're a president. You're acting ultra virus your situation. If you were the president of a corporation, we would slap you down. And now that you're the president. You're acting ultra-virus your situation. If you were the president of a corporation, we would slap you down. And now that you're the president of the United States, we should do the same thing.

The standing doctrine is a completely artificial judicial confection. The word standing appears nowhere in the Constitution. And it is inferred from a provision which says exactly the opposite. The judicial power shall extend to all cases in law and equity. Equity includes injunction against ultra-virus activity. So I have no idea where all this comes from as an originalist, and so I don't think that the problems are that serious. As to Justice Roberts, I think it's important to understand that the man spent too many years in the trenches as a litigator. And one of the great problems that you get as a litigator is that if you get a big case

and somebody asks you to come in on their side, you will do it whether or not you agree with it. So what you do is you have to develop a highly compartmentalized mind so that you cannot let yourself develop general principles which would say, hey, as a matter of conscience, I can't take this particular case because I'm inconsistent to anything. And Justice Roberts, my favorite illustrations, he represented the, I think it was California and Nevada, when they tried to uphold an endless land use moratorium on some developer who was in Lake Tahoe. I mean, to me, it's just appalling that anybody would want to defend governments on those cases. And it's perhaps even more shocking that Justice Roberts did a very good job and actually won that case against the Pacific Legal Foundation, which made a bunch of mistakes, perhaps, in the way in which it handled it, perhaps not. So I don't think you have a man there who has any

deep long-term political and intellectual convictions. And as to the Obamacare case, let me mention the following proposition. Justice Roberts cites a case, the child labor tax cases, for the proposition that the government has broad power to legislate taxes. The state actually stood for the following proposition when you read it. If you cannot do something through direct regulation under the Commerce Clause, you cannot do it indirectly through high taxes of any sort. So this is not a question of whether it's a penalty or a tax and so forth. It's the notion that you cannot do through taxation what you cannot do through regulation. If he had read the case correctly, he would have had to come out the other way. He's not a very good technical lawyer on certain kinds of occasions. And that's, again, the problem

about being a litigator. I mean, I spend so much time reading legal briefs. And what you do when you read a brief is you look at the three dots before and the three dots after and ask yourself whether or not if you put the cause in context, it would flip everything over. Let me just give you one illustration of how terrible this practice is. In dealing with the Obamacare case, many people, including Charles Freed, said, well, you know, Justice Gibbons said in – rather Justice Marshall said in Gibbons and Ogden in 1824 that the federal commerce power is plenary. Well, that seems to be very persuasive except you read the full sentence. And it says, with respect to the specified objects that it covers, the power is plenary, meaning if it is in commerce, we dominate. If it's not in commerce, we dominate. If it's not in commerce, we can't do anything at all. And they then convert that to meaning everything is in commerce. I mean, just if you literally read the whole sentence, you know that everything is turned

upside down. And it's not just, you know, Charles who did this in a dumb blog. It's what the Supreme Court did in Wicked and Filburn, and it's what they do in all of these cases. Ruth Ginsburg, when she says that the purpose of the Commerce Clause is to handle those problems which the states are not competent to handle by themselves, what she forgot to do is she took out the word in the beginning of the sentence, which was legislation, and put in the Commerce Clause, which is nowhere there. And if you read the original text, Commerce is not mentioned within 10,000 words on either side of that particular passage. So, I mean, what you have to understand

is the level of outright manipulation of text by justices in order to achieve their end is very common. And Justice Roberts, being an old lawyer, is sometimes prone to that, and virtually everybody on the court is willing to do that. I mean I sit there and I'm supposed to be an academic. My view is that the first rule of constitutional interpretation is for God's sake, cite the full sentence before you pick on a good lawyer. Well, I guess it comes down to this.

