The Ricochet Podcast - Lion Sounds and Big Vibrations

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

It's been an incendiary week since Charlie and Steve last spoke, but they return to chat the matters over as they wait for the smoke to clear. They share approval of Israel's strike at Iran, discuss the legal and political questions surrounding the unrest in LA with Andy McCarthy, and wish the great Brian Wilson peace in the afterlife. Sound from this week's open: Prime Minister Netanyahu announces operation Rising Lion to the media.Take control of your cellular health today. Go to qualialife.com/ricochet and save 15% to experience the science of feeling younger.Luxury shouldn't be out of reach. Go to cozyearth.com/RICOCHET for up to 40% off Cozy Earth’s best-selling temperature-regulating sheets, apparel, and more. Get back to running your small business by letting BambooHR handle human resources for you. Check out their free demo bamboohr.com/freedemo

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It's the Ricochet Podcast with Steve Hayward hosting this week along with Charles C.W. Cook and special guest Andy McCarthy breaking down all the unrest on the streets and in the courtroom. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Look, it's very simple, not complicated. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. The increasing range of Iran's ballistic missiles would bring that nuclear nightmare to the cities of Europe

and eventually to America. Remember, Iran calls Israel the small Satan. It calls America the great Satan. Long live Israel and long live America. Welcome to The Ricochet Podcast number 745. It's Steve Hayward sitting in the host chair today while James is still away, joined by, and now 100% recovered, Charles C.W. Cook at his outpost in Florida. How are you today, Charles? Yeah, I am. I'm doing well. Thankfully, there's nothing going on in the news, so I've been able to ease back into it. Well, you know, I keep saying, I've been saying for a while now that the things

happen so fast in Trump too, that we're going to need to measure it in dog years. And doesn't the Trump Musk divorce feel like two years ago already? Yeah, well, I think they've to some extent reconciled. So we've been through a divorce and maybe a remarriage. It's like Richard Burton and Liz Taylor. I wonder how many times it'll happen. Well, I think it may follow that same epicycle. I'm actually still on holiday over in Europe, so I'm not keeping up moment by moment by the news. But like everyone else, I woke up

early this morning here ahead of most of you in America, of course, to see the news that Israel has dropped the dime, so to speak, on Iran in a big way. And I guess my first thought, Charles, is the left was starting to taunt Trump here a few weeks ago, saying he was – what was the euphemism or the acronym? He was a taco person. A taco. Taco. I'm guessing right now that Iran may have taken Trump's war aversion too seriously, but they won't be celebrating Taco Tuesday this next week.

Maybe that's too glib, but the point is, I did wonder, you know, there's ways of thinking that Trump didn't want them to do this, and did they do it without telling us, and, you know, these things have gone on. But then he released that very strong statement on Truth Social saying, look, I told Iran that they had 60 days, and today would be day 61, that I meant it. And it looks to me like Trump didn't chicken out this time. Of course, they're not American forces committed to this, at least not yet. No, I know a few thoughts.

The first is it was very odd that the Democrats picked up on that line of argument, given that they didn't want Trump to do the things he was doing. So they were taunting him for taking their position. Yeah. Not a smart move in politics, especially with Trump. Not a smart move in politics, especially with Trump on this in particular, though. Trump is an interesting figure in that there is a movement that has been built up around Trump that often projects onto Trump views that he doesn't actually hold and uses him to claim changes on the right that have not happened.

Now there is a lot clearly that has changed with the arrival of Trump into the Republican Party, which is now a 10-year phenomenon. But some of the time, for example, on economics, the claims that are made just aren't true. This idea that, well, Republicans are no longer interested in say, tax cuts, Trump's here. Well, they are. And it is never more pronounced than in the realm of foreign policy. It is true that Trump between the Iraq War and the vast majority of things that American presidents have done in the last 30 years. Iraq, in fact, is only

notable because it was an aberration from the foreign policy that had surrounded it, and for some reason some within the so-called or supposed Trump faction have decided that he is an isolationist who would be opposed to ever deploying American troops, ever exerting American force. Well, he hasn't actually in this case had to do either of even those things. He's just had to say, yeah, Israel, go deal with Iran. Quite why there was this vehemence in assumption that he would be opposed to this was never quite clear to me. Clearly he is not. He's left some wiggle room in his rhetoric. Marco Rubio was clear to note that the Americans weren't involved, but this isn't out of character for Trump. If you look at his first term,

or if you look at the way that he sees the world, supporting Israel, doing America a favor, and of course doing Israel a great favor too, in taking out some of Iran's nuclear capabilities is classic Trump, surely? Yeah, well, right. There was, I'm no expert on military capabilities, but I always thought that there was some doubt as to whether Israel could successfully attack Iran alone.

