The Ricochet Podcast - Debates and Decisions

Episode Date: June 29, 2024

Whoever decided to place a presidential debate smack dab in the middle of the Supreme Court's decision calendar was either crazy or a genius. It not only gives us plenty to talk about but it gives a certain podcaster the rare opportunity to praise Donald Trump (Yes, really.)The Powerline men, John Yoo and Steve Hayward join Rob and Peter to review the debate and parse the thinking of the high court.

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Plus, get an extra $35 off with code TENDER at checkout. Minimum purchase may apply. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It is the Ricochet Podcast. I'm Rob Long, New York City, joined by Peter Robinson and Steve Hayward.

Our guest today is John Yoo. There is so much to talk about. Stay tuned. And since I've changed the law, what's happened? I've changed it in a way that now you're in a situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally. It's better than when he left office.

And I'm going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the total initiative relative to what we're going to do with more border patrol and more asylum officers. President Trump? I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don't think he knows what he said either. Hello and welcome to the Ricochet podcast. This is podcast number 698, which is just, I mean, about the mental age, I think, of the president of the United States. I can't believe I made that joke. I apologize. It was too easy to go for. I'm Rob Long. I'm coming to you from New York City. One of the

co-founders of Ricochet joining me as always, a co-founder, Peter Robinson in Palo Alto. And we are joined by the brilliant, as always, Steve Hayward to talk about what happened last night, the burning of Atlanta. And also our old friend who's going to explain why today was not just a great day for the Trump campaign, but also for constitutional law. Mr. John, you Professor John, you John, how you doing? And a great and a great day for the Trump campaign today, too. Yeah, that's right. It was not just that. It was also a great day for the Supreme Court. And we're going to get to that. We're going to get to all the complicated stuff. But I first want to hear from Steve. I have something to say that will be um contrarian slightly i think to

some of the media um but i want to hear what you thought of last night i mean look it's one of those things where the whole thing has been hashed over and hashed over and hashed over but um i just want here's one here's my anecdote to set the set table i was watching the debate with some good friends of mine who are mostly on the left and mostly in public radio and including a couple very good friend of mine a wonderful wonderful reporter she's one of the best and um we're watching this thing together and about three minutes in she looks at me and i look at her and i ask her i said is this is this over and says, oh yeah, it's over. It's over.

And the feeling in the room was that it was over very early. So much so that people just started talking and having conversations and they weren't watching it like you'd watch something that really mattered. And I thought, oh, that's really, I thought it was really, really fascinating.

Anyway, that was my insight number one, but give me your thoughts. Well, yeah, I mean, that was burning down Atlanta, great train wreck, all the metaphors have been used. I have two thoughts that I haven't seen widely expressed in the, what, 18 hours since it went down. One is, maybe someone has said this, but Trump's line early on after one of Biden's early incoherencies, where he said, I don't know what he just said. I don't think he does either. I think that's going to go down with Ronald Reagan's there you go again from 1980 is one of the great zingers in debate history. The other thing is, the thing that I have not seen

anyone notice is that I think Biden committed last night his own deplorables moment you remember hillary talking about trump supporters or basket of deplorables and i think people haven't focused in on this because it was in a wrap in his whole incoherence it was on the abortion issue and remember biden did something inexplicable he he pivoted to immigration from his strongest point to his weakest point. And he says, you know what, Trump says, you know, an immigrant murdered somebody and he went to the funeral. I mean, why are you bringing up Trump's humanity? But then the next thing that came out of Biden's mouth was this. And I'm going to quote her from the transcript. The idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming in and they talk about that.

But here's the deal. There's a lot of young women who are being raped by their, by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters by it's just, it's just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it. I'm thinking, wait a minute.

Wait, what he's Biden has just slipped and told us what people like him think of middle America. You know, the great unwashed, the working class, the people in the middle. And they have to be, we have to have unlimited abortion because there's this what

epidemic of rapes going on from family members and incest i mean i i think that was a slip that revealed once again the condescension that people like him and hillary and and the rest of sort of the leftist elite have uh for the what they call deplorable america i i you know i i gotta share this one thing because i watched it it was painful i had to turn away i couldn't watch it anymore but as a former justice department prosecutor i think that trump is being prosecuted on the wrong charges it's not insurrection it's not sedition he should be prosecuted for elder abuse well here's what i thought and i want to get peter i i want to hear you your your uh your thoughts here um i all of the commentary afterwards said you know the the the both sides said well yeah

obviously terrible for biden he was doddering everything but you know trump lied it's all filled with lies and you know i am no fan of the of the man or his presidency trump but his lies i mean you know capital l didn't seem outrageously out of line for somebody presidential candidate. I mean, they all exaggerate. There goes Pastor Long defining deviancy down. I mean, not really. Look, he's wrong about trade. He was wrong about trade. He's mistaken about free trade, I believe. But it's not a lie. It's just that he was wrong.

Anyway, that's part of my feeling. The second thing is the reason that he beat Biden and he beat him and people say, well, it was a bad debate for Biden, but it was not necessarily a good debate for Trump. I think it was an excellent debate for Trump. I think he was angry for the American people. He was angry in our – on our behalf. And that is something that he really crossed a line there where he was

going to convince voter i think he's going to convince voters that he's not this narcissistic malignant selfish kind of mentally and emotionally unstable person he actually is a candidate who's running for you now i may not buy that all the time, but I found his argument to be the most coherent. And I mean, he had his best night in politics, I think. And Biden had his worst night. And they are living in fantasy land. If they are looking for mistakes that Trump made, they're going to matter. That was my take.

Okay. Do I get my take in here? Do we have time? Absolutely. Okay. Thank you. So my take is a morning after take. I don't disagree with a word any of you have said, particularly John saying it was painful. I was watching with my youngest daughter and my wife, and we kept wincing, just wincing. No Biden fans in that room, but just wincing at how horrible it all was. Yeah. Okay. So, but when I say the morning after reaction, what I mean is,

if you look at the New York Times, Krugman has a column, the best president of my lifetime must step down. Thomas Friedman has a column. Joe Biden is a friend. He needs to step aside. Nick Kristof called for Biden to step down on Twitter before the debate was over. What do I conclude from this? They had it already. Now, consciously, did they think to themselves, this is the moment we finally begin the campaign to get him off the ticket? unconsciously at a minimum unconsciously there are all kinds of people who should have known better including the professional journalists i just named who were lying to us or lying to themselves or i lying is getting overused now but who are engaged in a long running act, not purely

of self-delusion, but of pushing delusion on the rest of us. And at some level, they knew it, which is why they were able to pivot so quickly. Oh, this is what's happening, says Christophe, as he's watching the debate and tweeting. Because at some basic level, he knew it all along. So, Steve, I saw that Steve tweeted somewhere this morning. I'm just reviewing my ex. Somebody tweeted, the reason they agreed to such an early debate was to give themselves time to replace him if he collapsed. And Steve tweeted, that's what I think.

