The Ricochet Podcast - Missing the Point on "Maryland Man"

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

With Congress missing in action, the two active branches of our federal government are at it again, and the temperature rises by the minute. Caught in the crosshairs are the increasingly exasperated American people and our numerous non-citizens, most notably Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Jason Willick joins today to argue that our partisan impulses are blinding team red and team blue to both the legal and the political stakes before us. Plus, Messrs. Lileks & Hayward talk Harvard's funding freeze and why they had it coming. - Sound from this week's opening: President Trump takes a question from his new favorite reporter.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Liling. Charles Segal, New Cook is out this week. But Stephen Heywood is with us to talk to Jason Willett of The Washington Post about all this deportation stuff and more. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Photos have emerged of Senator Van Hollen sipping what appears to be margaritas

with Abrego Garcia down in El Salvador. Do you encourage other Democrats to fly down in El Salvador to meet with this illegal alien who's an accused? I like this guy, see that? This is the kind of a reporter we like. There aren't enough of them, we gotta get some more of them. Welcome everybody, this is the kind of a reporter we like there aren't enough of them we got to get some more of them welcome everybody this is the ricochet podcast number

737 yes we're getting those numbers that resemble Boeing aircraft again I'm James lilacs and orbed as I'll probably be called if I'm grabbed out of my house and thrown onto a plane and dropped off in El Salvador, Minnesota dad. And I'm joined, uh, not by Charles CW cook, who's off rasslin gators in the Everglades this week, uh, but by Stephen Award, Stephen welcome. Hi James. Good to see you again. Indeed. Indeed. Well, it has been a week and uh, it's, you know, it's kind of a nice week where a story that began the week turns out to be dominating things at the end of the week as well. But beneath that, and we'll talk about that with our guest

later, recent news that Harvard seems to be under some stress. They've rejected the demands that the administration has said. The administration says, you know what, you've been letting anti-Semitism run rampant on your campus and unspoken perhaps or I don't know maybe spoken is the idea that you have promulgated a variety of anti-American ideas in your leftist administration and hence we are under no obligation to send you any money according to the and so I think it's about 2.2 billion in grants and some other stuff in contracts and it's not just money handed to them and it's not like one day somebody walks over with a check for 2.2 billion dollars from

what I understand it has to do with funding of certain things and certain things and this and that and if we take that funding away then the imminent cure for cancer will be will be lost etc. But Harvard has said no no sorry one of the things they seem to be balking at and people can argue about whether or not it is the position of the right of an administration to put demands like this on an institution is the requirement that they hire a critical mass of intellectually diverse staff. I mean, we're seeing manifest almost every week, if not every day, an explicit act that conforms with things that the right has been complaining about for a long time, right? I mean, the right has been saying, you know, you parade around your notions and your exemplars

of diversity, but actually you are not diverse at all. You are, your diversity consists of immutable, personal, racial identifiers. Intellectual diversity is what used to characterize the institution, and you don't have that. And if you don't work towards it, we're not going to give you any money. So A, Stephen, tell me what you think about Harvard's

reaction, how you think it's gonna play out, and B, whether or not you think it is wise to actually do the thing that that people have been wanting to do for an awful long Time which is reshape reform and reset the idea of diversity Yeah, so I mean I guess in reverse order. I think yes, it may not be wise but it is now necessary I mean conservatives and also a lot of, I think, smarter liberals have been acknowledging for years now that universities have become just cesspools of narrow ideological conformity, but nothing was ever done about it. And two points I make, among many more, is we talk about

diversity, but there's no viewpoint diversity. And so commitment to free speech is really insufficient when there's no one there to offer a contrarian opinion to the campus orthodoxy. So it amounts to nothing to say, oh, we're going to redouble our efforts for free speech. The second thing is on diversity. You know, Thomas Sowell likes to say, next time you hear an administrator say, we're committed to diversity, ask them how many Republicans they have in their sociology department. And you want to talk about, you know, the demand of the Trump people that they hire more intellectual diversity.

Something that listeners and the general public are not aware of is the great move the last 5, 10 years at elite universities, actually all over the place, for what they call cluster hires. Of course, right away, we will joke about what particular noun is missing from that. But the cluster hires all say, we want to increase in the interest of diversity, underrepresented minorities, and it's always in ethnic studies, feminist studies, maybe history, and so forth. And in other words, cluster hires mean let's hire six or more leftists all at once and install them. Now, I've always thought that the idea that you should require or demand that universities

self-consciously hire some conservatives was a defective idea for a lot of reasons. But I'm also reminded of Churchill's great line that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have ever been tried. And we now have come to the point where the only way Harvard and other elite universities are going to reform is if they're hit in the head repeatedly with a hammer. Because otherwise it's not going to change. And so I'm all for what Trump's doing, even the unreasonable demands, which I think were designed intentionally to make Harvard say no.

Because by the way, if Harvard capitulates, no other university in the country could possibly hold out. Mm-hmm. Well when you say to people you know you talk about diversity yet have you hired any Republicans they will hear that as somebody going to you know a conclave of anesthetists and saying well how many Kevorkians have you hired? Right. It's not as it as something that they regard as necessary or even welcome within the field of academia because they may perhaps have a rather ancient, crusty, bigoted, narrow view of what a conservative is.