I mean, people kept saying, they need American help, they need least American intelligence and maybe AWACS planes, and I don't know what other, you know, practical logistical support along the way. And it appears that they did not need any of that. They only needed our blessing And now we'll see and weapons and weapons, right? Oh and that's tough. I'm said that right look that we've got the best weapons and we've given them a lot of them to Israel And we're gonna give them more. I mean Trump sounds like he's all in on backing Israel on this Well, it's in our interest for Iran not to have a nuke,

and I think we can, I shouldn't assume, we've become so deranged by Iraq that now even indirect help is cast as being a forever war. But surely we can acknowledge that Iran not having a nuclear weapon is good for America, right? Yeah. Well, we can debate how we do that, whether we should do it ourselves, whether we should support Israel, how much we should spend, whether there are risks. Those are totally reasonable questions. But the goal, the end, the aim here of Iran not having a nuclear weapon, surely is presumptively good. Pete Right. Yes, I think so. I will say I do know, well, actually, you know what, I will name names. You know, we had Dan McCarthy on the show here several weeks ago, and he was very stubborn. I mean, he did say Israel can do it themselves,

they don't need any help from us. And I thought, well, maybe that's true, but I'm not sure how. I don't know that. I don't know how you would know that. I like Dan, he's a pal, but he and there are other people like him are very dug in that really, it's none of our business if Iran has a bomb. It's not really a threat to us. And I think that there has been this effort by people like Dan, who I repeat, I like very much, but I think is greatly mistaken here along with others who are saying the same thing. And that's not even before you get into Tucker Carlson territory, which I don't want to get into. You mean you don't want to get into the topic or you don't want to get

into the territory he's occupied? Either one. Quarantine the non-aggressor. Well, I think Dan is wrong. I like him too. I do think it's important to us. I think as a threshold question, it is important to the United States who has nuclear weapons. I don't think it matters where they are in the world. You cannot get far enough away and stay on earth from nuclear weapons. way and stay on earth from nuclear weapons. Like it, it, it obviously affects us.

Iran is not even where Australia is in the world. You know, it's, it's right next to a whole bunch of countries that affect us, whether they're allies or enemies or we just neutral toward them. We take that perfect theoretical Washingtonian stance it matters so I just I can't I know if that is being used as a proxy for it is better on balance for us not to get involved or it's better for them to get a nuclear bomb than it is for us to start or support a war.

Sure, I can buy the argument, although I don't agree with it, but not to care. Come on, not to say it's not in our interest that that ship has sailed. That is that is just not it. There was a certain point in American history, I think, where this sort of view made perfect sense. I mean, for example, although we weren't wholly unaffected by it, if you were an American president in 1820, the movement within the Habsburg Empire didn't actually matter that much, right? I mean, you could say plausibly we don't care, but Iran nuclear weapons, come on. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

And yes, and they're showing their aggressiveness. Well, let's switch gears here back to the scene at home. And okay, so what we've got the the resistance, the riots going on in Los Angeles and elsewhere, sounds like they might spread. It sounds like maybe some governors like Abbott will get out in front of it and stop it from starting. And then we have this crazy stunt with Senator Padilla in California. By the way, my theory as a native Californian who's watched the state slide into a one-party

Socialist Republic here in the last 20, 25 years, the problem with Padilla and Kamala Harris and Newsom to some extent is they don't affect, they don't face much effective Republican opposition. They don't face much serious media scrutiny. And so suddenly when things are running against them, they behave in these ridiculous ways like Senator Padilla. Now, we'll talk with Andy McCarthy in a few minutes about some of the legal aspects of this, but you and I are better at the politics of it. And it seems to me that this is disastrous politics for the Democrats. And I think some of their own polls are even perhaps showing this. What, Mayor Bass said this is all terrible, and then she declares a curfew. I think, you know, faster than

you can say bad opinion poll, she put in a curfew. What's your sense of it from over on the other side of the country? Well, it pains me to say this because as you know, I'm a big lover of California. But your state's crazy. Yeah, it's the most beautiful place in the world run by terrible people who seem to think that they have a veto on federal law. And in any other context, Steve, this would be compared to the nullifiers of the past. They wouldn't be the heroes. They'd be the presumptive villains. You just don't get to stand in the way of legitimate federal functions because you don't like them any more than Florida would.