And you know what? It's what I think. And you know what? It's what I think too. When I saw the early debate date, way back when, these weeks ago, when both camps agreed to the debate, that's exactly what I... If he puts in a performance that's fiery and more or less coherence,

the way he did at the State of the Union... By the way, the importance, the political importance of his State of the Union address had nothing to do with his agenda. It was entirely devoted to shutting down the insurgency within the Democratic to replace him. He was saying, I want this job. It was a health checkup.

Exactly. I'm coherent. That was his cognition test or cognitive test that Trump kept pushing for. It was the State of the Union address. So they weren't sure yeah but they thought let's have an early date so we can get rid of this guy if he does collapse well he has collapsed well the problem with that of course is that you can't get rid of him unless he decides to get be gotten rid of or unless you convince him that he decided that i suppose you can say hey you know hey grandpa this is what you decided to do um so it isn't i

mean it it's a it's the best card they can play in a very bad deck well so let me let me put let me give let me offer a scenario and see what you guys make of it and steve and john is well we turn the show over to john in just a moment when when we start to yeah i'm bored of all this debate talk when we get talking about something important okay so here's here's the way i see it two weeks, and maybe by the end of this week, Joe Biden will have announced that he's no longer seeking the Democratic nomination. He will release his, and the politicking will begin immediately, of course. He will release his delegates at the convention. is a problem. How can they possibly set aside an African American woman? And the answer is, there will be a big fat book contract. There will be corporate boards. She will be very comfortably bought off. She may even be promised an ambassadorship to the court of St. James or Paris. They will move her aside. How can they check the diversity boxes if they get rid of her?

Because they will nominate Whitmer, Governor Whitmer of Michigan, who's a woman, and Raphael Warnick, Senator Warnick of Georgia, who's a black man. That will give them a state in the upper Midwest and Georgia, or in my judgment, this would be the most powerful ticket they could put forward. Josh Shapiro, a more or less centrist Democrat in Pennsylvania. He's Jewish. He would make the first Jewish president if he were elected. Raphael Warnock, that gives them Pennsylvania and Georgia. And all of a sudden, Donald Trump will go from being the younger man in the debate to a man who is almost a quarter, let me see, no, no, who is more than a quarter of a century older than the young, energetic, telegenic, well-spoken presidential candidate.

This will happen by August. What do you think? Well, so first of all, before I answer your question, can I just say after Rob's speech a moment ago, Peter and John, will you guys go in with me to put a hidden camera in Rob's voting booth in November? Because I'm just very excited. Okay. Are you kidding me? I've already mailed Rob's absentee ballot.

What are you talking about? So, Peter, I think- How do you spell Jill Stein? Right. Now, in reverse order, Peter, I agree with you that Josh Shapiro would be the strongest candidate. I'm going to say something very crass. The Democratic Party cannot nominate a Jewish person to the top of their ticket right now. They just can't.

I think that's even harder for them than pushing Kamala off the ticket. Oh, you think so? Oh, yeah. Oh, no, I'm convinced of this. I mean, I just, you know, I'm just paying attention. The squad just wouldn't stand for it. The squad and, you know off the ticket. Oh, you think so? Oh, yeah. Oh, no, I'm convinced of this. I mean, I just, you know, I'm just paying attention. The squad just wouldn't stand for it. The squad and, you know, the prophecy. The anti-Semitism is now so deep in the Democratic Party

that there'd be a revolt against it. It'd be a whispering campaign, probably, but it'd be bad. Now, the second thing is, maybe you can buy Kamala off with book contracts and millions of dollars, but I think her pride's too strong for that. I have another scenario. By the way, my pride is not if anybody wants to buy me off.

No, no. I mean, we've established that. Yeah, right. I'll be contacting my local McDonald's. Right. I have an easier scenario that I think works. Newsom wants it badly. I'll bet he's been burning up the phone line since minute five last night they've been having to sponge the drool away from his lips

at this exactly i'm sure newsome and camilla hate each other that's well known in california democratic circles yes uh so if you think that newsome is going to be the person who wraps up the nomination then he stands up and says gosh gosh, you know, there's this 12th Amendment. And, you know, John can correct me here. Right. But the 12th Amendment has that peculiar passage that says the electors from a state cannot vote for both president and vice president for people of their same state. That means that they cannot vote because remember, you cast your vote separately. The candidates run together, but you cast the electoral vote separately, which is weird. They can't cast a vote for Newsom for president and Harris for vice president.

They can't allow California's 45 electoral votes or whatever it is, number 52, to not go to a Democrat. You either surrender the vice presidency to Republicans or you allow the Senate to pick the vice president. That's the backup feature in the absence of a majority. And the Senate might be Republican in January. So you say, gosh, I'm so sorry, Vice President Harris. We just have to have somebody else on the ticket because of this archaic passage in the Constitution. There's nothing we can do. We're so terribly sorry. And then they'll pick Warnock or somebody or, you know, maybe Wittner for running mate. I don don't know but I think that's how it could happen that that passes the uh and it allows the Democrats to focus their rage against our archaic constitution right so I think that's how it could go down okay so so

are we agreeing you guys are underestimating and not just inertia but the Biden love of power yeah or any like the jaws of life to pry those people loose yeah but here but here's the more serious point is how can you say biden is unfit to run for office and leave him as president for the next six months right if you're gonna say he should step down because he's a you know because he's senile you got to trigger the 26th amendment we got we're at war two of our allies are at war we've got the worst all theseth Amendment. We're at war. Two of our allies are at war. We've got the worst, all these problems at the border, inflation, China and Taiwan, Ukraine, Israel. And we're going to say, oh, it's okay to leave the senile guy as commander chief for the

next six months, but we've got to get him out of running for president. Robert Herr has said he's too old to stand trial. He's too old and senile to stand trial. But, you know, if you guys want to continue him as president, that's up to you. We've already made that decision. The people in Biden world now have to, they're the only people who have any kind of power and leverage. They have to now explain to their elderly president and their boss and their key to

enormous power. I mean, has there been a presidential staff by definition that has this much power i can't imagine right not since woodrow wilson had a stroke and couldn't talk right so they're gonna have to convince him to do something the people in washington dc and probably everywhere else can't do which is to say please take my power away old man, they're going to do what they've been doing for the past year or two years, however long this decline has been, and say, everything's fine. Everything's fine. And they're pointing to it today because he did have a