The problem – all the problems that we face really come down to too many lawyers. Well, no. It comes out to – not too many lawyers. Not enough ex-toy. It comes down to the legal realist tradition, which essentially believes that all texts are infinitely manipulable. Justice Breyer has an acute case of that, which led him to write a very bad opinion with respect to the meaning of the phrases in the recess appointments case. It happens all the time. It's Chevron deference. If the introduction of linguistic relativism as a standard mode of interpretation increases

the scope of discretion of both legislatures and judges so that good guys always win and bad guys always lose and we get to pick whom they are. And it just leaves the constitution as a coherent doctrine in the rearview mirror disappearing slowly as we continue to charge folk. Ramesh, last question here. Peter here once again. Is that what it comes down to? Is what unites Ramesh Panuru and Ted Cruz? I throw Ted Cruz in specifically to make Richard feel a little uncomfortable here. What unites Ramesh Panuru and Ted Cruz of the School of Robbie George at Princeton

with Richard Epstein is that you all believe words have meaning. Ramesh? Say yes or no. Yes. I understand that. Not ambiguous. Thank you. Thank you, Ramesh? Say yes or no. Yes. I understand that. Not ambiguous. Thank you. Thank you, Ramesh, and thank you, Richard.

Thank you, guys. Welcome. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Richard. Thanks, Ramesh. See you soon. Bye-bye. Take care.

We have to talk about that in a minute, but before we do, I have to say the Ricochet podcast is brought to you by Encounter Books. I'm just jumping right into it, Peter. I don't do the segues. This week's featured title is Faithless Execution, Building the Political Case for Obama's Impeachment by Andrew McCarthy. Couldn't be more timely, especially when we just talked about it. straightforward matter to plead articles of impeachment derived from these episodes to establish high crimes and misdemeanors, which is a term borrowed from English law, signifying maladministration and abuses of power by holders of high public trust. To focus on the individual episodes, though, is to miss the overarching offense, the president's willful violation of his solemn constitutional oath to faithfully execute the laws. The modus operandi for the

transformation he promised is to concentrate power into the hands by flouting law, the constitution, statutes, judicial rulings, and essentially daring the coordinate branches of government to stop him. He's behaving ultra-virusly. Did you hear that? I love that phrase. I heard that. That's what I love about Richard is that you always learn like a new – like I'm going to drop that in, like just pretend that I always knew it. I don't want to behave ultra-virus-ly. But I think like – check it out.

I got to Google it. Make sure I'm not saying ultra-virus or something. To get Andy McCarthy's book, which is excellent, and Andy McCarthy – by the way, Andy McCarthy writes beautifully. So you get the book. It's kind of probably a page turner even though it seems like it's a heavy work of nonfiction. To get Andy's book for 15% off list price, go to EncounterBooks.com and use the coupon code Ricochet at checkout. We thank EncounterBooks for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. And of course we thank you for being a Ricochet member if you are, if you are not.

Now is the time. Ricochet.com, three levels of membership, three glorious ways to interact and have conversation and meet and greet and become part of a national movement to return the country, to win the country back. So go to Ricochet.com. We actually need you to join. If you're listening and you're not a member, just know that you're letting us down. We need you um anyway i i we we should say we were planning to have a mark levin on and um mark levin was sort of booked and ready to go and he was enthusiastic and he loves ricochet and he actually reads it a lot uh but he had a little bit of an emergency he had to take care of so we're gonna try to reschedule that so um if you saw mark levin on

the program note um he is on his he he will be here in the next few weeks. But he had a little emergency that he had to deal with. So he will be back. Peter, what do you make of – well, Ramesh Panuru who is not a libertarian and Richard Epstein who is a libertarian basically agreeing that we have a culture problem? Two points. One is I guess I would say I'm on Ramesh's side. There are certain social or cultural issues on which I'm just not libertarian at all. Big deal.

Social conservatives and libertarians can make common cause 98% of the time. 98% of the time, we can agree that there is an overweening, overreaching, ultra-virus federal government. Do I get points? James may be the master of the segue, but I hope you realize I just dropped a little Latin in. There's no heard that. There's no tone overall tone here. And the second point is, you know what? I wish I could wax intellectual about – I wish I could rise to the level of Ramesh and Richard. On my best day, I have trouble rising to that level. So let me just put it this way. You know what I love about both of those guys?