I think that it has become clear within California that the view that I just outlined is the majority in the country and that there is a great deal of downside to taking the stance that California has. It is not the case that Donald Trump is wildly popular. He's more popular than I thought he would be in a second term but he's not wildly popular but he is about 20 or 30 points more popular than the Democrats and especially on the question of immigration the party looks Absolutely crazy compared to trump and I I think that some of the

Rhetorical backtracking that we've seen we can get to podila separately because he escalated but from mayor bass from Gavin newson is the product of that they've recognized recognized and I noticed a shift prior to that backtracking. Joe Biden was disgraceful in his refusal to enforce federal immigration law, an absolute historic disgrace and he cost his party dearly, but he always pretended he was doing it. He always said, no, no, we are enforcing the border. And then later on he said, you know, whose fault it is that the border is open Republicans, remember that stunt where they said that they needed more power from Congress. And of course that was nonsense, but Biden understood at least that he had to lie about it.

And for a while Bass and Newsom and Schiff, they didn't, they just came out openly said, look, we just don't believe that we should be enforcing this law. It's terrible. We'll stop you. Padea is still doing that. Those guys aren't, which is probably the product of a shift in opinion polling that you noted. Yeah. Well, I, you know, I, my mind runs back now to Biden's secretary of Homeland Security that the despicable Mayorkas kept saying over and over again in congressional hearings, the border is secure. I could not believe they thought they could say that with a straight face. Right. Right. And yet they did. I say the other thing that's funny, you mentioned Mayor Bass declaring a

curfew. If Gabin knew some filing legal pleadings about states' rights and the 10th Amendment, Trump has this way of turning everybody on their heads. It's so annoying. It's so annoying because in every circumstance where the authority of the states actually applies and the federal government is overreaching in a way that would have been totally alien to the founders and really to everyone prior to the New Deal, California is wrong. California, but the second that it's something that is undisputably a federal function, they're suddenly all about the 10th Amendment. It's like they can't be right even when they're trying. Right, right. Well, I think the problem is, we're seeing in California

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as a lawyer, the Trump administration is keeping you busy trying to keep up with things. Boy, it's overwhelming. I wrote something like, I want to say three, four days ago about the Kalil immigration case, I have a three quarters finish and I can't get to it because it feels like every 10 minutes something else happens and just overwhelms the news cycle. Yeah. Well, now we want to ask you first about the legal aspects of Trump calling up the California National Guard. And I'm overseas, actually, and I haven't kept up with all the details, but I gather he's not yet invoked the Insurrection Act, which I guess is maybe the most clear statute that will authorize that, but I think there are other means of doing it. What do you make of the scene so far? Is there any problems with it? Are the criticisms from people like Governor Newsom have any validity? Or what's Annie McCarthy's always candid take on

what Trump does here? Well, it's hard from, you know, I'm on the East Coast. I'm watching the news just like everyone else is. I think it's hard when you read the conflicting reports and particularly when you read Judge Breyer's opinion in the California District Court, which made a ruling yesterday that the Ninth Circuit has suspended that Trump's invocation of the statute that he did invoke, which is 12406, that that was unlawful. We can get into why he said that. But what he basically argues is that there is no rebellion and that there's sporadic violence, but that there isn't as much violence as the administration suggests. And then you get a lot of pushback from the other side that at least in the places where the violence is happening, federal functions are not able to go forward. And even though the people who are resisting the Trump administration

and the immigration authorities, even though they're not armed with firearms, they've been Molotov cocktails, they've thrown objects that could be lethally dangerous at the police. They've boxed them in, they've made it impossible for them to enforce the laws. So, it's difficult to get a read. In part, I think, Steve, because Los Angeles is also huge. We're talking about not just Los Angeles, the city, but Los Angeles County, which is just, it's massive. So, you know, there are many people in Los Angeles, I guess, who can look out their windows and see that everything's fine and there is no violence and there is no, seemingly there's not a problem. But in the places where there has been, there have been uprisings, they've been pretty intense. So there's that difficulty of getting a level,

you know, getting a read on how violent things are, which I think is important because he's invoking rebellion. And I think, you know, it used to be prior to January 6th, if you threw around words like, you know, sedition, insurrection, and rebellion, those words had meaning. And we actually thought that, you know, you had to get to a certain level of uprising before invoking those sorts of things. I think, you know, the fact that they tagged a three and a half hour riot where none of the security forces were killed, there were a lot of injuries. But the damage to the facility was so minimal that Congress was able to reconvene that evening. That nevertheless had to be because of political reasons and

insurrection. And I think it kind of trivialized the concept. And now they want to have an exacting definition of rebellion after we basically got rid of insurrection as something meaningful. So that's a big part of Judge Breyer's opinion as well. But you do have to make a judgment about how serious the violence is if you're going to throw words like rebellion around. I still think that's true. Pete Right. Well, one more quick question or point, Andy, before I turn you over to tender mercies of Charlie. Look, I remember the Rodney King riots of 1992, which people like Maxine Waters, still very much with us, called a rebellion. I think she might even use