fantastic rally in North Carolina, right? He came out and he was, oh boy, look at the, where was he yesterday? So they're already trying to explain to people, no, no, it was just an off night. But the problem is it wasn't just an off night for Biden. As I said, it's also a really great night for Trump. And it wasn't about a comparison. It's that he came out and he mentioned he mentioned 2020 glancingly. His answer on January 6th was a clever. I thought it was a good answer. His answer on abortion stunned the people I was in the room with because even though it was typical Trump nonsense, it was, it had an intellectual and philosophical and emotional coherence to it that I don't think a Republican

politician has been able to articulate. I mean, imagine, think of all the weird twists and turns that George H.W. Bush got himself into when he's talking about abortion. So this was a guy who kind of had, now, I don't believe he's going to continue. That's a kind of discipline that I don't think Trump has, but he had it when it counted. And I feel like the media is missing that argument, missing that point, because the Biden disaster was so, so strong, so catastrophic. Steve, John, we can talk about the Supreme Court in a moment. And who cares about the, could we just talk about Rob?

We can call him as I see him. I don't know whether we're to believe. We're already finished talking about the senile candidate. I don't know whether to believe the demurals or what comes after the demural. Listen, as you guys know, I'm no fan of Donald Trump, but that man was a god last night. Did you see him? We have to look at this the way it played out. And we want it to play out.

And it played out. I mean, yeah, he was a little nasty near the end, but he's look, he's a jerk, right? He's a nasty. Thank you you but on the other hand but on the other hand he won that debate he didn't not lose it and i think it's well it's a very big distinction that people in the media are not making peter i agree he won at this point peter i like to repair to what our old friend milton freeman used to say nothing counts before the but. We're going to use that filter with Rob now, right? Exactly.

Exactly. By the way, one small technical observation. Turning off the mics played entirely to Trump's favor. It just worked like a charm. Everything I read led me to believe that that was what the democrats had insisted on but it worked for trump actually what biden wished is that he could turn off his mic earlier how many times did they say oh by the way mr president you have half your time left to see you 20 minutes left mr president right yeah the idea okay what was the idea again so uh

so i think i i i i what i hope for is just because it's American politics, American politics is fascinating, that we have an interesting summer with an interesting convention. I think that would be great for the country to remind ourselves that this is politics. We're not choosing the pope here. We're not choosing the father of the country. We're just choosing the chief executive of the administrative branch and that person is by definition flawed and we've got a bunch of losers and miscreants in that in that role and a country will be just fine and maybe

we should go back to something a little bit more political and a little less of this show business pageantry that we've fallen into okay possible um the other possibility is that nothing happens, that it's just the high wire act all the way to November and Trump says something stupid or whatever happens, happens. And it's this weird thing where we're worried about we're up till three in the morning counting ballots in Pennsylvania and Georgia. Oh, I bet that one. I think we can rule out if Biden. Yeah. If Biden remains on the ticket, if to that extent nothing happens, he loses. I just, I cannot conceive of any way for him to come back from last night. There's a Democratic Party base of maybe 37% of the vote or so, a little under 40% that's going to vote for the Democrat no matter what. And that's about all he'll get, in my judgment. There is just no recovering from last night.

There's no pulling back a Paul Krugman column that says it's time for Biden to step down. There's no pulling back all this material that will appear in Trump ads. The business community will just say, we're done with Biden. It's over. We're not going to waste any money on him. I just don't see it. Excuse me. I say all this, and then you're quite right.

Donald Trump is so wildly unpredictable, he may find some way of saving the situation for Joe Biden. But it would have to be, well, it would have to be something that I can't even imagine. Anyway. well, it would have to be something that I can't even imagine. Anyway, oh, so, but if I may, may I be the little third grader writing a report on the virtues of democracy? I do, I will say, so I said this morning after those bastards, they knew what they were lying, which is why they were so ready to change, to sort of try to pivot. But there is this to be said. Brezhnev remained in office until he died.

Ceausescu remained in office until the day he died. It's been that way. That was a different kind of a day. In other words, the idea that it was a reassuring night for democracy, this strange little ritual of a presidential debate that I don't think any of us was expecting what happened last night. We thought nothing would happen. It wouldn't be consequential. Somebody would win by some, they both say ridiculous thing and the polls would remain unchanged. In fact, we were all unable to see that Joe Scarborough

who said the president is at his best that Jean-Pierre, whatever this the press secretary, oh no the president is decisive and alert and we have trouble it was all a lie and we could see it with our own eyes and the only system of government

under which we have been permitted to see that is democracy could our producer add a little swell of the national anthem in the background please yeah okay i'm done i just i just hope he can you know over you know block out my weeping and crying i mean i'm so moved hi everybody james lottix here for ricochet it's june it's the first month of summer and you know's going to happen? Summer's going to be gone like that before you know it. So what do you do to keep it strong and long? Well, you might sign up for Ricochet at Ricochet.com. Join the member feed where you'll have endless numbers of conversations with like-minded folk and those who want to argue with you, too. It's this place for sane, civil, center-right conversation you've been looking for all your life on the internet and you know what you'll be there for june for july for august through the fall matter of fact you'll meet new friends and be with them the year round so that's ricochet.com go there take a look thanks speaking of democracy um we've got a couple supreme court rulings to talk and they link together in my head and maybe I'm wrong.

First case in question is what they call the Chevron case. And the second one is the SEC case. So I was earlier this week. And it seems to me that the Supreme Court in those two cases is making a drawing a very bright line saying if you're gonna have rules and you're going to enforce rules and enforce fines and have uh semi-quasi-legal proceedings they have to come through the judicial branch is that sort of close now i'd even uh make it stronger and also include the january 6 case uh which is, and this is something that's been going on for several years, but it's reaching a crescendo, is you want to call it the bureaucracy,

you want to call it the deep state, but they are on a generational losing streak now. This is the main mission of the Roberts Court, is to cut down the deep state to size. Every time the deep state, which I think it was the permanent bureaucracy, gets up before the court, they are getting smacked down. So the first case Rob mentioned, the Chevron case, should courts accept the interpretations of the law offered by agencies, which we've been doing for 40 years now. The court says, no, no longer. We're not deferring to what bureaucrats think about their own power. The Jarcasey case against the SEC Rob mentioned from two days ago, can an agency try you or me before their own court system with no juries of course court says no the reason i

think this ties in with the january 6th case think about this is can prosecutors right sort of bend and twist the law to go after people that they don't like again the court says no you cannot even though the january 6th the January 6th, both sides of the court are saying, even though the January 6th protesters might've done terrible things, they tried to perhaps stop the peaceful transfer of power. But they said, prosecutors, again, the permanent bureaucracy cannot make up or twist and turn with the law to go after people without the protections of good old-fashioned American, and I'm not going to say the word democracy as Peter does, because guess what?

