The Ricochet Podcast - The Black Hole of Jurisprudence

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

Big, big news this week! And even if we’re a few days behind, fashionable lateness is sort of our style. To ensure thoughtful novelty, we’re joined by legal scholar Adam White, who is able to channel his Iowa everyman to take us through intricate legalese and manages to put it in plain English. He evaluates precedents, the new political questions, and the litigation to come. The gang (including... Source

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. We've endorsed Dr. Oz, we've endorsed J.P., right? J.D. Mandel, and he's doing great. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson. No, Stephen Hayward's sitting at the theater this week, and we've got Rob Long.

I'm James Lilex, and we talk to Adam White about all things SCOTUS. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you welcome everybody this is the rick and fashay podcast number 592 moving our way towards 600 and oh what festivities there'll be when that happens the fireworks the brass bands all of that stuff i'm james lilacs here in minneapolis rob long is in new york peter robinson well when we told peter we were going to be talking about the Supreme Court and abortion in Roe versus Wade, he just sort of rolled his eyes and said he's so bored with the subject and has no opinions on it. So he took the day off and we have Stephen Hayward. Stephen, welcome back for a rare, never before happened, three times, three in a row. You're like the guy who became the person who sat in for Carson and

everyone kind of expected him on Friday. Yeah, no, I'm right. I'm starting to feel like Jay Leno a bit. But the real problem is I am getting this overwhelming urge to buy a preppy sweater and nod it around my neck. Good. Thank God. I thought you're going to say I'm getting this overwhelming urge to get paid for this. And I have some bad news for you. Well, gentlemen, just as Putin solved COVID, it seems that the Supreme Court leak has knocked the Ukraine war off the front page. Although all these things still are going on. And of course, that's what we're going to be talking about this week. But before we do so, there was some results in Ohio. J.D. Vance, who has made something of a sort of intellectual or at least rhetorical journey over the last few years.

I remember some of the position papers that he made prior to the election seemed a bit out of character, might we say, with the temperate man that he had portrayed himself before. I was a little surprised by some of the things that he said. But he won, and who cares what I think about it anyway. What matters is what this means for the future and i imagine you gentlemen have some opinions on that steven let me go okay sure uh so i think uh top line is there's a decent case that trump's endorsement of jd vance put him over the top because you know what's a close race where josh mandel who i've met a few times in ohio was leading in the polls long time popular figure with Ohio conservatives. But then Vance pulled away and won by more than 10 points. On the other hand, I think you could say that more important than Trump's endorsement

was Peter Thiel putting in $15 million behind Vance in an independent expenditure effort. So I think the real test is the upcoming Pennsylvania primary where we're going to find out whether Trump is the Wizard of Oz. In that case, he's endorsed Dr. Oz for that Senate seat, which seems an odd pick. And I'm not sure that Oz actually has real support among conservatives in Pennsylvania. So that's a better test than Ohio, I think. Yeah, I mean, I should agree. I think that this was a, you know, first of all, I think J.D. Vance is a pretty good candidate. I think a surprisingly good candidate. I think Peter Thiel supported him from the very beginning, put a lot of money to him. And I think Peter Thiel, I'm guessing here, I don't really know, made a call to Donald Trump and said, listen, why don't you back a winner? I'm going to give J.D. $15 million.

You'd be smart to betray your friend, Josh Mandel, who you've implied and basically promised you would endorse, double cross him and support Vance, which Trump did to great shock and consternation in the mandel camp um in fact it's it was so surprising was surprised even trump because trump kept referring to uh uh vance as jd mandel like in a rally that's just how confused trump was but it just shows you that trump will endorse somebody who wants he who's going to be he thinks going to be a winner if it doesn't cost him anything um look the real the real i look i don't want to you you know, I get in trouble about Trump. The problem with Trump is his political career as an endorser and a political power will be over at the end of this month. Except for the true diehards.

Brian Kemp is going to win, most probably, in Georgia. One of his greatest political enemies, the current governor of Georgia, is going to fend off his challenger as a Republican primary, Perdue, who Trump supports. Republicans in Georgia are going to say, we think Trump lost Georgia. We think Trump's political enemy, Brian Kemp, is a better choice than Trump's choice to lead Georgia. Trump, by the way, has said he thinks Stacey Abrams would be better than Brian Kemp to lead Georgia. And they are going to choose Brian Kemp. That is going to be a total repudiation, not only of Trump, but of the lie that Trump secretly won Georgia. And it is going to come not from the left-wing media, not from going to come not from the left wing media,

not from the liberals, not from the Democrats, but from the Republicans in Georgia who voted against Trump in Georgia. And that will do that will that will kill his kingmakers. No, no. But it's going to it's going to be what really matters, what will really matter politically for the next couple of years, which is that it's going to show that in a die hard red state among red voters among conservative republicans trump doesn't really have much pull um they're kind of tired of the act um and that's not gonna be good if you're donald trump steven you agree with that uh yeah i do think so uh so. I think one other note about Ohio, though, that's worth watching. I think you want to watch this. The other state suit is turnout.

Twice as many Republicans as Democrats turned down in Ohio for the primary. And though the Democrats had contested races in Ohio, that's a huge enthusiasm gap showing up. I want to watch for that in all the other states like Georgia and Pennsylvania and see if we see a similar, regardless of who wins, regardless of where Trump's influence falls out. I think that that's another thing to watch in all these races. Well, that's interesting because I was told this last week that the shenanigans at the court and what they were going to do and the recriminalization of everything good in the world meant that the Republican were going to be blunted when it came to doing anything. There was a new wind filling the sails on the left and that they would show up in every single instance to vote as hard as humanly possible

in order to send a message that that Roberts's weight has to be has to be maintained. It might. I mean, this is this is new. I mean, it might. I don't really know what's going to happen with this. This is going to be really interesting. It is, I mean, it's the only thing the Democrats have. So we're going to hear all about it. I mean, if you're Tim Ryan, you're going to be running against J.D. Vance in November. It's going to be, you know, J.D. Vance going to say inflation economy. I mean, I don't know. Pick anything, any issue on the docket. And Tim Ryan's going to say abortion, abortion, abortion, abortion.