the term insurrection. By the way, she was for it, right? At least the people who said January 6th was an insurrection were people who didn't like it. Okay, but it seems to me that, again, I've come at this from a political point of view, more than a legal one. And one thing is that, of course, the Rodney King riots, and actually one of my earliest childhood memories growing up in Pasadena was seeing the distant smoke from the Watts riots in 1965. I could go out in my front yard and see the smoke from a long way away, and what was I,

nine years old or something, and thought, wow, this is really kind of scary. The point is that it seems to me there's an argument for saying don't wait for it to spread all over the city or to spread to five more places. You want to nip it in the bud. And I mean, that's why it seems to me that at least the political logic and the moral logic is entirely on Trump's side. You know, it's interesting that you mention that because I've had occasion the last couple of days, Steve, to talk about when I was, I think, 11 or 12, Kent State happened. And that's my powerful memory. And it's every time we have a situation like this, where we think about putting federal troops into a domestic situation,

I can't help but go back to that. Because to me, more than Tet, more than Tonkin Golf, more than almost anything that happened in those years. I think the Kent State debacle in which four students were killed created the mythos about the Vietnam War as we remember it now. To me, because I was so young and impressionable, that's like the most powerful memory of that incident and every time we have something like this happen, that's what I Find myself going back to Andy. I have two related questions for you. And I hope you're sitting down is a very off-brand for me Number one Does Trump need a law here?

Is there any inherent authority within the presidency to execute federal law and to defend those who are executing federal law from those who would resist? Two, is this justiciable? I am the everything's justiciable guy. I tend to like courts. I tend to think in so many cases where people say that's non-justiciable. There's no real way of arbitrating unless you use the courts, even in core constitutional questions involving the political branches. But this level of micromanagement surely at some point must become unsustainable. Both are great questions and Judge Breyer wrestles with the justiciability.

I don't think very convincingly, but he wrestles with it in his opinion. I think it's a useful example for this, Charlie, is the Alien Enemies Act invocation, because a lot of that litigation has gone back to an opinion that Justice Frankfurter wrote in about a year after the actual shooting in the Second World War ended, where the president had invoked, President Truman had invoked the Alien Enemies Act. It had been invoked throughout the war, but the people who brought the lawsuit wanted to claim that there was no longer a declared war, that the state of war no longer obtained. And what Frankfurter basically said, and this gets the lines very blurry, I think, is that the court owes a lot of deference to presidential judgment because of the nature of what was being litigated there. But that courts are capable of interpreting statutory terms.

And what the court there decided was that because Congress and the political branches together, Congress and the president, had not acted in any way to end the declaration of war and were taking the position that the war was still ongoing, even though it was 1946, the court was not going to second guess that. So basically, they said, we have this statutory term, you have to be able to show that there is a declared war, but we're not, we're going to defer a great deal to the political branches about whether the declared war is still ongoing because they haven't retracted it. And then they said there are other things like that statue talks about aliens of the enemy force who are below the age of 14. So they said that was something that a court can wrestle with because it's a bright line.

Easy, yeah. And the other things that weren't in the statute or were not up for debate in that case was was there an invasion or a predatory incursion? And it does seem like in all of these cases, and this controversy raises the same issues, there are always two questions. One is, what's the objective test? That is, what is the thing that's in the statute that has to be established? And then secondly, who gets to decide? And I don't think the courts have been consistent on that. I think what they basically say is, since the statute is written in an objective way in the sense that it doesn't say in the president's judgment, it just says, you know, insurrection or rebellion. The first thing is, objectively speaking, is there reason to believe that

that condition obtains? And that, I think, is one threshold. And then the second question becomes if the president decides it obtains, then how much are we going to subject that to scrutiny? And interestingly, in the oral argument in California, one of the questions that Judge Breyer pressed the Trump Justice Department on was, what if President Trump, in order to invoke 12406, had decided there was a rebellion, he had absolutely no evidence that there was a rebellion. He just, on his own, if say, it's a rebellion. Does a court have to accept that? The administration's position is that the court has to accept it. Breyer's position is that the court doesn't have to accept it. So it seems to me there's not a good answer to your question. There's a lot of blurriness here, and it seems to

me that there's, again, there's an initial threshold of can we agree that there are enough facts that it's at least plausible that the statutory term has been met. And then if it has, how much deference do we owe to the president in terms of invoking it? So that's not a very satisfying answer, but I think that's where we're at. In terms of whether the president needs the law at all, I think it depends on what it is the president wants