We are not a democracy. We are a republic. Thank God we are not a democracy, Peter. We have a decentralized government system with lots of things in it to protect us from the majority, like the juries, like judiciary like so that's what i think that's how you can understand what the supreme court term has been about is restoration of all of the protections against big powerful government and that's what the roberts court's really been trying to do for 10 years so john can i just just sketch out a timeline, kind of a template for what the issue really has been. Congress passes a law, and the law is vague. And then they have a clause in there saying,

and the details to be just come later from the administrative blah, blah, blah, blah, as such and such as pertains this issue or some ridiculous boilerplate that is, frankly, anti-democrat. And then the agency has this law, which is essentially carte blanche to do almost anything they want it's like a star chamber law and it can be in anything it can be the consumer protection bill that would that the agency that passed it could be the epa it could be almost any administrative body that has penalizing powers and then if you're running i might just was a friend who was running a business, and they were like, okay, we're kind of in a new area of industry, and we have to continually ask what the rules are. And the agency that it pertained to would not tell them what the rules were. Didn't have to.

Was not asked to. Didn't have to decide what the rules are. Only decided post facto that they had violated the rules. So the idea was that somehow these big businesses are trying to subvert the rules. But in fact, most of these businesses have enormous compliance departments, lawyers desperately trying to figure out what the rules are. But those agencies don't make the rules, they only enforce the fines. And what Supreme Court said is you can't do that no more. Is that close?

Yeah. I would say that the Supreme Court actually doesn't care about the big businesses and their compliance costs. These decisions are really protecting the little guy. And maybe the way to think of it is this way. There's two real models of government going on here. One would be the progressive model. Congress passes these vague laws like steve's favorite statute the clean air oh my god you know what the clean air act says

the clean air act says you the epa make the air clean that's about all the statute says and then the epa is like okay let's have all electric cars within 10 years right the agencies just go hog wild with that kind of stuff. The agents will say is, the legislature, they're filled with corrupt politicians. Progressives think all the power should be transferred to the experts. And then the experts can issue the rules that are best for society. And maybe that helps the big businesses, maybe it doesn't. But there should be rules issued by experts insulated from politics. That's the model we've been living under since the New Deal. The other model, which is the founder's model, I think, is we live in a decentralized government. Concentration of power is the problem, particularly when it has democracy behind it.

We don't want to have majoritarian rule in this country. And so what we do is we create lots of barriers to government action altogether. And so in Rob's hypothetical, in that world, businesses and people are free to do whatever they want, unless the government comes in after the fact, when the legislature passes a law and a prosecutor comes in and a court with a jury blesses it. Otherwise, if they don't give you a hard time, you're just free to do whatever you want. That's the original 18th century constitutional model, and it's been supplanted by this progressive view. And what this Supreme Court is doing is trying to refer us back to the original, so much so that Chief Justice John Roberts, this moderate guy who upheld Obamacare and so on and so forth, in his opinion today, he's talking about how important it was to the founders, the founders that we returned to this model. How important it is to the founders two days ago that we have jury trials.

That's really what's going on. It's not a big business compliance thing. It really is that I think they think they're defending the rights of the little guy against an overly powerful federal government. Well, I mean, and the case, John, I mean, you know better than I do, but the case, Rob, involved the little guy. It wasn't a big company. The Loper Bright was a fisherman. Fisher. The Fisher we see now, right?

The facts were really shocking. Fisher person, yeah. The old Marine Mammal Protection Act said, well, the government can carry out inspections to make sure fisher people aren't taking too many of the wrong fish or something like that. And that led the Department of Commerce to say, oh, we need to put inspectors on your boats when you go out to sea. Oh, and you have to pay for them $700 a day. This was a plot point in the Oscar for for best picture three four years back i think it was coda about the the family of deaf fishermen in maine or somewhere and and but the point is i mean that could be the day's profit for an independent fishing person right you could threaten to wipe them out and it was never authorized by congress that you could charge

essentially it's a tax one way of thinking about it but uh it was never authorized in the statute and that's so there this is not a big company it's uh it was not involving chevron it was involving a couple of people with fishing boats and the counter argument is going to be from progressives oh this means that all the things that the government does are going to be struck down now and we're going to have dirty water and asthmatic air i don't know what other you know and children's cribs are going to start exploding when you put kids in there and cars are going to drive over old ladies autonomously. It's going to be cats and dogs living together like in Ghostbusters. It's going to be the end of the

world. That is really not what the court's about. What they're saying is you can make all those decisions, but it has to be the Congress that does it. People who are elected and accountable to the people. Congress can't. Look, Congress likes transferring this power to agencies, too, because then they don't have to take hard votes. Exactly. But now that's the return of the system. I was at a dinner a couple of years ago with the chief justice, and I was asked to introduce him. And so I asked him to tell us what we should know that the people that was missed in the coverage of the Supreme Court. And John Roberts stood up and said, what people need to know is that the Supreme Court finds itself in one bad spot after another because Congress is not doing its job.

And he spoke that last phrase with real anger, actually. So as a procedural matter, John, the court has now said agencies don't even get to interpret the law. Congress needs to write good legislation. Is that what it comes to? Can we expect this group of decisions? I'd like to get to Murthy in a moment, by the way, which was a disappointment that doesn't fit the pattern we're discussing. But can we expect that this group of decisions that taken together say, Congress must legislate. The courts interpret. Federal agencies only do what they are explicitly instructed to do by statute. Can we suppose that this will have a tonic effect on Congress, that it will now be forced to write better, cleaner legislation to take greater responsibility

upon itself? So now I'm switching my hat to the now my old other hat former senate aide and the cynic in me be like no of course not what are you of course not these are politicians what are you high yeah i mean the thing is they can pass precise laws when they want to right when they want to pay off groups or anything you know the tax code's very clear right appropriation law is very clear so uh this So this decision itself doesn't give Congress an incentive, a political incentive based in reelection to pass clearer laws. What it generally just means is that the administrative state, the deep state, whatever you want to call it, has less freedom to get away with things now under the vague laws that Congress is going to keep passing. Unless people say, I'm not voting for my representative or senator unless they do their jobs. But I detect no interest in that in the electorate. Yeah, I know we want to move on to some of the other,