Well, no, he won't say no, no, no, no, no. You won't say abortion. He will say women's health. He will say choice. He will say all those. Oh, yeah. But he's going to it's going to be that. I mean, that's pretty much I mean, that's kind of they're going to be their playbook. I mean, as it should be, because it's all they got. What's he going to say? Gas isn't really expensive and bread really isn't expensive and the economy really isn't that bad. He's, you know, with a second quarter numbers could come in if they come in down as the first quarter. That's technically a recession.

What are you going to what are you going to say? Well, I think at least we're going to see Democrats be able to identify women again between now and November. They are struggling with that now. Well, I think there may be, you can go through some poll data, which as a political scientist, I do, and I won't bore listeners with that. I think that the dynamic that we can all appreciate is there may be a race here between who overdoes it. So you may have some Todd Akin moments from Republican candidates, right? That's one hazard for Republicans. But the Democrats may go, and James will like this, I think there's a good chance on this issue, Democrats are going to go full Paul Wellstone funeral mode and so overdo it that they're going to turn people off.

And by the way, so Tim Ryan, I think he has already said that he's for the most radical pro-abortion bill that the most left reaches of the party want to push to Congress, which is no restrictions at any point. And that's not going to play well with a lot of sort of centrist Democrats in Ohio that Ryan desperately needs to win if he's going to win well with a lot of, you know, sort of centrist Democrats in Ohio that Ryan desperately needs to win if he's going to win that state. So I think it's a jump ball. And I think I don't know, I could be wrong about this. And who makes the most mistakes? Well, I mean, the question is, if you say no restrictions whatsoever up until and after, for that matter, birth, what you'll be told is, well, that never happens. And when it does happen, it's the right thing. And if it does happen more, that's good, because essentially we have to come down to choice and health, however health is defined.

So, I mean, you're right, Stephen, they have a problem because the party has moved so far to the left on this that you have to assuage their concerns about any restriction on abortion itself can't be countenanced because that's wrong. We can't do that. That just gives aid and comfort to the enemy. So you have to do that. But I still think that they can they can hew to a more moderate point out to everybody that actually we are not talking about what most people believe in and most people accept with however many reservations and however many

silent mutters about the current situation of abortion in the country first trimester that's sort of baked in yeah yeah um that to to tell people that actually there's an ideological, enthusiastic insistence on more abortion, it takes a smart politician to be able to thread that needle and tell people that's what they're up to. Well, you know, it's funny. I mean, you know, it's hard as I as I get older and I sort of become a slightly more religious. Right. And slightly more. I don't know, slightly more convinced that there is a God, right? And he's sending us messages and he's sending us lessons. And this is a lesson. The lesson is you're doing it wrong. And I'm sending you a lesson so that you can learn how to do it right.

And this seems like a lesson to American politicians. They've been doing it wrong. And one of the ways they've been doing it wrong is they've been continually appealing to the extremes of both their parties because you can kind of eke out a win you know like last couple of presidential elections have not really been since really since obama actually have not really been that definitive you know like been kind of like whoops we kind of skated by kind of tight um and and they've been kind of parsing the numbers and saying, well, if I win Wisconsin by 17,000 votes,

and I win this by 11,000 votes, and I send this direct mail piece to this county, then I can kind of eke out a win. And so they've lost the ability, and they've actually lost the interest to speak to the great big center in America. And the great big center in America has rewarded them by roiling

the waters every couple of years i mean we lived in the most incredibly volatile political times since the 19th century um and the politicians have responded by saying well the american people are crazy look they vote for obama they vote for trump this is insane we have tim ryan i mean we have uh paul ryan as speaker of the house and then we have uh nancy pelosi speaker of the house the american people are insane they're schizophrenic no they're not they're just trying to get your attention and the the politicians and the political party that appeals to the moderate center and the moderate center in america is kind of like ah we kind of they kind of feel like first trimester is sort of kind of okay

and they kind of feel like after that sort of kind of not, and that's kind of where they are. Remember, let's just finish. So, because if you're, if you're, if you're making a moral,

if you're, if you're a politician, that's kind of possibly where the first step ends up. If you're a moral leader at that point, you take over and then you go in flatbed trucks, the way we do in America, and you go door to door and you say, okay, the law is this, but it's wrong. And that's a human life. And you try to convince people otherwise. And that is actually how things in America get done. And it could work. That could work. Anyway, go ahead.

Sorry. The formulation, no, no, no, I do apologize. You're on a roll. The formulation, and and it could work like that could work anyway go ahead sorry who did the formula no no need to apologize you're on a roll the formulation safe legal and rare were and was smart for a reason safe we have women's health legal which means we have an established framework we all understand it's gone through the process we're not doing back not even to worry about the you know the back alleys and rare and when a liberal politician would use the word rare, there was a moral weight to that. It meant that this is not something to be done lightly. And everybody got that, right? But what we have now is the idea with the solipsistic nature of people in this society that rare implies a judgment that they don't want to live by. Why should it be rare?

There's absolutely no reason it should be rare. It should be common because it doesn't mean anything because that's not anything in there. And I mean, those simple three words were quite persuasive. And Rob's like, right. I mean, it's around the vagueness. There's an emanation of a penumbra about what people feel. And that was a wise piece of political right. But you're not going to hear it again because rare, as I said, implies some sort of disapproval. dimensions uh i do think that sometimes the comparisons that uh my pro-life friends and i am a pro-life person a make between slavery is overwrought and overextended except on this point uh that nowadays there's this very strong push you see it really from rob's friends in hollywood but elsewhere that abortion should be celebrated as a positive good right the way slavery was celebrated as a positive good by its defenders not way slavery was celebrated as a positive good by its defenders.