to accomplish because you have this crash, which I think also leads to some blurriness between the position that the Justice Department and the Office of Legal Counsel have taken historically, which I think is best articulated in this 1971 memo, which was written by William Rehnquist when he was running OLC at the Justice Department, which talks about the protective function of, meaning the president's authority to use the military in order to carry out executive functions that are his lawful, legitimate functions in the executive branch. And that crashes into posicomitatus, which is enacted toward the end of the 19th century, and basically says that in the absence of a congressional authorization

or something clear in the Constitution, the president cannot use the military for domestic law enforcement functions. So it seems clear that if what the president is calling the military in to do is protect federal facilities like courthouses or federal buildings. The military can do that because that's not a law enforcement function. There's also authority for the proposition that if people are blocking, say, facilities and interstate commerce, like railroads or highways, and that were to prevent something like the mail from being delivered. The president could dispatch the military to open up those facilities to make sure that the mail could be delivered, and might in fact even be able to use the military forces to deliver the mail

because that's not a law enforcement function. I think where it gets tricky, and Rich asked me this yesterday in the podcast, I'm less confident now than I was when I gave that answer because I've looked a lot more into this since then. The question is, what if the president, you have these disruptions of the ability of the agents to enforce the immigration law, people blocking the places where they want to go in and do the raids, people trying to prevent the agents from getting at people they want to place under arrest, that sort of thing. Can the president dispatch the military to protect the federal function of enforcing the immigration laws in a sanctuary city where the local law enforcement,

they're not allowed to obstruct, but they're not required to help the federal authorities and where people are clearly obstructing that function. If it gets serious enough that the federal law enforcement people cannot carry out their duties, can you send the military along to protect them? And when does that evolve from a protective mission where you're basically making sure the agents are safe when they go about the duty of, say, arresting someone or carrying out a raid? Or are the military guys actually doing law enforcement? Is that so close to the actual execution of the law that in the absence of congressional authorization, it's something that should be illegal. And I don't think that's been resolved. The more I look into it, the more I

think it's a blurry line. Hey, I've got to interrupt here. Maybe you started your business because it was your passion, but fell into HR as your business got going. Nobody's an expert in all areas, including HR. That's why we're excited about an all-in-one solution that can give you your time back to do what you love most, which is growing your business. Bamboo HR is a powerful yet flexible all-in-one HR solution for your growing business. Stop spending countless hours on payroll,

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except maybe it is in a certain way that, I mean, the left says we should live in a world without borders. Well, guess what? That means foreign policy is different. I'm sorry, I'm just using their argument against them for a moment. The other one is, you mentioned Frankfurter. Was he the one who said the Constitution is not a suicide pact, or was that Jackson? I don't remember. That was Jackson. Robert Jackson. Jackson, right. Okay, but that, you know, famous line, that same era of cases that you were invoking. And I don't know, Andy, I just get frustrated with trying to parse this out in legal terms. I guess here I'm a strong executive power man, and that the checks on him ultimately should

be political and popular. By popular I mean the sentiment of the American people. And Congress is not without remedies available to it. I mean, they're difficult. Impeachment takes time if you want to go to the most extreme one. But I don't know, this seems to—and I see I'm attacking your profession. I'm sorry, Andy. I can't help it. But as a constitutionalist, rather than as a lawyer, and I know there's a blurred line there, I just get very frustrated with the way this always ends up in court, the way Tocqueville said all of our disputes were going to go. Yeah, there's a lot to that. You know, I always, what I've found over the years, especially

after working on national security cases cases instead of, you know, my last 10 years as a prosecutor, I did much more national security stuff than cops and robbers stuff. And what you really, I think what the impression you come away with in a much more powerful way is that we like to think of ourselves as a rule of law society, more powerful way is that we like to think of ourselves as a rule of law society, but we're a political society. The most important decisions that get made are political ones. And I think we delude ourselves sometimes into the... Actually, they can't even... With respect to the most important decisions that we might have to make for the protection of the country, you can't make antecedent. Hamilton recognized

this, right? Because the threats to a country could be infinite, you can't make antecedent laws that bind the government in a way that they might not be, that the government might not be able to respond in a meaningful way to kinds of threats that you haven't anticipated. So I think the thing that's challenging about Trump's presidency, and I think this might be best seen in the immunity argument, the argument, which, you know, as time goes by, I actually think, Charlie, you noted, I think at the time when the Supreme Court made their decision about whether the president had immunity from criminal prosecution or not, which of course is not in the Constitution, but at the same time, I think everybody, common sense wise, knows that the president has to carry out certain particular executive functions and he can't be stopped from

carrying them out by criminal statutes. So that's the tension. And I think looking back on it, Justice Barrett has a much more modest take on that than the rest of the majority did. But the broader point I wanted to make about Trump is that we went 230 years without having to have that sketched out in an apodictic way because everybody kind of knew that there were these norms, you know, that the president has to make very hard decisions, and some of them are going to be legally dubious. And we can't have a situation where the next administration is going to come in and prosecute the president for what he did in the last administration unless it's so blatantly criminal that its criminality can't be ignored because you can't have a functioning government that way.