some of the, and also the obstruction case, right? But isn't it, I mean, so the strangest thing about these cases is that is it impossible at a year from now in the first term of the in the first year of the second term of the trump administration that the all the liberals screaming and yelling about chevron and the sec decision will be saying according to chevron the sec you're not the administrator of say can't do what it what trump the trump administration wants to do i mean shouldn't they be cheering this because it's especially after last night it's entirely possible they're going to be looking at a a trump administrative state and not a biden

administrative state i mean yes how obvious is that going to be in a year from now i mean if people who are court watchers should, of course, immediately recognize that. But they're so overcome, of course, by who wins the election, they won't say it outright. But yes, of course, if you think, the more it looks like Trump is going to win the election, the more you're going to see progressives start to embrace these decisions by the Supreme Court. Because Trump likes using executive orders too, just to use them on immigration and building a border wall. But these same doctrines, I am sure, will be cited by the ACLU and the NAACP and immigration, whatever, law center, the minute Trump comes

into office and starts issuing executive orders about deportation, building walls and placing travel bans back in effect. I am Andrew Gutman. And I'm Beth Feely. And we're a couple of accidental activist parents who woke up and started speaking out about issues that we saw in our children's schools. So join us every week on Take Back Our Schools on the Ricochet Audio Network or wherever you get your podcasts. Ricochet! Network or wherever you get your podcasts. Ricochet.

Join the conversation. Let's talk about Murthy. That was a disappointment last week, right? Yeah, John. Yeah. My line out of it is we've now got from the Supreme Court, Murthy's law. Whatever can go wrong in the Supreme Court will go wrong in the Supreme Court. There's a pattern here, John. It goes back three or four

years now. You have a thesis about it, but maybe talk about the case first, though. Okay. So this is actually the return of standing doctrine with a vengeance. The standing doctrine is the idea, if you look at the Constitution, it says federal courts can only decide cases or controversies under federal law. And so the Supreme Court has said, well, we're not going to decide everything everybody asks us. There has to be a real dispute, a real case, not some made up case or someone just asking us to weigh in on some policy decision where we have no real dispute going on. So that's what standing is. Standing doctrine is essentially, is the plaintiff here really the right plaintiff to bring this case? Is there really a dispute that we can adjudicate? Now, why it's disappointing is because when you

read the facts of what happened in Murphy, and I actually think the plaintiffs have achieved their goal, which was to air out all the things that Biden and his aides were doing to coerce social media to censor people. We now know that because of these cases, even though Dr. J and Scott Atlas and all the other people who sued lost in the end. But this is how I would read it. There's Murphy. There was another case earlier. There's a lot of discretion in the Supreme Court to avoid deciding things they don't want to decide. And standing is one way they do that. They sort of say, ah, this is not the right plaintiff. This is not the right guy. I think what they were doing is they are trying to get out of abortion, get out of these social media cases because they got

to have their powder dry for Chevron today and the presidential immunity case on Monday. And so that's, I think, how judicial moderates think. I mean, I don't agree with it, but they're like, well, some things aren't going to be conservative. Some things aren't going to be liberal. So all these standing decisions were their way of giving liberals some wins, kicking the can down the road, and then saying, oh, no Chevron power. And that leads me to guess, I'm probably going to be wrong, but my guess would be on Monday, Trump is going to get a much better victory in the immunity case than I originally thought he would.

I thought he wasn't going to get any immunity. I think he's going to get something now. I also think that means the social media companies will win on Monday and the Texas and Florida cases, that'll be the win for the liberals. But I think this is how a John Roberts or the middle of the court thinks. We've got to give some to the left, give some to the right. May I quote from Justice Alito's dissent in Murphy? If the lower court's assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this court in years. Freedom of speech is essential to democratic self-government and to the advancement of humanity's store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences,

philosophy, and the arts. Alito obviously hasn't looked at Twitter lately, but go ahead. The government's behavior was blatantly unconstitutional. Officials who read today's decision may conclude that if a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. This is not a message this court should send. Two questions. A, is he correct? B, can we agree that he has now replaced Justice Scalia as the most eloquent member of the court? John? Question A on standing. One thing that is true is that it's only a case, it's only a holding on this plaintiff not being the right guy so someone else can come in and make the exact same claims but do them a little differently and they'll be able to get into court and they'll be able to get all the way to the supreme court but the more important thing

is the main purpose of the litigation was achieved everybody now knows yeah all the things that the biden white house was doing to force twitter and facebook to commit censorship the real answer to this is the political process i think not having the federal courts get involved with how the platforms decide to you know moderate or censor if you want to call it that uh the discussion feeds in terms of your question too is justice alito the most eloquent i don't know i i mean you know peter you know if you read supreme court opinions i mean they're pretty pretty boring so it's a very low bar to be the best writer on the supreme court you know none of these guys are none of these guys would have made it into the writer's room on cheers rob right like that's probably true that's probably

they're not concise they're yeah good in story not as good on jokes yeah probably so so i i don't think any of them really approaching justice scalia i'm afraid oh you don't so could i before So before we talk about immunity, the Fisher case, could you explain the facts in that case? And isn't that tremendously important? You mentioned it already, but of course the practical consequences are enormous. The legal issue is, okay, so after the 2000 financial crisis, Congress passed a law called Sarbanes-Oxley. And one of the provisions says, when Congress wants information, don't mutilate, tamper, destroy, hide the evidence right so that's part a of the law and then part b says or otherwise impede the investigation so the legal question is really simple does that second part actually mean you can charge people for anything they do that obstructs an investigation, like say threatening

a witness, or does it just mean don't otherwise destroy evidence in a way that we haven't thought of, right? Don't otherwise mutilate, tamper, or ruin the documents. And so all the court said was, I think it's pretty, actually it's very simple and I think obviously- Give us the facts in the case who was fisher and and oh so this is what happened so that's the laws it reads so the biden justice department for whatever reason chose to charge people involved with the january 6 riots in the capitol with don't do anything that could otherwise impede or obstruct congressional activity. And so they said, well, if these people appeared on the grounds of the Capitol, they stopped Congress from completing the electoral count on January 6th.