Not as a peculiar institution and a stain on the country and a tragedy we have to deal with. So a Democrat... At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar,

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Innovate. The IT solutions people. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to 10 euro if your horse loses on a selected race that's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing cheltenham with live score bet this is total betting sign up by 2 p.m 14th of march bet within 48 hours of race main market excluding specials and place bets terms apply bet responsibly 18 plus gamblingcare.ie today cannot say what bill clinton said and expect to survive in the Democratic Party.

Just one too little more fragments of history on this. You know, President Biden saying, gosh, the Republicans are extreme and radical. This is the same Joe Biden who in 1973 said the Roe decision went too far. George McGovern's position on abortion before Roe in the presidential campaign in 1972 is that abortion is a matter that should be left to the states george mcgovern could not be nominated for president of the democratic party today because of that one point of view and and republicans are the ones who got radicalized excuse me i think it's exactly opposite obviously right and i could go on but i think that's enough. I mean, it is interesting to think that the greatest disaster that could befall the pro-choice movement is a reversion of the crucial, I mean, a fundamental question to the voters in the states. They can't imagine anything worse and that that ultimately is the most i mean that is the most weird and concerning thing the idea that sovereign citizens in the

greatest longest lived republic in the history of earth um are terrified that a crucial question about i mean a fundamental right right right it's going to be referred to to the citizens of that heaven no no ancient greek no founding uh author of the constitution or the declaration or none actually none of the none of the citizens of the original column could could would could fathom that don't forget, these are the same people who tell us every day that they are for democracy. Right, exactly. I was thinking the same thing.

But you know what, Stephen? It's not what they talk about is our democracy. If some state passes, codifies essentially what the real regime has been and isn't any more liberal than they want it to be, then we will have a state that is full of tongue, babbling snake, juggling yahoos. So it'll be their we will have a state that is full of tongue babbling snake juggling yahoo so it'll be their democracy won't be our democracy it'll be their democracy

yeah just like but also like you forgot they forgot the great sweep of american history has been people convincing other people of stuff not judges i mean it is true that you we have short we have shorthanded our way through american history by looking at court cases but there are rotten court there are rotten supreme court decisions um to to balance every good one um and the the preponderance of great personal movement great i mean even there have been also crazy like we this is a country that passed a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol so don't tell me it can't be done it's just you got to do it you got to actually it's kind of i mean it was crazy i just can you imagine

this is a country built on alcohol we managed somehow to give it up i wanted to do back and we gave women the vote and you know what happened after that but okay so we banned alcohol and then we unbanned it we so so we came to our senses but you can you can convince people to do stuff you just have to do it and you can do it outside it doesn't happen in dc it happens in uh in uh you you drive into town and you convince people we sobered up and and and made alcohol legal no you're right but if if what you believe is so important and so morally correct and you can't persuade people of it, it doesn't mean that there's a failure to your argument. It means that you have to find other means to do so. And that means perverting any institution you can in order to achieve the desired effect. You pack the courts. You pass regulations instead of laws. I mean, the entire progressive apparatus, which is unpersuasive to most people when they see the nuts and bolts of it, can only be implemented by using the brute force of government to make it happen, as opposed to people assuming and saying, yes, I want this to happen. I want the Green New Deal.

Please take away the car that I have. Put me into this. take away the meals that I have, make me make my shoulder, my shower colder with less pressure. Please make me have to flush the toilet twice, get rid of the light bulbs that I want. All of these things, nobody wants them. So they have to be employed. They have to be imposed on people and that's fine by them. That's absolutely fine because the, the force eventually results in utopia any day now, probably 10, 15. Oh, I don't know, well, at least by the end of the week. Oh, it is Friday, so we're already at the end of the week. Well, I would just say this. I mean, a thought experiment.

Because I don't believe these court cases, any Supreme Court case convinces anybody of anything. I never do. They're not supposed to. No. Imagine Roe v. Wade is the last abortion ruling, the last abortion anything that happens in America. So from Roe v. Wade on, we really don't do anything about abortion. So there's no extension of abortion regulations.

There's no partial birth abortion. We prosecute people like Gosnell, you know, ferociously prosecute him. We actually enforce those rules. We don't celebrate it. Safe, legal, rare, I guess. I wonder if we'd be in a different position now.

Well, the number of abortions has been slowly trending downward. Right. And there are large parts of the country, rural parts of the country, where there are almost no abortion clinics. There's only one in North Dakota, something like that. And in fact, the pro-choice community has been complaining for a long time that abortion is slowly being strangled here, there, and everywhere. And one of the things you do see in public opinion is that younger people are trending ever so slightly in the pro-life direction. And I'm not quite sure what that's all about, but some of it may be technology. I'm not the first person to make the observation that

ever since we got sonograms, people have been able to see a human being starting to squirm at eight or 10 weeks. And that's changed a lot of minds. And that didn't exist in 1973. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Well, if it happens, as people are fearing, we'll probably have some sort of institution that will mail abortion bills to people without prescription. Does that seem likely to you? Oh, yes. Oh, definitely. Right. And it will probably, it will end up probably being,

if there's a progressive government in charge, paying for it, because the inability to have abortion access would have an adverse impact on certain communities. So what we'll have then is the government in the interests of i don't know fighting the white supremacy that you saw in the supreme court decision mailing pills to people of particular races and economics class to make sure that they don't reproduce and keep their numbers down and that's enlightenment that that's that's going to be considered to be a very compassionate thing to do well yeah that's what that's happened that's what you know freakonomics is when the first edition of freakonomics it's since been i think re rethought i don't think debunked is the right word rethought but the the uh the the shocking conclusion was that after roe v wade