It shows that we're not the stupid ones. Our side has legal scholars as good as any on their side. We have people who know the Constitution, who know American history, who know how to construct the English language, who understand technical legal readings. We are not the stupid party. Well, you and I are the stupid ones, but we're not just yet. But we share a trench with Ramesh Panuru and Richard Epstein, and it's good. Good to be in a trench with them. Yes, I agree. I agree. And I was going to ask this, but I thought if I ask this question, then Richard will answer it. And that's another podcast.

And I wasn't sure. But when you and I were younger in the late 70s and even early 80s, it was a Reagan issue. It was a Carter-Reagan issue, a social issue. It was a thing called school prayer and i mean if you're younger than me around you're 40 you probably only vaguely remember this as a big deal school prayer there was school prayer the death penalty and abortion those are the three big um social issues that people had to get on the right side of and school prayer was outlawed as we all know because it was the from i guess from the establishment i guess it's church and state business, right?

But look how far we've come. I mean the truth – something that Richard said and Ramesh said both is that what's amazing about the Hobby Lobby views, how willing the – a religiously sort of grounded, organized, family-run business, how willing they were to accommodate others of other religious views with a simple kind of a little workaround. But that's what life is all about. How uncoercive it all was except for the coercion of the state. And I suspect that – and one of the things that sort of people on our side who agreed with the Hobby Lobby decision say is we're just going to scratch our heads and say, why are these people freaking out? Why are they freaking out? They shouldn't be freaking out so much. This seems insane. It's got to be a political reason.

They're trying to score political points or they're trying to get more – they're trying to galvanize the – I keep thinking galvanize the base so that liberals send more money in for the midterms, something. Or could it be that this was never, never about a border-facing contraception? It was never about women or women's rights or any of the things they say it's about it was always about removing religion and removing people's right to have their faith from any exercise from any relevance in their day-to-day life and it seemed to me that the any to be to be seemed it seems to me and i'm not a religious person but it seems to me just from the just from the, it looks to me like it's not a war on women, but it really is a war on religion. And that as long as you keep it in a box, as long as your faith comes out around 10.55 a.m. on Sunday and goes back in the box at 12.01 p.m. on Sunday, that's OK. You're allowed.

But the minute you say – For now. Yeah, for now, but, but the minute you say, well, actually it kind of guides my moral compass throughout the week. And from my business decisions, my personal decisions, the way I raise my children, the way where I want to live and where I want to, what I want them to learn. The minute you do that, they're after you. It's almost like the minute you walk out of the church, they want you. I couldn't agree more. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. This Supreme Court decision and the resurgence of the Tea Party of conservative looks at the polls

basically right now between now and November, which looks as though our side is going to win in November. We'll see. But it looks that way. Gives me some hope. But I must say the other day I was thinking to myself, what will Obama be remembered for? Will it be Obamacare? Will it be the collapse of American strength in the world? What will he – I thought to myself, you know what? So many hits. is that it was under his administration that the fundamental ability of people who believed in the Judeo-Christian moral and religious tradition, the fundamental ability of them to live their lives unchallenged moral and religious tradition in the country, that the government under Barack Obama became hostile.

Well, now we see some pushback. We see some pushback in the court. We see some pushback in Republican Senate races We see some pushback in Republican Senate races. I shouldn't say – in Senate races. Thank goodness the country is pushing back. But that – I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. That's what's at stake.

And I know we have to wrap and I want to talk about two really great posts from a Rickish member post. But before I do, it does seem to me of a piece that it's the use of the federal government. I think for the first time ever, I really do believe this. I don't can't think of it. Lyndon Johnson did not try to convert Southern racists. That's not his job. He's just said, no, no, there are rules. You're just going to have to comply. And he was correct. Barack Obama seems to want to – and the progressives who run this administration want to convert you. They want to remove from your life your religious underpinnings, the things that guide you during the day. They're going to make that illegal. They're trying to separate you from that.