If the president has to worry about being prosecuted or civilly sued while he's making these decisions that are of great consequence to the country, the government can't function. We went 230 years without a court having to describe what the parameters are, or at least grapple with them because we still don't really know exactly what the lines are, even after that decision. But the thing is, there's a number of things, Steve, you talked about politics rather than law. And a lot of the important stuff that goes on in government is covered by norms more than laws. Because once you get into an important government position, your bad calls are not going to be subject to criminal prosecution or civil suit. So what controls you to stay within the four corners of your authority is more norms than law.

And I think we function that way fine for a very long time, but Trump, I think more than any of his predecessors, and this isn't to say he invented this, I just think he pushes it harder than the rest, but he finds the loose joints in the system and he pushes them. And I think, you know, I've had this argument with people who say he wants to be a dictator, you know, he's accumulating power to himself. I don't think he's got a realistic idea that he's going to be president forever. I think he knows he's going to be president for four years. And I think in the current very paralyzed system that we're in, he's basically got two years to get stuff done. He has no prayer of getting much statutory

stuff done. And what he's trying to do is identify all the things that he can do unilaterally and push as hard as he can in the directions that he wants to take the country. And a lot of it looks like, Charlie and I both talked about the pretextual use of emergencies in order to do things that a president shouldn't be able to do, essentially to legislate. He's looking for all the things that he can do unilaterally, even if he needs a pretext to do it. And I don't know that we've ever had a president, I mean, we're only six months in and I feel exhausted trying to watch him every day, but I don't know that we've ever had a president who tries to push the outer limits of his authority so hard, so fast, to the point where now courts are being called in to try to draw lines just like they did with the immunity.

I think that's the stress on the system. Well, yes. But to what extent, Andy, is that stress also being created by the left? And I'm thinking the immunity case. The immunity case was created by lawfare, right? And then in this case, one of the problems here is that you have the governor of California is trying to subvert immigration law, or at least on the side of those who are. And maybe then Trump pushes it too far. But it seems that we have a perfect storm where you have one side pushes everything over and then Trump says, ah, well, I'm going to push it over

in the other direction. And then we expect the courts to fix this. Or am I just being too partisan? No, I don't, I don't think so. I think, you know, lawfare is complicated because the most preposterous cases are like the New York cases, you know, Bragg's case. I looked at this very closely for a long time. I didn't agree with Jack Smith's, especially the J-6 case, because I think he was stretching statutes to the limit to try to criminalize what Trump did. But I was in the Justice Department for a long time. There's

no way that an attack on the Capitol of the kind that happened on January 6 would not have been investigated as a criminal event. And even if we quibble over whether the statutes that were stretched the way they were applied to what Trump did, there's no question that Trump did appalling things on January 6th and the run up to it, which would have justified at least investigating him, right? And then the Florida thing, I think that was, you know, you can argue about whether they should have brought it criminally or not, but there was definitely misconduct that was involved there.

Did they overdo it? Yes, they overdid it. And was there a coordinated strategy in order to bring cases at a particular time that would hit in the run up to the election? There absolutely was, but it was. But it's complicated. I think the sanctuary city stuff is much more on point for what we're talking about because if you look at what Judge Breyer wrote, he wrote a 36 page opinion, which means he had to start writing it the minute he got the case. But there's nothing in that opinion about sanctuary cities or sanctuary policies or the fact that the federal government

has the right and the power and the authority to enforce the immigration laws and that the states are effectively obstructing the enforcement of the immigration laws. So the whole opinion is kind of, it's artificial in the sense that what you're talking about is like there's violence in the streets and is it enough of an impediment on the federal agents and we're not really talking about why there's a problem. And I'll finish with this, but that's the part of this that's making me crazy. Cause I am a very big fan of the decision of the Supreme court in Prince V United States, which was from 1997, which is the justification for sanctuary

cities in so far as jurisdictions in America are not obliged to help the federal government. That case was a gun case. It was a case that came about after the Brady government. That case was a gun case. It was a case that came about after the Brady Act, because the Brady Act initially required the states to enforce certain portions of federal law. And Scalia writes this opinion and he says, no, you're not allowed to do that. That's commandeering. So whenever people complain about sanctuary cities, I always jump in and say, hey, oh yeah, terrible politically but legally we actually like some of the principles that are in play here.