So they impeded the investigation. Fisher and the trial judge in this case, a very good judge guy named Carl Nichols, I know. He said, no, obviously that second part of the law is only saying, don't do other things to documents that we haven't thought of. I think it's obviously correct because if it weren't, then all you ever needed was to say, just don't obstruct Congress. Why list anything? It's so obviously clear. So that's what I mean. The legal holding is not that big a deal. The practical consequence though, is that this rips the heart out of most of the January 6th

prosecutions. And I think Trump doesn't need immunity anymore. That's the big thing that people have not noticed. Trump is going to win on the substance of the claims now in the prosecution, even if he's not immune, because this charge actually is the heart of Jack Smith's indictment of Donald Trump. And now it's been held not to apply to January 6th. So there's still two other charges left and he's going to get off on those because one is, I mean, I think this is Jack Smith is an incompetent prosecutor because he didn't charge Trump with insurrection. He didn't charge Trump with insurrection. He didn't charge Trump with sedition. He said he committed all those things. Joe Biden, the head of the executive

branch is out there saying Trump did all those things. They charged them with this evidence tampering thing. That's gone. The second charge is they charged them with defrauding the United States, which is usually used against government contractors. But the Supreme Court has already said that's a bribery law. That involves stealing money from the government. And if there's no loss of property or money, you can't use that charge. That's gone. So the only remaining charge is this bizarre claim under the Ku Klux Klan Act that Donald Trump deprived every American in the country of their vote simultaneously and all at once. So actually, this evidence tampering law was the only one that even had a remote chance of working on Trump. So if Trump loses on Monday, I still think he's going to win.

Can I ask you, John, about a wrinkle in this case? It's a 6-3 decision. Which case? Fisher? We're still on Fisher? We're still on Fisher. But it was not 6-3 Republicans versus Democrats. Katanji Brown Jackson voted with the five other conservatives. Yeah, what's with that? And Amy Coney Barrett wrote a dissent.

What's going on here, John? Are Justice Jackson and Justice Barrett, are they both competing for the David Souter chair of jurisprudence? What's happening here no fun no fair making fun of new englanders like peter and rob challenges okay so so first of all yeah so one thing is this that is really interesting it actually deprives i think critics of the case that, oh, this is just Trump justices, right? Prosecute, you know, letting Trump people off. Contagion Brown-Jackson, secondly, the votes didn't really matter. Still would have been 5-4, even if, you know, Contagion Brown-Jackson did vote the majority.

But she wrote a small opinion to attach the majority, a concurrence. And I think she's right. She just says, this is a simple case. I wish it wasn't. I'm trying to decide it without regard to the January 6th protesters. This is not about their immorality or morality. This is just whether the prosecutors

use the law properly. She might be someone who might be more favorable to criminal defendants. And so might want the government to have to prove its case and not make stuff up. The Amy Coney Barrett one is the one I don't get because she clerked for Scalia. She kind of models herself after Scalia, tries to protect his legacy. I can't imagine Justice Scalia taking the same view she did. Mind you, this is let me say

this is a criminal what was the view what was the argument what was her argument so her argument is oh well you know part b of the law right and anything else that you can think of that might impede congress don't do it she thought that really does include everything oh that's like oh they put in don't tamper with the documents. And then they just put in a general clause to catch everything else. The thing is Scalia in his old age wrote these huge volumes about how to interpret the law. And so there's several examples Scalia gives in this book, which are on the side of the majority saying, yeah, you don't read. Basically, here's an example.

Actually, this is an example that Chief Jeff S. Roberts gave, and Rob will like it because it involves popular culture. Basically, he says, suppose there's a football rule that says, don't hold people by the face mask. Don't trip them. Don't stomp on them with your cleats and then says and don't otherwise harm them and so robert says if that were the law would you say that trash talk violates the rule and he would say no because all the list everything in the first list is about

physical harm yes and so you wouldn't say oh in the second the second part, oh, and then we're going to get everything else. He said, nobody would read the law that way, a football rule that way. Although I constantly think the referees who stopped the Eagles from winning the Super Bowl do read the rules this way, obviously. But that's the example Chief Justice Roberts gives. I think it's quite compelling, actually. And I'm not in favor, I've got no brief for the January 6th protesters. I think they should all be charged with insurrection and sedition, and the ones who are convicted should be sent away for a long, long time. But they can't be charged with insurrection and sedition, or else they would have been

charged with insurrection or sedition. I mean, to me, that's the significance. Is it the political? I guess. You just said on the law, this is an easy case. Katenji Jackson Brown for the first time, let us hope the only time in history agrees with John Yoo, yeah, this is an easy case, which suggests that the Justice Department lawyers knew that the law, that it was easy, that they were stretching the law and they still put hundreds of people in jail on this cockamamie chart law that was addressed to Enron executives who had engaged in fraud or destruction of documents. So, and they were effectively, DOJ was effectively daring the court.

Yeah, we know it's easy law. You know, it's easy law. But look at the politics of this. We dare you. I hate to say it, but I think the Justice Department probably thought no one would appeal it because this is such a high sentence. They're going around saying, we'll give you a plea one year. Plea guilty, we'll give you a year in jail. But if you don't, we're going to throw this Enron case at you and you're going away for a long time.

Most people will say, I'll take the deal. They didn't expect that there would be people who try to get all the way to the Supreme Court on this misinterpretation of the law. So we should all feel grateful to Mr. Fisher and his counsel. Well, I don't feel grateful he decided to take a little tour of the Capitol when he wasn't supposed to. Yeah, right. Off hours. We should talk a little bit about this. I don't really know what they're calling it, right? It's the outdoor camping rules, what I've been calling it, which is the homelessness case. Johnson versus Grants Pass.

Grants Pass. Six-three decision. Barring people from camping in public parks and imposing fines on those who do, does not criminalize the status of homelessness and does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment. The idea that the Supreme Court had to decide this is sort of shocking anyway, but it really does have i mean of all of the things that maybe have an effect on the most people right that this this

decision does seem to have an effect on pretty much everybody lives in a city around a city or in a state that is um currently experiencing homelessness or currently experiencing people who are currently experiencing homelessness or whatever you're supposed to say um how how of all the ripple effects of all the of all the decisions we got this week this one seems like it's pretty big but nobody's talking about it just because it's not fancy i think so rob if you think about uh what might affect the daily lives of most americans in all these cases this is the one that will have the most direct impact uh because you've first of all let me as an expert on all things woke i think the proper phrase is the unhoused is that the right phrase it's not

no but the opinion but the opinion used the old term. Yes. I think that was part of the purpose. Part of its hate. Exactly. Right. So, but you're right. And this is, even though in the other, and this is different than the other cases. If the other cases are about the courts are going to sit there and conduct close scrutiny of what the administrative state and the Justice Department is doing. This case is a plea for judicial modesty and humility. This is a case where the court says,

homelessness is a terrible problem. States and cities have to figure out what to do. And who are we, the courts, to interfere and tell them, oh, you're allowed to try this. You're not allowed to try that, based on an utter misreading of the Constitution. So again, the simple case is the Eighth Amendment says no cruel and unusual punishments. And it's, I think, proven without a doubt that that is about the sentence you get from a court when you've been convicted of a crime. And this lower court here, of course, out in California said, no, no. Telling people they can't sleep in a public park, that's cruel and unusual punishment. It has nothing to do with a criminal sentence. It has nothing to do with what a judge and a jury do to you after you've been prosecuted.