It's not – I'm somebody who's in favor of gay marriage, but it's not enough that you disagree with gay marriage and you have no right to control other people's marriage in Arizona. You must also bake them a cake. This is so profound and so chilling. This is an overreach in a certain sense, but in a certain sense, it isn't. The following comparison. As you know, I've been working on the Cold War. One of the puzzles to me is why stalin always wanted a signed confession yeah before he would execute an opponent and in fact we have in the archives we

have general tukachevsky's confession signed confession it's splattered with blood it's clear that the man was beaten if not tortured tortured, before he signed his confession. But it was not good enough for Joseph Stalin to put a bullet in the back of an opponent's head. He had to have the opponent sign a confession first. There is some kind of totalitarian impulse that says it's not enough for me simply to use my power to thwart you i want to get inside your head i want you to agree that i am right and you are wrong now we're a long way from what took place in the soviet union in the 1930s and i don't mean for a moment to suggest that Barack Obama is like Joseph Stalin. But I do believe that this fundamental totalitarian, let's call it that,

totalitarian impulse, because it makes a total claim, not just to your behavior, but to the way you think, to your deepest beliefs, to your very conscience. That is the same. That totalitarian impulse, it has to be called a totalitarian impulse when the CEO of – what was the company? The CEO, it turned out, in 2008 had written a modest check. Mozilla. Mozilla.

He had written a modest check supporting Proposition 8. He's got to go. And he has to go. He's gone. He apologized. He said he changed his mind modest check supporting Proposition 8. He's got to go. And he has to go. He's gone. He's out. He apologized. He said he changed his mind. It was some years ago.

It was a modest check. Not good enough. Out of here. That's a totalitarian impulse. It's of one piece. It's the same impulse. Yeah, it's very – Yeah.

It's very strange. If you look at the entire Obama administration from the prism of one of its goals in addition to sort of nationalizing healthcare, in addition to sort of spending a lot of money, in addition to all those sorts of things, one of its goals was to eradicate conservatism. Right. It makes more sense. Like, oh, I get it. That's the point, to use the regulatory powers of the federal government to eradicate or to illegalize or whatever the word would be. I'm sure there's a Latin word. To the other side. We're the Kulaks, Bob. I don't want to be dramatic, but you look at all these things of a piece and you think, good lord.

It doesn't seem like accommodation is the answer because accommodation is obviously here. There's accommodation in gay marriage. There's accommodation in the Hobby Lobby case. There's all sorts of accommodations where people who disagree can live and work together. But they always want the extra step, which is no, no, no, no, no. You got to like it. You got to bake me a cake. Right.

Which I think is creepy. So this got dark. Listen, we have to wrap it up. This has been a long time. We've been talking think is creepy. And so this got dark. Listen, we have to wrap it up. This has been a long time. We've been talking a long time. Again, Mark Levin sends his regrets. He will be on soon. He had a little family thing to deal with.

And so we will talk to him soon. And he is always lots of fun. We thank Richard Epstein. We thank Ramesh Purnooru. I love Ramesh. Ramesh is so – Ramesh is also one of the most genial people in the world if you sort of sit around and deal with it. He's just a lot of fun. Before we go, a couple posts of the week.

Ricochet member BigDumbJerk, which I think is sort of interesting. I don't think anybody on the left would ever adopt that screen name, has a request and an inquiry about the podcast. Basically, Peter, he's saying to people who are on the podcast, Peter, that when they are not speaking, Peter, they hit mute because sometimes the typing, Peter, that you do, we can hear. Yes.

Oh, he wants me to hit mute. I thought I'd gotten in the habit of hitting mute pretty regularly. Yes, but you also type twice as regularly. So just hit the mute. The second thing is – No, that was Scott. Anyway, all right.