I mean, there are people, and you see this all the time, unfortunately, when you're sometimes hearing college protesters vent their spleen, that to be on the right is to have a set of ideas that is contrary to truth, not necessarily just another way of looking at it, but anti-science, anti-truth, anti, all the wonderful things that we know,

and therefore why would you include these people in your institution? The idea of both sidesism, you know, strikes them as trafficking with evil. So it's hard for them to make the leap and say, no, there actually is a conservative position grounded in a few other ideas that approaches these topics that we all are concerned about

and finds different solutions. And they're not insane. They're not insane at all. As a matter of fact, they happen to be based on about two, three thousand years of accumulated wisdom from observing various human societies around the globe and knowing human nature, as opposed to you guys who just want to rewrite it.

So yeah, once they get their head around that, they might find, but you know, what I worry about, of course, is that oftentimes when institutions will hire a conservative, they will trumpet that fact and say, look, we've got a conservative, they will trumpet that fact and say, look, we've got a conservative here. And again, whenever they say that, it suggests that liberalism is the norm, is the default position for any smart, critical person, and therefore, you know, it just goes without

saying. There's truth, and then there's conservatives. But the other part of this is I don't think that people would be complaining about intellectual diversity so much, the lack of it so much, if indeed they hadn't somehow deduced, inferred, come to the conclusion that instead of just general variety sort of 1950s, 60s technocratic liberalism that we all grew up with swimming around in the you know the the waters that were whose temperature was set by Walter Cronkite in the New York Times editorial board then instead of that it's become this anti-American anti-western civilization Gramsian nonsense that seeks to upend everything and replace it with a forago of nonsense

that is that is contrary to what this country was founded on I mean when you when you have protesters out there in the quadrant who are saying you know we are here to destroy Western civilization and it may be a one out of ten one out of twenty I don't know but the idea that that idea Western Civ has got to go is something we've heard chanted for an awful long time so if you just I mean if you had your basic old style old line liberals there people wouldn't be complaining so much what it is is they detect the presence of an element a cohort that is antithetical to what we regard as the great American experiment. So again, if Harvard goes, the rest of

them would have to go as well. You know, Princeton has got something like 2% of their faculty votes Republican. Yale, it's 3%. I mean, it's just absurd. And how did it get to this point? Self-selection, bias, reinforcement, and a culture that just was fat and happy and unchallenged until now. Yeah, one of the interesting critiques of this

comes from an unlikely source. It's Cass Sunstein, who I think is the sort of smartest center left thinker around at Harvard Law. He wrote an article more than 20 years ago that, and being Cass Sunstein, he never published an article once. He published it six times in different forms. But it was about what he called the dominance of conformity. And what he said was, when you get a bunch of like-minded people together, and they're only together inside their bubble, they become more extreme. And he gives lots of examples, although the real target of his article, which he kind of admitted to me indirectly in an email exchange we had, was universities. And so one of the problems that I find is that

the presumption you mentioned, that conservatives are simply crazy, wrong, bigoted, ignorant, stupid, whatever, comes about from a reinforced intellectual laziness. I'll give you a quick example of what I mean. Last week I went behind enemy lines at the University of Colorado at Boulder for three days for a conference, at Boulder being the Berkeley of the Rockies. And that's why I missed the show last week, listeners. And anyway, I met with a bunch of students and somebody asked to go around with the students

in a small group, where do you get your news? It was predictable. Oh, I read the New York Times, I listen to NPR, I watch MSNBC, and I thought I'm going to have some fun with these folks. This is why our side is generally winning elections and winning a lot of things and liberals are losing. Because we also, we conservatives who are you know engaged in the world we read in New York Times And listen to NPR. It's opposition research that makes us bilingual See we know what you're thinking, but you'll never read a conservative publication or a conservative news outlet So you never actually hear any serious arguments and you don't know what we're thinking and that gives us a great advantage And I can go on from there

But it's a lot of lot of uncomfortable shifting around in chairs I made that mischievous point which happens to have the advantage of being true Well, here you are the thinking you know, the Charlie Kirk of your generation waiting into these places. How did they respond though? I mean did it did anybody raise a hand and challenge you and say absolutely, you know We don't read these things because we believe they are misinformation, because we believe they are biased, I mean did they say anything or just shift their buttocks in a, in a, in a querulous way? Well it was one of those rambling conversations that wasn't very sequential, so the subject got chained pretty quickly to, I don't know, all kinds of crazy things, but it

was always fun. I mean, you know, what's the old line of fighter pilots about a target rich opportunity? That's why I like going behind the lines at liberal universities because whichever way you point, there's something you can attack and throw people off balance. And I do enjoy that up to a point. After a while, it becomes tedious and exhausting. Well, the end result of this probably

is going to be that these institutions will not accept the terms and they will have the funding yanked from them. Harvard, from what I understand, may have a huge endowment, but it's not particularly liquid So who knows what they may have to do. There's also a administration press to investigate the the the Intellectual temper show we say of people who are coming in from other countries Especially to put the screws to Chinese Visa holders who want to come in and study. Now, this is something that again, a lot of people have said, well, anybody who comes here is probably CCP connected.