and the increase in abortions among certain populations uh contributed to a corresponding decline in crime, you know, X number of years later in populations. But that has been criticized and critiqued, but I don't think it's been debunked. Well, two quick points. One is Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself once said that at the time Roe was passed, there was concern about population growth among certain populations that we were concerned about. I mean, a statement that if, you know, a white male made, you can imagine people. And in the Roe opinion itself from Justice Blackmun, he makes reference to population growth. That's back when the population bomb was riding high. And it really was thought that abortion was necessary to limit the population growth. That's back when the population bomb was riding high, and it really was thought that abortion was necessary to limit the population bomb. That eugenics vibe we thought we got rid of

back in the 40s and 50s was still lurking beneath the surface here. Quickly on the crime thing, Rob, I followed the Freakonomics debate, and there's another one that, as a person who lived in LA, I grew up in LA. Believe it or not, there's a small coterie of scholars who think that the decline in airborne lead when we got rid of lead and gasoline and high lead levels is actually correlates better with the drop in crime and by the way you can observe that oh yes it's it's a very i don't want to derail us to get off on this it's from my old environmental beat but it's pretty it's actually more compelling statistically than the Freakonomics thesis until the last 18 months, which screws everything up. But it's more likely than people eating lead from paint chips because, I mean, a kid would have to really make a daily habit of crushing them up and putting those on ice cream like sprinkles to have some sort of effect on them. No, airborne aspiration of lead is probably a bad thing, and I'm glad that we got past that.

Hot town, summer in the city, right? I mean, we think of the old days, and we forget how much they smelled. By the way, you can thank the Reagan administration for speeding that up. It's one of the great environmental success stories, and Reagan never got any credit for it. Oh, boy. I hated those summers, though. You know, those summers when you're so hot and sticky nothing you can do about it though completely uncomfortable hot sticky uh you know you know where it's you're the most uncomfortable well yes rob thank you for

eliminating 75 of the segue that i was making because i wanted to talk about the we forget how planes used in restaurants used to smell of cigarettes and how cities used to smell of exhaust wait a minute i thought i eliminated that i don't know no i'm just explaining to those people who are trying to you know to chart this like okay diagram a sentence exactly where i was headed i go right into it from that 1960s my underpants is what I mean to say, James. My underpants in the summer are not places of cool comfort. Hot time, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirt and gritty. Well, it isn't just the back of your neck. No. It is impossible to play it cool when you are sweating and you are sticking and you are chafing.

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million pairs sold. People love their Tommy John underwear and loungewear. There's no risk because you're covered with Tommy John's best pair you'll ever wear or it's free guarantee. Shop TommyJohn.com slash Ricochet right now at this very moment for 20% off your first order. Get 20% off right now at TommyJohn.com slash Ricochet. TommyJohn.com slash Ricochet. See the site for details. And I'm not kidding. I got those in a special drawer. And it's hitting the 80s today, but Tommy Johns are going on. And we thank Tommy John for sponsoring this Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Adam White, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on American

constitutionalism, the Supreme Court, and the administrative state. Concurrently, he co-directs the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of Administrative State at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. Welcome. Thanks for joining us with the podcast today. First thing we have to ask, this leak, do you think it is it? Do you think it's the opinion as it will eventually be revealed to us? Oh, no, not at all. This draft is from February, and it surely already has changed since then, and it surely will change even more in the next month or two before it's released. It'll be interesting to see how the draft is affected by whatever sort of responses it gets from, say, Justice Kagan dissenting or maybe Chief Justice Roberts writing a separate opinion.

We can't even really take for granted that it's going to be, the thrust of it will be the majority opinion in the end, although I do think it will be. What do you think is most likely from what you've read to change? Well, I think people are waiting to see if perhaps, say, a Justice Kavanaugh or Justice Barrett drops off and goes to a narrow approach, the kind of thing that Chief Justice Roberts was sketching out at oral argument. That's possible. I don't think it seems all that likely, but it's certainly possible. I think the biggest change might be perhaps in the way that the Alito draft frames things up. Justice Alito says there's really no middle way here. Either we overturn Roe or we strike down the Mississippi statute. There's no way to uphold the Mississippi statute without overturning Roe.

I think Chief Justice Roberts is going to push back against that. Like I said, I suspect Kagan, maybe Breyer will too. And so I think Justice Lito will probably have to build out that part of his opinion. And as you've seen from the explosion of commentary and drama since the draft leaked, everybody is talking about what this might mean for other precedents, like the Obergefell precedent on gay marriage and so on. So my guess is that Justice Alito will end up building out that part of the opinion. And frankly, there's a lot of adverbs in this opinion, egregiously wrong and so on. wouldn't disagree with them they have the luxury of being

the virtue of being true um but i could see those getting maybe sanded off a little bit so hey uh so it's rob in new york thanks for joining us so i got a question first of the the i got the the nancy drew mysteries question here sure who did this? The mystery of the leaked argument. Okay, so I've lived in Washington long enough to know that conspiracy is harder than just sheer incompetence. And so I've always been intrigued by the incompetence angle. Yeah, well, me too. I'm from Hollywood. Yeah, I agree.

A clerk brought a draft home and his or her spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, roommate, somebody saw it. That's possible. A justice might have brought the draft home and somebody in the House saw it. Who knows? I mean, the Occam's razor simplest explanation is that, you know, a justice Sotomayor clerk leaked this. Right. I mean, that's what's my mind this is where my mind went first right that there's a bunch of radical lefty wokey kind of non-binary clerks for one of those left-wing judges out of yale law school and they're there and they're just furious and they just hit send yeah i i focus on sort of when it comes to seeking fertility treatment, time can be of the essence. At Beacon Care Fertility, we are proud to offer prompt access to affordable fertility care. With over 60,000 babies born across our fertility clinic network, we have both the science and the expertise to deliver.