But California in its rhetoric and in its actions has gone so much further than Prince and it really annoys me because in any other circumstance, it would be very obvious that they are behaving like George Wallace. They're the ones who are red-liners of the Confederacy and of the massive resistance, not Trump. And yet somehow in the press, this gets cast as he's breaking norms. Well, he might be pushing it to the edges, but we had this fight, right? We had this fight over and over again. Are you allowed to nullify federal law? No, you're bloody well not.

Anyway, I've said my piece. Well, I do want to say though that it's, this is an interesting area and it's been a kind of a bugaboo of mine for a long time because when the Constitution was ratified, the thing that was certain was that the states had authority over who was lawfully in their territory. And what wasn't clear was whether there was a federal enforcement role. The Supreme Court, over about a century's time beginning in the early 20th century, probably late 19th century, derived a federal role at basically two things. One, the notion that the national government is sovereign and has to protect the borders

and is in charge of foreign policy, is in charge of protecting Americans who are abroad. So that was one part of it. And then the other part is Congress's, the constitutional assignment to Congress in Article 1 of naturalization authority, setting the terms of naturalization. From those two things, the court derived a federal responsibility over immigration enforcement. And then I think what happened is probably what invariably happens, which is once the federal courts invent a federal responsibility, it swallows up the state responsibility. But for a long time, we went along and this arrangement worked because federal statutory authority in terms of enforcement of immigration is very strong. It's very pro law enforcement. Charlie, you've had to deal with it in a way that Steve and I haven't, but I mean, they're

pretty formidable laws. So you could tolerate a system where the states had the authority to enforce immigration only insofar as it was consistent with federal law. But then what happened was Obama comes along and he says, no, no, no, you don't have to, you states don't have to comport with federal statutory law. You have to comport with Obama administration immigration policy, which is to not enforce

the federal laws. And I think Scalia rightly said that if it was presented to the states at the convention in Philadelphia in 1787, that you can't protect yourself immigration-wise because that's going to be a federal responsibility and if they decide to not enforce their own laws, you can't, then nobody would have joined this compact. The Constitution wouldn't have been passed by. Right. Well, Andy, I kept thinking that if nothing else, this is kind of glib at kind of serious point, if nothing else, Trump has taken the gridlock in Congress and moved it to the judiciary. I mean, we're just jamming up the courts with all these problems, right? But one reason we love to want to have you back over and

over again, Andy, is there's no gridlock when we have you here. You sort out a lot of these problems for us and a lot more always to be said, but we'll have to have you back soon for the sequels, of which I'm sure there are going to be many. Probably sooner than later, but great to talk to you guys. Thanks, Andy. We'll see you soon. See you. Well, all right, Charlie, you know, our listeners can't see that wonderful splashy blue flower

print shirt you're wearing. It just screams Florida. And also, you're obviously back in full fitness after your belt with the plague, whatever it was, and I'm guessing it's because of the sheets you've been using. No, absolutely. And of course I used my sheets more than ever when I was sick and they were luxurious to lie on because they're made by Cozy Earth. So Cozy Earth not only keeps me cool in what is now the full-fledged Florida summer, but it nursed me back to health. So thank you Cozy Earth for that. And that's because Cozy Earth uses the best fabrics and textiles that provide the ultimate ingredient for luxurious softness that lets me sleep like a baby.

And here's the thing, they're not just soft. Their weave fabric is enhanced for a durability that won't pull. And best of all, Cozy Earth Bedding products have a 100-night sleep trial and a 10 year warranty That's a whole decade of cool quality sleep What is that three years perhaps of sleeping maybe more depends how much you sleep if you have small children Like me you sleep less than you shared which means you don't get to spend as much time on the cozy earth sheets as you Want but what you do spend is terrific

on the Cozy Earth sheets as you want, but what you do spend is terrific. Now luxury should not be out of reach. You can go to CozyEarth.com and use code RICOCHET, obviously R-I-C-O-C-H-E-T. And if you do, you will get up to 40% off Cozy Earth's best-selling temperature-regulating sheets, apparel, and more. Trust me, you will feel the difference the very first night. That's CozyEarth.com. The code is Ricochet, sleep cooler, lounge lighter and stay cozy. All right, Charles, let's get out today with a little cultural news. Boy, I got a reminder of how old I'm getting when the news came of the death of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys at the age of 82. I'd lost track. Of course, everyone's

getting to be age 82 from that old rocker generation of the 60s, but you know, I grew up with the Beach Boys in California. It was a beach goer, Laguna Beach, Malibu, all the places they used to sing about. And it's very emblematic of California in those days. You know, the whole story of the Wilson and the Mike Love and all the families involved in it, as they were sort of working class people who'd come to Southern California where you could buy a home for quite cheaply, not far from the beach, in places like Long Beach and Huntington Beach and Santa Monica, unlike today. And so, that's just aside from the music, there's sort of a cultural connection there too, and I don't know, you know, that's sort of one of those