You know, they may be rich enough to come here, their parents are connected, are we any under any obligation to allow this? And, you know, perhaps we're not. But again, this is being seen as as is overly invasive and of course authoritarian and fascistic Whereas well, you know, I if if I spend a lot of my time Fulminating against every aspect of British culture society politics and the rest of it and I walk in with my passport I put it down the thing and then in the and the rest of it. And I walk in with my passport and I put it down the thing and the light goes red. I wouldn't particularly be surprised.

I mean, having been given the stink eye by a Russian passport agent in St. Petersburg, thinking back 40 years to things that I wrote about Mother Russia, I wouldn't be particularly surprised. But we seem to be in this position of, you know, we walk around with a kick me sign on our back and encourage everybody to give us a good boot in the hinds of the cruise.

So by the way, James, I've had that same stink eye from a passport guy in St. Petersburg getting off a cruise ship, right? I think it's standard operating procedure. But look, I think two points. On the Chinese business, I think the real game here is, I mean, regardless of how many students are CCP connected, probably a lot of them, but whether they're actually spies or not, a lot of wealthy Chinese want to send their kids to America for degrees and also to get some

money out of the country. It's a long story. But so I think restricting Chinese students is not only a way of depriving many universities of revenue because they pay full freight, but also, I think it's to cause trouble for China's rulers because your rich elites in China are going to be mad that relations are so bad they can't send their kids to American universities. But getting back to the Harvard thing for a minute, because I think the other target audience of foreign students are people from the Middle East and elsewhere who are anti-Semitic, anti-American. And let's do this thought experiment. You know, we've heard,

oh, we have to allow free speech and criticism of Israel. Okay, fine. Let's try this as a thought experiment. We know at Princeton a couple of weeks ago, there was a student mob yelling at Jewish students, go back to Europe, because that's where you're from. That's where you emigrated from. Now imagine if you had a group of students at Harvard who said to blacks, go back to Africa. It would be a five alarm fire for weeks. The university would punish those students, probably expel them. And so there you see the asymmetry of these things.

Now to deepen that thought experiment, would Harvard be justified in saying, say 40 years ago or so, we're not going to accept any South African white students who are defenders of apartheid. Their views are not welcome in our universities. They're poisonous and insidious. So it seems to me that the Trump administration is saying exactly, they're taking a consistent line about who should and shouldn't be admitted to the United States and to our universities. And I'm all for that too. Yeah, basically seems to be we kind of want people who don't hate us and our found and our foundational principles we can work around the details, but basically we kind of want you to be like liking us and what we stand for and what we strive for and the rest of it.

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That's L-U-M-E-N dot me slash ricochet for 15% off your purchase and we thank lumen for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Jason Willick columnist for the Washington Post where he writes primarily about law, politics, foreign affairs. Gee I wonder if there's any nexus of that this week. For that he contributed to the Wall Street Journal and the American interest. Welcome Jason how are you? Good good to be with you guys.

Well, we haven't yet talked about Maryland dad, but let's do it now. Trump administration made a clerical error in March and so the guy gets sent off to the big house. Two of our active branches of government are trying to get him back and the Democrat party seems to be staking an awful lot on bringing Maryland Dad home where presumably he would be turned around or deported elsewhere. You've been pointing out that the Democrats are fighting to secure his release and they're sending the wrong message shall we say. What should they be talking about? What should the Democrats be doing if we all as a nation want to move past this this incident? Yeah the moment the Democrats started to make it about Marilyn dad and personally lionize

this one individual, I sort of had a sinking feeling and then lo and behold, the administration releases some more bad details about him. Fox News reports on a domestic violence complaint from his wife and so on. You know, these victims, when somebody tries to make a victim in the press, they're never a perfect victim. And that's the wrong way to think about this dispute in my mind. The dispute is, you know, about the law and the fact that the administration is sort of thumbing its nose at the Supreme Court on this case. And I think that that should be the focus, not this individual, because most people, certainly most Republicans agree that an illegal immigrant accused of domestic violence, suspected of gang membership, there's nothing wrong with deporting that person. A lot of people think

Trump was elected to deport that person, but you also have to follow the law and you have to follow the Supreme Court and they are not doing that in a pretty ostentatious way. And to me, that's the problem, not only constitutionally and morally, but politically. That's the problem that anyone who wants the administration to, you administration to change course needs to emphasize. I'll give this to Stephen in just a second. I want to respond to that. One, I think a lot of people don't care about the Supreme Court's decision in this essence

is because either A, they believe Stephen Miller when he says that they won it 9 to 0 when in the back of his head Mr. Miller may be talking about the little, the difference between facilitating and effectuating his release. But B, they probably, they basically don't care because they saw Biden thumb his nose at the Supreme Court when it came to student loans and regarded that, that's your tip, here's your tat.