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My orders, clerks, in part because she said an oral argument that ruling the way that alito is sketched out would leave a stench of politics uh around the court and so who knows maybe one of her clerks is feeling pretty turbocharged i thought that the fact that it was leaked to uh these two reporters at politico that's pretty significant um because the natural place to leak something like this would be adam liptak of the times joan biskupic at cnn um jeffrey tubin although he's he i don't know he's he ain't what he used to be i suppose um well but but but gerstein and i'm i'm blank although there'd be

something fitting about it you know yeah yeah yeah but but but gerstein uh josh gerstein a political he's a great reporter he's been been covering the court and national security issues for 20 years. He's not the natural sort of first-round draft pick on this kind of thing. And so I kind of wonder if it's somebody that has some kind of connection to the Politico reporters, not like in a nefarious way, just a neighbor or some kind of casual acquaintance, the kind of thing where it'd be easy for them to get them a paper draft. And the fact is, those two reporters, they specialize in national security, especially with Gerstein. Maybe he received it because they know he knows how to handle documents. Are they going to get that? Do you think they're going to find out who did this? I mean, don't doubt the power of the marshal of the Supreme Court.

I know. I'm embarrassed to ask yeah this is a the practice practically uh csi uh csi uh supreme courthouse i i don't know i i think somebody will read about it in a book i wouldn't be surprised if the leaker actually comes out and says i did it um but i i don't expect to know and again i i I just think it's very, very hard to even guess who it would be. So every law professor, or I mean, every law student right now, I mean, all this is done, I mean, aside from make it,

you know, kind of make this a circus, is extend what is in fact the argument period for the decision, right? So everyone now can file what is in fact the argument period for the decision right so everyone now can file what is a public dissent to alito's argument so if i'm a law professor i can just write that i can pretend i'm on the court and write a dissenting brief and publish it and i'm if i'm egomaniacal enough i can just assume that alito's gonna read it if he knows who I am. And I can feel I'm part of this team now, right?

Crowdsourcing the dissent. Yeah, I'm kind of going to crowdsource. So I'm a pro-choice, slight prominent law professor somewhere, a judge. What's my argument here? Do I help Roberts, you know, to do the weasel wording, have half kind of little of this, little of that pushback that I think is deeply ingrained in the chief justice's DNAna how do we get through this and do nothing a little this little that and not make history what's the argument there well first of all i think what you've seen just in the first 72 hours or however many it's been um since it leaked is

the first response people are getting is is actually an interesting looking past abortion altogether and saying, oh, look, this decision is overturning any manner of things. Again, I keep circling back to Obergefell and same-sex marriage, but any of the sort of precedents that conservatives dislike, you see as much argument about that among the legal professoriate than you do about abortion, per se. So I think that's what they're focusing on um again i'm curious to see the extent to which people focus squarely at roberts and try to push back on on justice alito's framing that it's it's all or nothing frankly i don't think justice alito is going to

spend a lot of time um reading twitter and the blogs and the op-ed pages for this he's saying but i i do think that some of these opinions through you know through the ether will reach folks like justice kagan and and um you know other other justices on the court i just think alito is singularly different and just not reading this kind of stuff well i mean i'm not going to change a leader's mind i just mean like that i have an audience now of one or two maybe of kind of gun shy justices including especially the chief justice who may not want to you know they always want to protect the legitimacy of the court which is now sort of in a shaky ground and may not want to um take this gigantic step um

what would i say if i was trying to give Robertson out? How do I push? How do I, because you said it was a binary thing, right? You either dump Roe or you dump Dobbs. Yeah. Mississippi law. How do I thread the needle? Yeah, right.

So Justice Alito says it's binary. Chief Justice Roberts identifies this case as non-binary, and he suggests that the way you would sort of you could say, we can decide this case just within the framework of these earlier cases by saying this statute is not an undue burden. That's kind of the buzzword in abortion case law. This Mississippi statute, it really only rolls back abortion a little bit within the state of Mississippi, just a couple of weeks. It's not that many abortions in the big scheme of things. Abortion is available in other states. And so Roberts would say this is not what we would call an undue burden on this. I got to say, by the way, the undue burden standard is hilarious. I once

heard a judge sort of speculate on what it must be like during conferences when these cases come up. And maybe Justice O'Connor would have said, well, this statute seems like an undue burden. Justice Scalia would say, no, I think this burden is very much due and back and forth, but it's not really law. I think Roberts could operate within that. And for justices, it's not just him. Say Justice Kavanaugh has often taken a narrower approach on cases. Justice Barrett, she spent her entire career as an academic studying precedent and originalism and tension with precedent. So she might have a nuanced view on this. And for what it's worth, I know Roberts is not the most popular justice in town, especially among conservatives. I think his approach on this is not actually unprincipled,

and I think it is a version of conservatism. I like Alito's approach in this case much better. But I'd say there is something to be said for, for, from a conservative standpoint on what Roberts is trying to accomplish. I just wouldn't agree with it myself. Okay. I got one more question. I gotta, I gotta let the other guys get a,

get a shot at you here. The argument about it would be, it would be too political. It would be politicizing the court or politicizing something. I'm confused by that because the very premise of the anti-Roe, I won't say pro-choice because it doesn't have to be pro-choice, the anti-Roe argument is that this is a political decision. It should be in the realm of politics. Now, politics is sort of a bad word, but what it really means is it should be in the realm of politics now politics sort of a bad word but what it really means is it should be in the realm of people citizens of the country deciding and that any

decision that would overturn roe essentially says this is an inappropriate decision for the unelected judges to make it's not part of the constitution it's really part of the political body people making their moral choices known um how do we get to the point as a culture it's like we just saw this before you got here i mean this this the idea that this that the court should be making these big decisions would seem very very strange to a whole host of people a whole host of americans really for 150 160 180 years of our life. I mean, even the progressives, even the wobblies in the 1920s, like even the socialists would find this very strange, the idea that we're going to kick the can, not just down the road, but across the

street to the Supreme Court and kind of turn away as they make these big decisions for us. And we're going to get mad at them when they say, no, no, no, not our problem. That's you. That's your job. Isn't this going to happen? Isn't this really more about who gets to decide and less what the decision is? Or am I being naive? Okay, so the Supreme Court's always been politically significant all the way back to the very beginning, right? When Chief Justice Marshall was making big decisions about the nature of federal power and all these things, that was political. It had political implications. The challenge that you just pointed out, Justice Scalia and his dissent from that big abortion case 30 years ago really emphasizes this. The problem is here the court is having a political impact by making totally unprincipled