totems. By the way, Paul McCartney once said that God Only Knows was the greatest rock and roll song ever written, which I thought was high praise. And I think it was George Martin who said that it was in fact Pet Sounds, the really great out, the greatest album of the Beach Boys, that inspired the Beatles to excel in Sergeant Pepper. Sergeant Pepper was the Beatles' answer to the Beach Boys because they thought the Beach Boys were their competition. Well, and they were. I think really, if you look back at the 60s and 70s, there are three people who stand out to me as deserving the label

genius. One is Paul McCartney. Another is Paul Simon. And then you have Brian Wilson. The thing about Brian Wilson that's so interesting is he was crazy. He was not supposed to reach 82. Now, I don't say that disparagingly, but he was quite genuinely Afflicted by mental illness. He had a Form of schizophrenia and he had auditory hallucinations and I think the auditory hallucinations helped him We overplay in our culture the tortured genius

Being mentally ill is not fun in In movies, they often make it look glamorous, a bit like being an alcoholic. But he derived his ability to do the work that he did from the same source as tormented him for so much of his life. And it really did torment him. He had to drop out in the mid sixties from the Beach Boys tours just as they hit peak popularity. And that allowed him to produce pet sounds, which was basically a Brian Wilson project. And then everyone thought, well, here we go. We're going to see the sort of second half of the Beach Boys career that you saw in the Beatles where from 1966 onwards, The Beatles just went supernova. But Brian Wilson couldn't do it. You get good

vibrations and then he falls apart and he spent the rest of his life falling apart. He couldn't work for most of it. He had rare flashes of genius. He spent years trying to produce one record. He was setting fire to things in the recording studio, putting his feet in sand, but undoubtedly one of the great songwriters of all time. And if you were told his family in 1966 that he would live till 82, I think they would have been shocked, especially given his drug use and his alcohol use, but he did, which is a happy ending of sorts. Yeah. So, you mentioned the mania that goes along with somebody of various degrees of spectral mental health. I've always been struck by the astounding fact that maybe their most famous song or one of them, Good Vibrations, it took 80 hours in the studio to record that song. And I mean, if I'd been

one of the other musicians, I'd have been going out of my mind, I think, but he was such a perfectionist. You can, by the way, hear some outtakes of that process in the collection of records that I think was one of the things that always Wilson wanted to do after Pet Sounds, but had to abandon. But finally, a few years ago, someone came out with what they call the Smile Sessions. It's a big long collection and you have in there some of the outtakes of early cuts of good vibrations and some of the narration and you get some appreciation for how painstaking and demanding and perfectionist he was, but also wanting to do something new and different that just had a sound that nobody else could come close to. I mentioned to somebody recently that, you know,

the other imitators of the Beach Boys in those years was Jan and Dean, and the only reason I remember Jan and Dean is one of their great hits was The Little Old Lady from Pasadena, and since I lived in the Pasadena area, I sort of remember that. But they weren't even close, of course. I mean, they could kind of imitate a little bit of the sound, but nobody remembers Jan and Dean today, but we're going to remember Brian Wilson and the, uh, the Beach Boys for a long time, I think. I think that's right. And by the way, McCartney was completely correct when he said that God only knows

it's the greatest pop song ever written. It's an astonishing work that really is more classical in its chord structure than most pop music. You've got the explosion in the seventies of so-called baroque and roll, but that was the first example of it. And the best example of it. I like that song so much, Steve, that I actually played it at my wedding. It was our first dance song.

I'm a horrible dancer. I'm a very good musician, but for some reason, my sense of rhythm, which I do have in my hands when I play instruments, just doesn't translate to the rest of my body. So I end up looking like some sort of stick insect having a stroke, but my wife still married me. Oh, I want to get some AI generated version of that to share. I'll be deported.

You're stripped of your citizenship, right? You get a chance to get into all those questions with Andy or anybody else. But I think that'll do it for us this week. Listeners, this podcast was brought to you by Quality Ascentalytic, Cozy Earth, and Bamboo HR. Please support them for supporting us. And as James likes to say, please join Ricochet.com, the best place for civil center-right conversation on the web. And as James also likes to say, and I will like to say it too, please take a minute to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you source your favorite podcast material. Your reviews help us get more listeners, and that keeps the show going. And so, we will see you in the comments, everybody, on Ricochet. What are we up to? 4.0? I have a loose town of things, Charlie.

4.0, that's right. 4.0. All right. Bye-bye, everybody. See you next week.