And the other thing that I think a lot of people are thinking is that they are absolutely indifferent to whatever legal niceties May or may not have been respected Because they believe that the previous administration let in 20 million people just let them in didn't care and X number of those committed a heinous crimes small crimes big crime, whatever they don't they don't Care now we're gonna talk about here why they should But would you agree that a lot of the indifference to this comes from the way the previous administration may have acted and how

people are just indifferent really to the the means by which the those consequences are tidied up? I think that's right, except I don't think that you're going to tidy up, you're not going to remove a huge number of illegal immigrants in this way. I mean, this Salvadoran prison, they've sent 300 people there. It's sort of a symbolic and a deterrent measure. It's not that, you know, we're going to send millions of people here. I guess if you really want to make the point, we don't need to respect court orders when it comes to deporting people, that's fine, I guess. But, you know, it just seems kind of like a teenage antics because you can easily deport this guy. You know, you can

easily deport him. He was deportable to a country that was not El Salvador and the courts that, you know, the government could change it probably through the administrative legal process so that he can be deported to El Salvador. It's almost like they just want to make a symbolic point that we don't have to respect the court orders on this. But, okay, you know, you're making your point. You're not actually, that's not actually going to get you any closer to deporting however many hundreds of thousands or millions of people you want to deport. Jason, it's Steve Hayward out in California,

and I wanna ask you a slightly whimsical question before I pick up on the main thread, and that's from your column yesterday, where you opened by quoting Peter Virek, and I thought, wow, that's a name that's like unknown even to a lot of conservatives, right? And so, are you trying to put George Will out of a job? That's a check. And I mean, the broader question there is not just Virek narrowly, but it looks like,

you know, you're sort of well read in through the broader spectrum of conservative thinkers going back, you know, in Virek's case, 60 years ago. I wrote an essay about Peter Virick in 2018 in National Affairs. So, I read all of his stuff for that. And that was one of my favorite quotes in his conservatism revisited. And I believe that if I'm not misremembering, you know, that as a younger writer then I got a note from George Will about that essay and I was over the moon. So. Pete Slauson Okay. So, the circle of causation is complete. By the way, for listeners, the quote that Jason's referring to is the lead of the article.

So, from Virek, he said, the lynching of the guilty is a subtler, but no less deadly blow to civilization than the lynching of the innocent. Eminently sensible. I mean, the older variation is the quote from older variation is the you know, the quote from the man for all seasons What happens when there's no law left to protect you and right so, you know to pick up on where James was driving us is Yeah, the way I put it is that the Trump people are saying as a political more than legal matter I think that look we didn't we haven't been enforcing our immigration laws

Where's been the due process for the American people of the last several years just letting people in willy-nilly and so you know why should we be bound by a certain punctiliousness about the law now that our country has not been following for the last 20-30 years i think that's a bad legal argument but it's a pretty strong political argument and the polls seem to bear this out i think i think you're right um but i think if It's a bad legal argument, but it's a pretty strong political argument. And the polls seem to bear this out, I think. I think you're right.

But I think if your goal was to deport people at a faster clip, instead of your goal was to sort of thumb your nose at the system and really emphasize how bad Biden was and all the things you should be able to do because Biden was so bad, you would do something different. You would have to reform the asylum laws. You would hire more immigration judges. You would go to Congress and change the immigration system so you can deport at a faster clip. And also, I think it's important to remember, it's not like Trump has been stymied in this regard. He has had an extraordinary impact already. He has stopped, you know, the illegal immigration basically in an extraordinary way. So he has had success in doing it. Now,

now if your question is, well, how many illegal immigrants can be removed? And, you know, I still don't think everybody wants to remove everybody, anybody, you know, but you want to remove them at a faster clip. Fine. I, you know, I think that that that's something that, you know, the Trump people like to do stunts sometimes instead of achieve their objectives. So now they're doing a stunt and in the process, you know, as sort of a collateral result of this stunt, they may be diminishing the Supreme Court's place in our constitutional order, which is a damaging thing in the long term after, you know, Democrats tried to do the same thing, and there is a

conservative Supreme Court majority, probably the most conservative in 100 years. And if the Trump people in the course of their stunt end up sort of making following Supreme Court rulings optional, that's going to be bad in the long run. Well, so, I mean, I think it's well understood that Chief Justice Roberts, for his whole 20-plus years on the court, has worried about, you say, the public status of the court. He likes to rule narrowly and cautiously, as we've seen. And so, I thought a couple things. One is by choosing to use the word facilitate rather than effectuate, or rather than issuing a writ of mandamus like Marbury saw way back

in 1803, they're allowing some wiggle room because the court can't enforce a writ of mandamus against the executive branch. And that does cause a big political and maybe constitutional crisis as well. And so yeah, they're flooding the zone. They're pushing a lot of stuff up in the Supreme Court Yeah, you know other areas like you know, Humphrey's executor on presidential control of the executive branch and so forth And so I don't know. I think that's part of what's behind it I do I was in a tangle last week with a very left-leaning lawyer who said ah, you know We've never seen a president defy a court like this except maybe Andrew Jackson and that famous maybe apocryphal remark that Marshals made his opinion, let him enforce

it. And I gently reminded that Thomas Jefferson, in the Marbury case, more than 200 years ago, was going to defy the Supreme Court. It's the Supreme Court issued a writ of mandamus ordering that William Marbury get his job. So this kind of clash with the court is not unprecedented and it's been a gray area or a difficult spot, I think really since 1803, right? And so that's a speech and I don't know

if you want to grab hold of that and add to it. No, I mean, no, it's like mutual deterrence and mutually assured destruction. I mean, people try to get out of it because you're gonna hurt both parties. You're going to hurt the presidency and you're going to hurt the court if you do that. So there's maneuvering, right? Like the court, if it thinks the executive is really going to defy it and have political

support to do so, it might back off. And if the president thinks he's going to get adverse court ruling, he might maneuver in a different way. And, you know, as a historical nerd point on the Andrew Jackson thing, people often use that example, but he was not a party to the Indian removal ruling. The Supreme Court was ordering Georgia to do something and Andrew Jackson just didn't enforce the ruling on Georgia. In this case, you've got the Trump administration as a party being told you've got to facilitate the release of this guy. And they're essentially saying, I mean, no, we don't.