decisions or decisions that have no connection to the Constitution's text. He says in this dissent, it's just great. He said, first of all, he sort of lampoons the court for worrying that overturning Roe would seem political. He says, of course, it's going to be political either way. And that's how we got here in the first place. But then he said, and this is right after the Bork hearings and the Thomas hearings, he says, a lot of people, including my colleagues, think that the confirmation hearings for justices are getting too heated, too ugly. That's our own fault, because we are turning constitutional law into

just a bunch of political value judgments. And the thing about Americans is they love democracy, and they are not fools. And when they know that what we're doing here is just political decisions, value judgments, they'll make their own value judgments heard in a variety of ways, including the confirmation hearings. So he said the only way out of this is to back the truck up, get out of the political quagmire, get back to deciding cases on the basis of constitutional text. Clearly, that's what the thrust of Justice Alito's draft opinion as well. And I guess his implicit response to somebody like Chief Justice Roberts, as I understand Roberts's position, would be, we're going to have litigation after this regardless. There's going to be all kinds of litigation in any number of directions on this and other issues. And so we just need to start from scratch, build from constitutional text upward, rather than try to keep slicing thinner and thinner back to the back to the starting point

back the truck up i like that if when this is finally released there's a sight of brake lights and a beeping sound we'll know that that's what it is i just before you throw it to steve i want to mention that anybody who was a bit confused by your your assertion that the marshal of the supreme court was going to be enforcing that there is actually no police powers. They don't have a uniformed staff. He was referring to a six-year-old tweet by Louise Mensch. And I applaud you for that very much. Thanks.

No, but jokes aside, this is being handled by the courthouse's own internal security team. I mean, they do not have an army. Their security really is handled first and foremost by the U.S. Marshals and so on. But Roberts is having this taken care of in-house by the court's own administration. Their computer system is skiff-like, isn't it? It's not connected to the outside world. There's no way that anybody can get inside of it. So their cybersecurity guys probably just consist of somebody who says these words plugged in or not yeah and this was this was a draft i mean this was clearly a photocopied draft for those who haven't seen it this was not like a pristine pdf this was

somebody's photocopying or photographing a stapled stack of papers and we don't know if it was the reporter who maybe received a hard copy and made the PDF himself, or if he was given a PDF of a photocopy. Yeah. Adam, it's Steve Hayward just up the road today from Rob in Rochester, New York. For you and Rob and for listeners, I want to read you one very short quote, and it's this. A less encompassing Roe, one that merely struck down the extreme Texas law and went no further on that day, might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy, end quote. Adam, I know you know who said that. I think you do. Wait, who said that?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1992, before she was on the court, in a long article where she talked about how, in her words, breathtaking the Roe decision was. So there you go. Once, of course, you know, we know her subsequent career was defending Roe against any challengers. You know, I had Adam reread the cases in many years, Roe and Casey, and I was surprised at how much worse they have aged. And so one thing is, although, and maybe you want to give a little background about the Dobbs case. The Mississippi law says no abortions after 15 weeks, with some of the usual exceptions, I think. That, by the way, is a more liberal law than most European nations have on abortion. Hardly anybody in America seems to know this.

So the thing is, if they decide to go with the Roberts route and dodge Roe, what's to stop Mississippi or some other state from forcing it back on the court next year, saying, okay, 15 weeks? How about 12? How about 12 weeks? Eventually, doesn't the court have to confront Roe directly? And aren't they just be kicking it down the can down the road if they dodge it in this case yeah definitely on your first point by the way yeah the the ginsburg quote is great it the row had no shortage of critics from the left the most famous one uh one of the greatest uh liberal law professors of the 20th century john hardy lee right he wrote right after row was decided row is not constitutional law law and makes no effort to pretend to be. And more recently, maybe 20 years ago, a group of progressive law professors put together a book called What Roe Should Have Said, which I love. It's like when I'm in an argument with, say, my wife, and I say, well, here's what I really meant. She knows I said what I meant the

first time, and now I'm trying to dissemble. You're right, Steve, that there's no way around this. There's going to be a fight over Roe, and the question is, do we have it now, or how do we get there? And again, I think there's conservative arguments to either approach, right? The fact is, the body of precedents, as much as I disagree with them, they are on the books now, and part of having precedents is having stability in law and making change slowly over time. If they took a narrower approach of just upholding the Mississippi statute and rolling back Planned Parenthood versus Casey a little bit and leaving Roe for another day, the Roe case would come within a couple of years, within five years. The states

are very aggressively legislating on this, and they were even before the case was argued in the Mississippi case. So again, the question is, do you sort of go towards the Roe issue one step at a time? Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver.

That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time time get your data center ai ready someday is here with nokia um and future cases would have to do with does there need to be an exception for the where the life of the mother is in danger or a pregnancy from rape or incest do you reach those eventually or as the alito draft sort of suggests, do you just say, no, we're bringing everything back down to the bottom now, and we can have future cases about, and surely there would be over, a right to abortion when the life of the mother is in danger, right? That'd be like any other case where you're asking, do I have a constitutional right to life-saving medical treatment? I mean, it'd be different, obviously, because there's another life at stake, but that's the way that Alito is going to approach it. But there was going to be decisions about this core issue sooner rather than later, and Alito is saying,

why not now? Well, you've teed up my next question perfectly, which is, let's assume that the Alito draft that we've seen is what they come out with, with the final decision, with five votes. Then what happens if a state like, I don't know, Louisiana comes along? Here's what I'm teeing up. You know, some of our very fervent friends like Hadley Arcus and others thinks that the unborn should be persons under the meaning of persons of the 14th Amendment, and that the protection of the law should extend, in some cases, all the way back to conception, no matter what the circumstances. So what would happen if you have a state that declares in statute that the state of Louisiana or whatever state believes that all unborn persons are persons for the purposes of the law? Alito's decision is not radical. It just says, let's go back to status quo ante and leave it to the democratic process. A law like that would press the matter to a more fundamental question about