I'm sure – thank you, BigDubJerk, for putting it so politely. I'll do my best. And he also wants to know if we – That was my equivalent of a signed confession, by the way. Yeah, okay. That's great. We can blood spatter to confession uh he also wants to know if we count stitcher and other download um numbers when we uh count up the

how many tens of thousands people listen to rickshaw podcast the answer is yes we do uh and it is an enormous number of people i say tens of thousands i'm being modest um uh but what's true and another rickshaw member we I think we I don't know I think we had him on the podcast Baraket Kalil is the Oxford comma

making a comeback which I kind of enjoyed that was yesterday you know the Oxford comma the thing that you do at the end of a thing you know a list of things

the serial comma you know this this comma and that red comma green comma and blue or do you do write red comma you know, a list of things, the serial comma, you know, this, this, red comma, green comma, and blue. Or do you write red comma, green and blue? The Oxford comma is inserting the comma after green, correct? Right.

Like an editor. Yes. And I, yeah, I'm a fan of the Oxford comma. And I'm also the fan of this other thing. I'm also a fan of that one, Rob. Me too. Yeah. Hello? Yeah, I'm here. fan of this other thing. I'm also a fan of that one, Rob. Me too. Yeah. Hello?

Yeah, I'm here. I think we're just a little delayed here. I stand for the Oxford comma. I also do the two spaces after the period, which I know is... Me too! Everybody hates that. Look at this. Look at the libertarians and the social conservatives. It's an accommodation.

Exactly right. Peter, any 4th of July plans? The libertarians and the social conservatives. It's an accommodation. Exactly right. Exactly right. Peter, any 4th of July plans? Holding on. I have all five kids home. So I'm just going to try to hold on. I think we're going to try to drive. The thing we haven't been able to make.

So here's the big deal. My poor daughter and her work, the team that she's worked for six weeks. She's had this job. This is the new world, Robin. Boy, do I not like it? No, I do like it. I just wish I were young enough to participate in it myself. Six weeks, and because her team got some big contract, she got enough of a bonus

to go fly to North Carolina to meet some friends. And as she was about to book the trip, Drudge, there... Speaking of mute, I get hit for typing and you don't get hit for about by the way that's not rob's dog it's rob uh anyhow so she's going to be here because there's a there's a hurricane that's going to be passing across north carolina

on the fourth of july so suddenly we do have the family home and we have no plans it's pathetic i'm a lousy father the answer is no i about you you know I have a little flag that I put out and I think I'll be the only one with a little flag I think my people here in Venice Beach will walk by that and think oh that's an interesting drapery I wonder what all those geometric shapes symbolize

and then maybe see some fireworks and that's that very quiet you know it's like the problem is here they're very safety conscious so you really have to go somewhere special to see the fireworks and usually they have the marine I might be able to see him from my from my street good we got

through it we got through it without segues without James I think I think we did okay but we're rusty Peter oh are we ever are we ever I'm gonna go James back we need James back lying down right now. I'm exhausted. I'm drained. Once again, thank you for listening.

If you're not a member, now is the time to join. Please go to Ricochet.com and sign up for one of the three glamorous tiers of membership. If you are a Ricochet member, we will see you in the comments. We thank Audible.com and counter books. And we thank you, Peter. Until next week. Until next week. Happy fourth.

Oh, beautiful. Oh, he was proved. In. Liberating strife. Who more than self. Country love.

And mercy more than life. America. America America Make God thy gold refine Till all success be nobleness And ever again divine And you know when I was in school we used to sing it something like this. Listen here. Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, A purple mountain Majesties

Over the fruited plain But now wait a minute I'm talking about America Sweet America You know America, sweet America, you know, God done shed his grace on thee. Henry Brotherhood From sea to shining sea You know, I wish I had somebody to help me sing this. America

America I love you, America You see, my God, he does shed his grace on thee. You ought to love him for it. Because he, he, he crowned my good. He told me he would. And he'd burn the hood. From sea to shining sea.

Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord. I thank you, Lord. Shining sea. Ricochet. Join the conversation.