We don't really need to do anything. So anyway, that is a part of the separation of powers for sure. We haven't though, the brinkmanship in so far as it's happened has not led to a full-on rupture. And the Trump people seem determined to push it pretty close. I want to change gears a little bit before I throw you back to James and ask you a couple of questions about journalism. So the first one is you're there at the Washington Post at the editorial page. I'm not clear these days, it looks like you're at home today from what I see on the screen, I'm not clear if people actually go into the building anymore, the old-fashioned way you went to newsrooms. I know James still does.

But the first question I want to ask, and maybe you can't say too much about it, which I understand, is Jeff Bezos, the owner, made this great announcement six weeks ago or so that he wants the editorial page to defend free markets and individual liberty, and it's caused a great deal of fuss. What can you tell us about where that stands? I haven't heard of any new editors being hired. I've heard of some resignations. What can you say about the mood of your colleagues?

Is this... I'll just stop there and you say what you want or can say about that. I can't say that much, except the post has been fantastic to me and they hired me a few years ago in 2022, I think, to build up a little bit. They're conservative, stable of writers and I'm very thrilled for where things are going. And keep an eye out for the new opinion editor being hired. I understand that they're looking. I am in a newsroom right now and I'm alone.

On Friday often enough, I am alone and I fear that there's going to be some calamity in town. I mean, I look out the window and if I see a small plane heading toward the skyscraper, I think, oh man, I'm going to have to write that. I'm the last person in the world who's going to have to write it. No, we do have a few other people minding the wires and the rest of it. Do you miss newsrooms as they were previously constituted, Jason? Because when I entered this business 146 years ago in the Jurassic period, they were vital, clamorous, wonderful places with

a wreath of cigarette smoke and a clatter of typewriters and, you know, the occasional nip from the office bottle. I mean, all of those front page cliches, I had them. Do you, is that culture still evident anywhere in the Washington Post today? I think it's coming back. I mean, I think, what are we 2025 now? I mean, the DC traffic has just dramatically increased in just the last few months as part of, I think, you know, people going back to the office in a big way and the Washington Post were under a, you know, they're sending us back to the office. I go in often. I mean, I was at the Wall Street Journal in the editorial page, and it was

fantastic, starting in, I guess, 2017, and then COVID hit, and then you had sort of this gradual dribble back, and the old norms haven't been totally restored. But I think maybe they will be within, you know, maybe a decade of COVID, because there's a lot going on. I agree with you. I like to be, you know, I talk a lot to my colleagues and I think it's that intellectual experience is really important. One more journalism question, a more general one. There's a story out here today,

or at least it's online at the Wall Street Journal, and I won't say it's taking a victory lap for the journals reporting a year ago on Biden's infirmities, but it kind of is. And it's a very brutal story, whose subtext is more people in the media should have known there was a cover-up going on about Biden's condition. And so, I mean, that should be as big a scandal as the cover-up itself, because I thought journalism was all about uncovering cover-ups. Do you see, are there any second thoughts going on at the poster anywhere that you're aware of that, boy, we really fell down on our duty in reporting

what was really happening right in front of us? Yeah, that really is extraordinary in retrospect. That failure because of journalism on the present, um, on the president. And that that's a piece by Annie Linsky. She's fantastic. And she wrote, uh, some pieces in the journal about it. And I think her point is now, now books are coming out about it, um, about the, the Biden age and infirmity. Cause yeah, that's not like an optional thing for the press.

You're talking about the president, the American people pay for the press to be here and get exposure and talk to the people around the president. So that was a terrible, I think, blow to the public's trust, you know, up there with, frankly, you know, weapons of mass destruction or some of the post-COVID obfuscations in terms of just fibs that were not scrutinized enough. And I think, will the press, I don't know, we'll see what the Trump, what happens, what Trump sort of does to the press. I mean, he is in no mood to sort of, he faced a universally hostile press in his first term,

and he seems in no mood to be, you know, John Roberts-like in terms of creating a climb down situation on that front. So, I think the press is going to be very hostile again to Donald Trump. Can they do that? You know, they've lost a lot of credibility from some of their failures before, so will that hostile coverage carry the same weight as it otherwise could have? Probably not, but it's still important because, you know, when the, if it's Biden or if it's Trump, the American people need to know about what their president's doing because he's very powerful. Let me be a lone voice of craziness out here in the middle of the continent and just say that I think that Saddam Hussein shipped massive quantities of his

WMDs across the border to Syria and we did find in a lot of stuff and we did a very poor job of publicizing it. I will say that until the day I dive and people can laugh and point and hoot all they like. Well I was in fourth grade so I didn't follow as closely. Let me put my teeth back in here for a minute. Right. I'm in the buttons. I'm in the mango. Judge Boasberg, who is the bugaboo now of a lot of people, we've got Article 2 and Article

3 cage fight, constitutional crisis looming. I hear this every single day that there's a constitutional crisis coming. Boasberg threatened open contempt investigations against the administration, alleged a willful disregard of the March 15th, I think it was a temporary restraining order. You've had a chance to read what he did and how this is forming and shaping and maybe you could cut through the BS and tell us exactly what is going on with Boesberg here. I have read it. And, you know, you realize, realize of course that reading it disqualifies you from telling us about it.