personhood in the Constitution, I think. What do you think, how does that unfold if it happens like that? Well, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see that kind of law coming out of the states. But frankly, I think the kind of law that would tee up the litigation you're talking about would be out of the blue states. When they legislate protections of a right to abortion, particularly in the aftermath of this case, you will see some people file lawsuits on behalf of unborn children saying that actually there is a 14th Amendment right to life that trumps any kind of right to abortion, even in the case where the mother's life is in danger. It's that kind of statute out of a blue state that would tee up this litigation. And for what it's worth, I'm curious

to see what, if anything, justices say about that issue in this case. That 14th Amendment right to life is not really an issue in this case. But the thing is, the Justice Alito draft leaves a lot of room for other conservative justices to write separate opinions going a little bit further, right? I wouldn't be surprised to see some justices, maybe Barrett, writing about stare decisis and why she's sort of elaborating and extending the points that Alito makes here. You could see maybe Justice Kavanaugh write an opinion if he sticks with the Alito majority, explaining why he really does think it's an all-or-nothing choice, there's no middle way. I'm watching Justice Thomas the most carefully on two issues. One is whether he signals anything about his belief in a 14th Amendment right to life. He's always had a

broader view of the 14th Amendment from a natural law perspective than anybody else on the court. And it traces back to his precourt days at the EEOC where he worked with Ken Masugi and John Marini. John Marini, thanks. Think about the 14th Amendment. I also am curious to see if Justice Thomas says anything about the limits of Congress's power to legislate in defense of abortion. He teed this issue up a little bit years ago in a partial birth abortion case, where he sort of signaled his doubts that Congress had any power to legislate on abortion, either in defense of abortion rights or legislating restrictions on abortion. I kind of

wonder if Justice Thomas will signal that. And in fact, assuming Justice Thomas was the one as a senior most conservative other than Roberts to assign this opinion to Alito, perhaps he did assign it to Alito because he wants to write separately on a few issues. And so the 14th Amendment issue is one that I'm kind of keeping an eye out for. Yeah. So last question, a political one. Now,

Adam, you are from Iowa and you're this very nice guy, although I always like to say that Iowa nice is sort of minor league next to James's Minnesota nice. But I want to apply that question to Supreme Court politics. You know, there is a through line to this whole controversy and that through line runs through the office of Joe Biden. He's the guy who blew up this whole business with the attack on Robert Bork in 1987. And here he is in the middle of it now saying these ridiculous things. If we return abortion to the states, do you think that this is going to start to calm down? The court, I mean, the court's always been controversial, as you say, but do you think the temperature might come down from 212 degrees to just 150 degrees i mean the great irony of minnesota nice by the way is they lorded over us so much especially us iowans and that doesn't feel very nice that's because you as because because you're

literally beneath us um that's why i've always looked up to you james um i i'd say it's not going to end the litigation there's going to be so much litigation around abortion in the aftermath of this no matter what the court does here and again it'll be litigation over things like abortion in the case of the mother's life in danger litigation over an abortion pills litigation over congress's power on these issues. The FDA, the Biden FDA will immediately race and other agencies, HHS will immediately race to do some sort of executive action to protect a right to abortion in some cases. So that will get litigated in my own wheelhouse, the wonderful world of administrative law. So this is not going away out of the courts. And surely, I don't think it will take the temperature down. It will just change it in some ways. And I think it'll be good to have

new arguments about rights to abortion and the right to life rather than the same argument we've been having for 50 years. On that point, I did a piece for for rob one of rob's fine magazines uh commentary um i did a piece oh sure yeah about about um i mean i don't read it just so you know i just it's on the coffee table yeah i i read it uh i read it so you don't have to rob and i i had a piece that i didn't read um in the december issue where i tried i tried to describe roe v wade as the black hole of constitutional jurisprudence in america where it read in the December issue, where I tried to describe Roe v. Wade as the black hole of constitutional jurisprudence in America, where it's in the middle of everything, and it has this huge gravitational pull that just distorts everything around it. Every Supreme Court

case involving stare decisis becomes a proxy war over Roe. Medical regulations in the states become proxy wars over Roe. The Supreme Court confirmations, obviously, are proxy wars over Roe. It distorts everything. And I think the fact that this Supreme Court opinion was leaked is sort of the perfect example of this. Of course, it was going to be leaked. In fact, for what it's worth, I was running around saying to friends, I wish I would have put it in writing, of course, the draft will be leaked if it's going to be the draft that strikes down Roe. I did put it in writing in December, by the way. Oh, I'm jealous. I'm very jealous. And by the way, if we can strike down this president, Adam, I think we go after Wickard

next. That's just between you and me. I think somebody just needs to explain to progressives that overturning Roe would make it easier to overturn Citizens United and the Heller Second Amendment case. And then maybe everybody will get along now. What do you mean? Starry diseases won't matter then very much. Last question. So as we know, when you have people who want a certain outcome and they're willing to destroy any institution that stands in their way, what is aberrant at first eventually becomes the norm. Do you think there's

something special about this, that we got a leak of it because it was about the black hole, or do you think that leaks like this are going to become more common in the future and we'll just have to sigh and accept them and it will be another diminution of something that was previously thought to be an intact, serene, confident, closed institution? Yeah, so much for the norms, huh? this this is the this is the flight 93 election as applied to the supreme court that's exactly what this is um it doesn't mean that there will be more leaks i don't think there will be you saw sort of a flurry of not leaked opinions but leaked you know anecdotes out of the supreme court after bush v gore