So it's easy to say, oh, the Eighth Amendment just has nothing to do with management of who gets to sleep where and how long, whether you can be moved along or whether you can be given a ticket and pay a fine. Now you can say, okay, the punishment is too, like after you've been fined, you can say, oh, I think it's too much to be fined 50 bucks for sleeping outside. You could try to raise an eighth amendment claim there. I suppose you're not going to win, but you could try that. So that's the easy answer. But the practical consequence is power is now restored to cities and states to try to come up with sensible problems about homelessness. Yeah. I mean, that's the point, John, is that there's now no legal bar to cities that want to do something serious about the matter. I mean, up till now, I mean, I think the way this has been working is you would have cities

would try to do something to move the homeless out or whatever. And a homeless advocate, legal advocate, would run to court and they'd look at a couple of Ninth Circuit rulings that said, oh, it's an Eighth Amendment violation and tie the hands of the cities. And so now there are no excuses. You know, city leaders could, even if they wanted to do something or if they didn't, they could say, well, our hands are tied by the courts and now their hands are untied. And the results in San Francisco will be? I have no idea. More homeless people are going to show up and live in those luxury hotel rooms that Donald Trump was talking about.

Well, the other cities around San Francisco will get tough and that's what's going to happen. Yeah. Well, I mean, well, a couple of points on that. I mean, there was a report out from the state California legislative analyst's office a month or six weeks ago showing that the state has spent something like $15 billion on homelessness in the last 10 years. And it went through this technical, all these flow charts about how none of the programs are coordinated. And of course, homelessness went up. A simple minded person might say, that's because when you spend more money on it, you're going to get more of it. Well, the California state legislature just passed a budget for the next year. It's got huge cuts for lots of programs because we're so far under read, but it has another

billion dollars in additional funding for homelessness so there you go wow that'll be uh something that donald trump can bring up in his debate in the autumn with right yes gavin newsom yes right so so john actually this looks like i mean everyone wants to talk about Dobbs, right, with the kind of the new sort of more conservative makeup of the Supreme Court. But this sort of collection of things, it seems like this is most closely resembles the conservative Supreme Court that people have been imagining. Yes. Yes. Can I say, like like reading the opinions closely which i do i do it for a living it's amazing i get paid for it but i'm happy to receive the money is uh this is a this is a supreme court where all the arguments i think i said this to you guys about two years ago

all of the arguments all the debates are about conservative, originalist methods. They're all about how should conservatives who have disagreements about themselves properly decide these cases. There's no more war in court. Don't read the penumbras of the emanations of the principles of this amendment and the dignity of the human being as we think best. That's all gone. Nobody, if they want to get anywhere at the court, is making or promoting liberal judicial ideas anymore. It is dead. That's the most remarkable thing. So if you even receive the dissents, the dissents by a Kagan or Sotomayor, They're mostly, you conservatives are not being faithful to conservative ideas, or you're being inconsistent. Nobody's saying, oh, the privacy right that emanates from the due process clause means that these 20 rights in Immanuel Kant have to be

recognized by our constitution. That's all gone. It's just like gone, right? That's all gone. That's incredible change. Critique this headline. This is on the New York Times website at this very hour. Justice's limit power of federal agencies imperiling an array of regulations subhead. A foundational 1984 decision had required courts to defer to agencies' reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes underpinning regulations on healthcare, safety, and the environment. As editor, would you permit that headline to stand? Yeah, I think that's true. It imperils it. What they don't address in the headline is whether

the regulations were actually legal. Yeah. What they don't understand is that people like us read that headline and say, hot dog. Yeah, right. Exactly. Where's the bad news here? So Peter, I always like to remind people who I think are not clear on this. The original case was NRDC versus Chevron, Natural Resources Defense Council. They were really suing the Reagan EPA. And the point to keep in mind is the environmentalist position lost. The Reagan administration won that case. Fast forward to today, who are the greatest defenders of losing that case? The environmental

community. They're all over Twitter today saying, we're doomed, right? Rob, one of you put it earlier that that means, or John did, right? Where, you know, the air is going to get dirty. All right. It shows you the situational ethics of the left on these matters. They lose a landmark case and then they become its greatest champions. So what about the ethics situational, or let's put it this way, situational analysis, even of our side? I simply don't know the history here, but when that decision was handed down in 1984, favoring the Reagan EPA, Chevron won. We're in favor of oil companies. I guess the Federalist Society was just in embryo still in 1984. But did Robert Bork write an attack

on the decision? In other words, did, as a matter of – It's actually very much a part of the decision. When Roe versus Wade was handed down – yeah, okay. So when Roe versus Wade was handed down, all kinds of people, including our friend Richard Epstein, said at the time, that's a terrible decision. I don't recall that people said that in 1984 about Chevron. I think it's a little – it's very much a product of his time. And in fact, actually, this goes with some of the other doctrines Rob mentioned, like the SEC case and administrative judges. Actually, conservatives used to be in favor of these things. The conservatives were in favor of Chevron because what the Reagan administration wanted to do was deregulate. were still stacked with LBJ and Kennedy and Carter nominee judges were stopping them. And so the Reagan administration said, you should defer to us. We've been elected and we were elected to deregulate and the courts have to defer to

us. The same thing with this Jarcasey case about the SEC. It's actually Chief Justice Rehnquist who used to be in favor of getting rid of a lot of juries and courts because his worry was the left have created so many new rights, particularly like social security and benefits cases. We can't have the federal courts flooded with these things. We got to create these fake courts to hear tens of thousands of cases and get them out. So actually conservatives too.

I think actually the conservatives were kind of like the tough on crime and be pragmatic and defer to the agencies once upon a time. But I think now we're returning to our true roots, which is sort of defending the Constitution's creation of decentralized, weak government. Now, so I have a slightly different view on the case than John presents it. It wasn't so much the Reaganites wanted to deregulate as regulate more rationally. So what the dispute was about very simply was, what does the word source mean in that statute that John hates me to mention? The Reagan administration's view was it ought to be the entire Chevron oil refinery. And we're going to look at the whole refinery and figure out sensible, least cost ways for them to reduce air emissions.

The environmentalist position was no. Source on the statute should mean every single valve and every single pipe and every switch so that the EPA can issue specific regulations about every tiny thing that happens in the refinery. That was their position. And that's when the Reagan EPA said, that's stupid. That's expensive. It'll just lead to endless rulemaking. And what a dumb way to do things. And that was the the Reagan EPA said, that's stupid. That's expensive. It'll just lead to endless rulemaking. And what a dumb way to do things. And that was the position that won.