Exactly. Look, he's really pissed off because the administration had this idea, we're gonna proclaim the Alien Enemies Act and we're going to immediately, we're gonna proclaim it late Friday night or maybe early Saturday morning. And then that same day, we're going to load these people on planes under the Alien Enemies Act and put them in this prison in El Salvador. The lawyers for these plaintiffs, for some of the people, the Venezuelans got wind of it, filed a lawsuit.

The government knew it was coming, but, you know, hustled them onto the planes anyway. And, you know, it actually removed from the planes some of the specific plaintiffs in the case because it knew that it, that they were blocked from being deported. But then the judge said, you know, he enjoined the use of it that same day. This is all happening in a few hours on a Saturday, right? But he, he then orders, you can't remove anyone pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act. But the government has had people on planes already, they're out of US airspace. So they have them keep going and they, you know, despite being under an order to not remove anybody, they hand them over to the Salvadorans a few hours

later. And so he's saying you violated the order because I I said, you couldn't remove anybody. They said, well, they were already out of us airspace. He's saying, well, removing them is really changing custody. You're in custody of them and you're giving them custody of another country. Also, I said, you might have to turn the planes around or not disembark people from the plane. So it's a, you know, frankly, I mean, contempt in the ordinary sense, the government is treating the courts contemptuously in this case, they're like, who the

heck do you think you are interfering with this? You know, we're sending them off and, uh, you know, by the way, you're biased, we should have a new judge on this case and, you know, we don't need to bring back this guy Garcia. That's technically a separate case, but still, so, you know, contempt in the colloquial sense, I do think the government is treating the courts contemptuously. You know, whether Boasberg should be doing this is a different question. Cause of course the Supreme court five to four basically agreed with his

substantive ruling, which is you can't send somebody with the alien enemies act out of the country without any opportunity for due process, but the jurisdiction should really be in a different district court. So the government can say, what's this guy doing? Who's been stripped of jurisdiction, trying to prosecute us for contempt. And so, you know, is it wise for Boasberg to try to push this contempt thing forward? I think, you know, maybe not if you're trying to deescalate. On the other hand, I'm sympathetic because they were thumbing their nose at a federal court and they just didn't really care what he was saying. Well, okay, so all that's very cogent. On the other hand, I get back to what's, I know

bothers a lot of people I know on the left, which is the ruling of the Supreme Court last year about the immunity of presidential acts in connection with official duties. And of course, a lot lot of problem there is what's an official duty and so forth and so we again we get into one of those lacunae in the Constitution where when a judge finds someone in contempt of court they then need who to enforce it and actually arrest somebody and put them in the jail cell when you're found in contempt well that's something that you rely on the executive branch, whether it's at the state level or at the federal level.

In other words, Judge Boesber can say, I find you, Donald Trump, or your officers in contempt of court, and now I want federal marshals to go pick you up. Well, that's not gonna work. I mean, we just know that's not going to happen, right? The federal marshals, right? And Trump could pardon somebody

under investigation for contempt of court. Exactly. So there's- But I knew it's- Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, go ahead. I mean, look, fundamentally, I at first saw this administration and its lawsuits and executive actions, and I said, okay, they want to take an aggressive posture toward the courts politically, and they want to provoke the Supreme Court to come in and side with them against the federal, these lower federal court judges, usually appointed by Democrats.

My calculus started to change after that Oval Office meeting with Bukele, where it's like, huh, maybe they're not really interested in just getting stuff in front of the conservative leaning Supreme Court and sort of doing politics. And they're really just interested in, you know, going as far as they can possibly go. So my old calculus would be, you know, judges have to lower the temperature. And I still think that they should do that where possible. But it may be that, you know, your thanks you get from lowering the temperature as the Supreme Court tried to do in the facilitate versus effectuate is even, you know, more, more contempt. So that, that's sort of the question here. I think you're absolutely right. I mean, you're getting to the

constitutional no man's land. I mean, the president can pardon somebody for contempt, that's settled. So courts can't really enforce contempt against the executive branch if the president doesn't want them to. So it's really becomes a political question, what does the public think of these contempt findings? And what does the public think if the president pardons somebody and so on? And I'm not sure Boasberg, you know, and is going to help the political case against Trump. I think that's pretty easy for the administration to spin as here's an Obama appointed judge appointing a prosecutor to go after our people. So I think, you know, the courts have to be very judicious and, you know, about what kind of political terrain they want to defend. Not sure if this is the wisest thing, even though, as I said, quite sympathetic here, because I'm frankly quite, you know, angry at the way that the admins, I don't think there's a basis for the alien enemies act. I think that's, you know, pretextual.

I don't think Venezuela is at war with the united states i don't think that the gang normally the alien enemies act is against like citizens of germany not members of a gang i think that the whole thing is legally flawed and flimsy and protectual and i think that the way that they implemented it to circumvent judicial review is outrageous changes every four months the subject before we let you go.