But it didn't take the bureaucrats long to figure out, oh, if the courts are going to defer to us, we can run wild. And it took a while for our team to figure that out. You see why on our Three Whiskey Happy Hour podcast, I don't let Steve talk about the Clean Air Act. Can I ask a question i don't i'm searching for this i don't know who was the the chevron case was decided in 1984 right i know you're gonna ask i think who was who was running the epa in 1984 well actually ne Neil Gorsuch's mother has left by 84. Oh, okay.

Oh, so close. I was so old. I was thinking, like, Neil Gorsuch was like, this would have been a great story, right? I know, right. The son avenges the mother or the son, however you want to look at it. It was so bad. Rob finally. Eventually, you get to overturn your mom i guess

yeah well it got interesting rob perked up when he thought he saw a sitcom in it right that's okay you know he only gets going if oedipus is involved it's got to be that one of the one of the absolute you know bedrock foundational myths we got to talk about um so so all in all this was an incredibly busy week and it feels like so so um before we wrap up the supreme court john what did they not decide what do you think they're gonna kick down the road what yes that's a great question. First, they ducked a bunch of abortion issues. They ducked the question of the FDA's approval of the abortion pill. They ducked this case out of Idaho where can you read Medicare requirements that you give emergency treatment in a hospital if you receive federal funds does that allow you to override a state's ban on abortions so there's this is all the working out of dobbs there's going to be still a lot of actually steve and i wrote a piece when dobbs came out which was this is not going to get the court out of abortion uh the states will still be primary regulators there's

so many follow-on issues about dobbs and abortion. So the court avoided all of those too. So those are all still to come. There are also a whole bunch of cases they decided not to grant this year involving the Harvard affirmative action case, because even though Harvard shouldn't be discriminating on race, all these high schools are still discriminating on the basis of race. So the court decided not to hear a bunch of those two. And then the one thing is, we'll see what happens on Monday with the social media cases, but they also ducked the Biden administration or the government in general using pressure to get social media to conduct censorship they kicked that one down and that might be the most important first amendment issue as peter mentioned and justice alito mentioned is how are we as a society going to regulate social media which are private companies but they have de facto become the public square for our society and that they they avoided because right they've got enough on their plate this year, but that's what's going to fill the docket in the next two or three years.

John, may I ask just explicitly, I think the way I hear you, you're imputing to the chief justice, I think mainly the chief justice, this kind of notion of we can only handle so much. We as justices can only handle so much, but as a political matter, the system can only bear so many surprising decisions, only a certain degree of overturning. And so he's using standing and other, he's refusing to decide certain issues on the substance just because he doesn't think the system can bear it you've served in a justice's chambers is that the way the justices think well i served in the chambers of justice thomas who is the one who does not think that way at least thinks that way on the court right he was just you know he he's he's happy to get the thing the answer right even if the supreme court building burns down because of it but But this is not just Chief Justice Roberts' idea. This is the main theory of constitutional law that's been taught in the law schools for 50 years, since Roberts was a student, which is the Supreme Court has a limited amount of political capital. especially because it's a anti-democratic institution usually when the court acts it's telling the democracy you can't do something so they have to do it sparingly and only for the

most important things so conserve your capital right and that's i think that's how roberts looks at the world and you can see it playing out right now these last is that correct or useful what do you make of that view i i think it's stupid. I'm like Donald Trump. I think the Supreme Court's sole job is to get things right. If the case or controversy reaches the court in the proper way, that's what Hamilton said about them. They have neither the sword nor the purse. All they have is judgment. All they have is getting it right and persuading the rest of the country that they have interpreted the Constitution correctly. Otherwise, why bother with them? Why have one unless that's all they do?

So I don't like it when the court evades shimmies and evades because they're worried about the political consequences of their decisions and they want to conserve their capital. That's not their job. I think elected politicians should think that way all the time, and they do. I'm ticked off about Murthy because Jay Bhattacharya promised me that if he won, he'd take me to Disneyland. Wow. I would love to see Peter. Yeah, I'm thinking like a progressive, like Peter Robinson, the hoover institution and covid denier and a little teacup spinning around exactly right great image feels like we could easily do a go fund me for that i don't think like i think that's how they came up with that's how they they refine vaccines it sounds like it was a central huge um what last question john just on the you know process are they all gone now the spring court just are they all gone now? The Supreme Court just, are they all like home or on vacation?

I mean, when these things drop, how far away are they from that building? Well, this is one of the interesting things is, as you may know, usually they end by the end of June. So usually today would have been the last day of the decisions, but they actually have no fixed calendar. It's up to them to decide when they meet or not. So they extended the term into the first Monday in July because they still got several more important decisions to issue.

But the minute those things go out, and they already know the outcomes and they've pretty much finished the work because they need a certain amount of days for the printers, actually, because they still have a printing shop in that building. They still need the printers to have days and time to tie you know to set the print to set the opinions and print them so but the minute they're done announcing the decisions on monday they all spread to the winds uh and go all their various places they you know justice kennedy was famous for going to

salzburg austria to commune with the Eurocratic elites. And I will tell you, Justice Thomas, he's the opposite. To the RV. Yeah, he likes to get in his RV and drive. I mean, I went with him once. I was like, yeah, I don't want to see any more America, thanks. But he likes to drive around in his RV and be anonymous and stop at RV parks and Walmart parking lots and commune with the regular Americans. There's your show, by the way.

There's your show. Oh, Rob, I've heard Justice Thomas tell the story of being in a Walmart parking lot and he's in his shorts and somebody comes up to him and says, oh, that's a nice rig you got there. Who you drive for? And Justice Thomas points at Virginia and says, Miss Gin him and says, oh, that's a nice rig you got there. Who you drive for? And just Thomas points at Virginia and says, Miss Ginny. Oh, man. Isn't that great?

Oh, my goodness. I know. He's the only one who can tell that story. I know. Yes, right. John, thank you for joining us and trying to make sense of this. You did a B- job, which is pretty good. I mean, with all the Yale grade inflation, I know that's a fail in grade.

Yeah, it's too bad. No, I don't do that. I'm old school. So on Monday, we're going to get some new decisions, do you think? It'll be the term. We will know if President Trump is immune. We will know whether Texas and Florida can force social media not to censor people. Okay. All right. Fingers crossed. Thank you, John. See you guys. Busy week, I know. Fingers crossed in which way I mean, I think I know which way the fingers should be crossed for all those things, but as you know, I'm an originalist, so whatever the... I go with the right blowing wind when it comes to the court. Speaking of the wind, our wind is over.

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