One more question. Because you also know, I mean, really we can talk about it. It's fascinating, but we eventually come down to that Jason's right. And that's a, that's a completely defensible set of positions. But as far as how it's going to change the calculus of it, the people who hate Trump will still think that he's being like the Gestapo and the people who love Trump will be indifferent to it because and I you know that's unfortunate because one of the things that distinguishes us is a rule of law and a rule of good law and a rule of law intended to produce moral outcome as

opposed to you know like the Soviet Union or Russia where the logic simply exists to grind people between the gears anyway foreign policy is something you also write about briefly before you go. Tell us, give us some good news in foreign policy and some less good news so we can balance things out here. And really quickly I'll just say something more on the law which is, you know, Donald Trump, everyone in DC, in the press, prosecutors wanted him prosecuted and convicted for January 6th by the election to hurt his election odds. It was going to happen except the Supreme Court intervened to the surprise of many and prevented it from happening.

So it would just be quite an irony if the administration turns around and mauls the Supreme Court this early in a term that it might not, might not have, uh, but for that, that immunity decision. Foreign policy, good news. Um, Something comes trippingly to the tongue. I see you're, you're, you're weighing so many good stories. Which one do we give you? I mean, okay, I'll start with bad news, which is, you know, I, I was actually

kind of hopeful that Trump's Ukraine gambit of sort of, uh, as one of his advisors call it, hitting Zelensky with a two by four, you know, forcing the Ukrainians to come to the table, that that would start to yield some kind of productive peace process does not seem to be happening at all. I was, you know, open to it happening because we'd had such an attitude that you can't have any negotiation between Russia and Ukraine. And maybe that attitude was right, you know, but, but we'll see. But I, but I'm, I might've thought that, uh, the Trump people could have gotten

some progress on that front. They really just have not. Because of what? Because, because of Russian, you know, disinclination to, to talk or Russian desire to spin it out as long as possible while they continue to grind away and lose 10,000 soldiers for every square kilometer. I mean, Russia knows and Ukraine has to know that the eastern part is not going to be relinquished. And that's the sad gut wrenching reality where we are today.

I would love to see Ukraine whole. But I mean, is that a reality that has to be acknowledged by Ukraine and the United States before they go forward? And, and I mean, that's the thing. Trump seems willing to more or less acknowledge it. But the Russians seem to be wanting to push, push for more. And you know, maybe maybe their terms are still what they were when they were threatening the invasion, which is, you know, a total reconfiguration of US and NATO troop presence in Eastern Europe. Yeah, I mean, it seems to me we more or less know what the end game is going to look like. But as always with these things, the details of the peacekeeping force, the time horizon, what's officially recognized, what's informal,

whatever it is, it's hard to say, but Witkoff and Rubio and Trump, and they don't have much to show for it in the first 100 days or 90 something days of his office. So I think that's bad news, because I was open to there being a, at least temporary agreement that was within reach. I think good news is, you know, Israel is, there was just that news story leak about how the, you know, Trump decided against going along with an Israeli strike on Iran.

But I think nonetheless, Israel has basically, you know, in the last couple years, in the last year, really, turned the tide in this war and really beaten the, you know, weakened Iran, degraded Hezbollah. There's an article in the journal about how Hamas is running out of an ability to pay fighters. So I think Israel is going to have emerged victorious in its October 7th war, it's looking like. Somewhere else in the world, though, there has to be something that's gonna just pop up

in two or three months or so, and everybody's gonna be scrambling for their maps and their lobes to figure out where that is and why it matters, and then we'll have you back on, and you can tell us a moment about it. Jason, we'll look at the Washington Post and you can tell us about it. Jason Willick of the Washington Post, thanks for joining us today, fascinating conversation, lots of stuff that our readers are gonna love,

and listeners are going to pick a bone with, or to applaud, and that's why we got you here. You know, the Washington Post comments, the AI summary, they now do an AI summary of the comments, and it's like, what is it? Readers express strong disagreement with the column's author, Jason Willett. So I welcome the bone picket.

Congratulations, good for you. There you go. All right, Jason, regards to DC and all that. And thank you for being on the show today. Thanks, great to be here. I hate those AI summaries. I get them all the time. I get them from Google now and I don't trust any Google responses that I get because instead of giving me a link to go where I want to go, it gives me the AI summary, which then

has a little paper clip at the bottom of it that I can click if I want to. And if I click on that, then something on the right sidebar shows up and it's the Wikipedia thing that I want to go to. And maybe I don't want to go to Wikipedia at all because it's a story about a contemporary character and we all know those are shot through with all sorts of poisonous politics possibly I just want to learn about a guy who was an architect in the 17th century but no I got to go to this other page I hate Google search right now I just do but here's the thing if you want wait a minute Jason are you still here I'm doing

a commercial no I'm listening yeah you're gonna be like Rob Long Rob Long at this point right shoulder his way into the conversation and completely destroy the segue that I was attempting to build but I'm more than happy from somebody's from an August publication is the Washington Post to do it to come in and do so anyway I have to get back to my commercial to keep the lights on so So thank you, Jason. Thank you guys so much. I'm a big fan, so good to talk to you. Great, thank you. Point being search is broken, but that's okay because if you wanna get new sheets,

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And he would make some droll remark about it. Um, and he would be anxious to get home because his wife, I'm not saying that Charles CW cook is the man who chooses the sheets around his house. No, who wears the sheet Buying pants in that place. It's mrs. Cook who we understand is strapped and quite a shot So, you know, you can take her advice on aesthetic matters as well She chose the cozy earth and she can't say enough good things about them Why because goes to your uses only the best fabrics and textiles that provide the ultimate ingredient for luxurious softness Let's just sleep like a baby. And they're not just soft, their weave fabric is enhanced for durability that won't pull.

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Well, I was wondering how, when you began that segue, you were gonna get to, because it's all about searches and the internet and AI, and how are you gonna get, but that was okay. Can I just say two quick observations on a couple things Jason said, that I't want to protract the conversation, argue, because I'm not really arguing, but he makes the point that, you know, we're not at war with Venezuela, and so how does the Alien Enemies Act apply? And I think that's true,

although remember that we haven't had a formal declaration of war for any hostilities now since World War II. We have, as the Obama people put it, with our Libya bombing, a kinetic activity. Right, we use these euphemisms. I do think it is correct, though, to understand that Venezuela, if they're not at war with us, they're at least hostile to us. And, you know, one piece of information many listeners may not know is there have been direct flights with a refueling stop between Tehran and Caracas for 15 years now, and I don't think that's about coordinating their oil strategies for OPEC. I think it's about a lot

more mischievous things than that. So, and I think, by the way, determining whether a country is hostile to us in actionable ways is an executive determination. That's just my opinion, and, and you know, Jason's views on this are certainly credible. But then the second one is, opinion and and you know Jason's views on this are certainly credible. But then the second one is and here again I get back to my historian role in life, it's true that Trump is taking a big risk if he attacks the Supreme Court or defies the court or otherwise causes a controversy or crisis over that. On the other hand, let's keep in mind that you go back to FDR and everyone knows about his court packing scheme and that's

all you read about in the history books, thought to be a great failure. But people really ought to go back and read his speeches and his fireside addresses that he gave in 1937. His attacks, direct attacks on the Supreme Court were borderline violent. I mean, he was trying to delegitimize the Supreme Court and force them to bend to his will, which they did. So, you know, again, I don't think what we're seeing is anywhere close to the assault on the court that Roosevelt conducted. And you know, I wish more people were aware of those kinds of things. Pete What you're saying, Stephen, is that actually there are nuances here.

And I agree with you. I mean, I just want to reiterate that when I make the point that I mean I'm a great believer in the rule of law and applied to all not find me the man and I'll show you the crime but find me the crime and show you the man I hate lawfare but at the same time two things one I'm not saying that I agree with this because I think it is a dangerous road down which to go but a lot of the indifference that people have to this comes from the lawlessness of the previous administration and even though that may itself have been have been fortified by code or programs or the rest of it everybody knows that it was open season come across and the the

Americans who themselves would say yes I believe in bringing people into this country to replenish us to bring new assets you know to do jobs here to provide service. I mean, yes, we believe in immigration. We just want the legality and the processes and the vetting. And the idea that there wasn't any of that, that people got in, they got a little date, show up in court in 2026 and released in the middle of nowhere. When you combine that with the occasional high profile crime, it combines to form an

era of an absolute indifference to what may be less than legal means to solve the problem. And I'm not saying I like it. I don't like it, but I understand why a lot of people, this is their sole intellectual contact with the argument, just shrug and say, they didn't care then and I don't care now. So let's, like Jason was saying, let us be careful to cross T's and dot I's because we don't want to lose

our eventual fallback in our due to the position of legality because it's a good thing. But again, again, I, you know, I brought up the Soviet Union and Russia, people keep observers keep pointing out that Russia is an extremely legal nation and will do things and you know, they follow codes and procedures just down to the atomic level. It's not because they're interested in doing what's right, it's because they're interested in doing what the system requires them to do. Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's right. Anyway, second point and it had to do with the... what were you... what was the last point that you were making there? I can't

remember. Well, that FDR's assault on the court was way last point that you were making there? I can't remember. Well, that FDR assault on the court was way beyond anything that any of the Trump people have said, so far at least. Right. Yeah, I go back and I look at the newspapers of the 30s and it's quite remarkable, the zestiness of the dialogue. Shall we say quite back and forth? Yeah, so it's, you know, yes, history helps. It really does.

There are many, many antecedents it's you know yes history helps it really does there's there's there are many many antecedents for what we are seeing today in the 20th century of American culture and sometimes it's amusing to find those echoes and sometimes it's heartening too to see that we have faced this before and we've gotten through it and we've remained a country that is still the last best hope for mankind well you know us and I don know, Luxembourg believes one of those small places. That is it for us. That is it for me. By the way, if you would, uh, by yourself, a lumen, believe me,

you will rely on it daily for cues and clues and your metabolic health. And you'll love it. It's such a cool piece of engineered tech. Also, cozy earth, as we mentioned before, your home should be a sanctuary, so start with Cozy Earth to build those sheets and a little place for you to sleep at night that is like no other. And if you could give us a five-star review wherever you happen to get your podcasts, we would like that. I've been asking that for about 735 podcasts now.

I don't think I did for the first two. Maybe 738 will be the charm. Who knows knows I also advise you to go to ricochet.com and go to the member site oh you can't that's right you're not a member sorry but that's easily corrected with just a couple of swipes of a little credit card yeah it costs a couple of coins a day but it's absolutely worth it because there you will find the same civil center right community you've been looking for all your days on the internet I'm James Lilacs inneapolis even here in california we both did you and you

thank you for listening and we'll see you all in the comment ricochet four point out