um you saw it you've seen it over time kind of ebb and flow. The courthouse leaks more and more now. I don't think we'll see leaked drafts. In fact, I think the backlash to this within the court will cause justices to maybe have sort of more grown-up talks with their clerks about this kind of thing. My guess is the justices, even the progressive justices who will dissent, my guess is they hate this leak. And so I think you'll see actually more clamping down on the court. And I think that I'd be surprised if we see a lot of leaks out of here. And yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Good. Adam, thanks for joining us. And to revise and extend my previous remarks, I think Iowa nice is a very, very potent thing and actually does put the lie

to the Minnesota nice, passive, aggressive way of hiding what we really feel. People in Iowa just are genuinely nice. And I love Iowa. Where in Iowa are you from, by the way? I'm from Dubuque, the beautiful part of Iowa, up in the Northeast. Some of my family roots are from Minnesota. So we've got that, James. But I'll tell you, James, here of Iowa, up in the Northeast. Some of my family roots are from Minnesota. So we've got that, James. But I'll tell you, James, here in Iowa, you can come to the picnic and you can eat all the food that you brought. Well, I've been to Dubuque. I spent some time there and compared to Minneapolis. It's different, as we say. Thanks, Adam. Wow. So much rage.

I can tell between the two of you. That's nice, man. Give me New York. At least we're on. Our state didn't kill Buddy Holly. Okay. Okay. Now the gloves come off.

Yeah. He was going to do a gig here, but no, Iowa. Just Iowa ground had something to say about him. Lots of fun. So, by the way, you guys, it was a great conversation. And one of the things I keep hearing though, is that all women are mad about this and this, you know, that's not exactly true.

There's lots of pro-life women out there who are interested in the ideas of keeping, you know, the notion of motherhood as being something that the society values and mother's day is coming right up, right? If you got something, I've been bugging my daughter saying, you got to get the card. You got to get the card. Draw something, pop it in the mail. And, you know, when you're a little kid, you draw something or you buy some flowers, you pick some dandelions.

Okay, well, now it's a little bit different. And, you know, you're maybe a little bit older and you want to get your mom something that is going to stay with her the whole year round. Unlike the flower that dies or the card that gets put in the drawer. Moms are, well, they're different. They're one of the few people in your life who will still just leave a voicemail on your phone or just call just to say hi. So maybe on this Mother's Day, make that next call to mom extra special. Spoil your mom with a gift.

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sort of have a soundtrack to get me ready for the day. And then I pop them out and I never, ever worry that they're going to be out of juice because they're always full and ready for my daily walk. Your mom will love them too. Tell mom how much you love her. Make sure she hears it in crystal clear audio quality with Raycon. Go to buyraycon.com slash ricochet, and you'll get 15% off your Mother's Day order. That's buy, B-U-Y-R-A-Y-C-O-N, buyraycon.com slash ricochet. And we thank Raycon for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Well, this is the point where we usually talk about a variety of other things, but there's something we have to mention. And that's exactly, I hate to say it, Rob, but I'm going.

You are. But I'm not going to start drinking at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. That way lies madness. What do you mean? It's a Saturday. What are you talking about? End up in the Hudson River. No, no, no.

There's guardrails and stuff. Oh, okay. All right. Because this thing will go on for a while. Oh, yeah. A pub crawl means you go from one place to the other. It's actually kind of hard from where the city winery is. It's actually a city vineyard.

Don't get it confused with a city winery. That's up the river. But city vineyard is actually, it's kind of hard. You'd have to start running, and we'd have to not tackle you. We'll tackle you. Don't worry about it. Okay. So if you

would like to watch me drink at three o'clock and then yes with the attempt to jump into the river and be tackled by rob long and other ricochet members uh rob tell them what they got to do you got to join ricochet so you can hang out with me james lilacs andrew gutman a few other luminaries uh you know steve you're invited i can't i've got a daughter graduating from college next weekend all right well la-di-da. Look at you, Mr. Little Mr. Principles. Little Mr. Family Obligations.

Little Mr. Special. Well, look. So you hang out with me, James Lilacs, Andrew Govind, and some other VIPs. Not Steve. On May 14th, that's a week from tomorrow, New York City joined us at America's Future in the Big Apple. It is our first members-only bar crawl gathering. Look, we try, you know, after COVID, we tried to put together a more

highbrow event. There is a more highbrow event happening next month in June, but we just wanted to get something on the books soon because I'm tired of all this stuff. So it will start at City Vineyard, which is 233 West Street, New York, New York City Vineyard.

It's right on the Hudson. It's really a beautiful spot. It's going to be a beautiful day. Three o'clock on Saturday. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia.

Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. Hey, move those routers there.

Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them.

Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. The 14th, we're just going to hang out. Me, James, friends, old and new, enjoy some drinks. And it is part of our spring membership drive. So please join. We're offering 50% off our annual membership.

Just go to ricochet.com slash special. Use the coupon code future at checkout to get the discount as well as a free pass to this event. Please members only. We got to do this because we need more members. I have already told you that we are suffering under a legal judgment, which took a hit is legal. We took a hit.

The equivalent of a Russian Poseidon. It is exactly right. It was a very, very tough thing. In these days, we say the process is the punishment. The actual legal punishment would have been, I mean, really under $1,000. But you got to pay the legal fees for the plaintiff. And that was a magnificently large number just because of a stupid thing and just really because we're conservatives

and he doesn't like conservatives. And so he was not going to take his foot off the gas. And that's what happens. So we really do need you to join. Please do. If you ever thought about joining Ricochet, I thought, ah, do. We want you to join. We want you to join so we can pay, I thought, do. We want you to join.

We want you to join so we can pay our legal bills, but we really want you to join because we want to see you. And here's what I'd like you to do. I'd like you to join, help us pay our legal bills, but come to our pub crawl in New York City on May 14. Come up to me or James and say, I joined because I want to help you pay your legal bill and if you say that i will buy you a drink because the least i can do is buy you a drink for helping us pay our lawyers um because at least at least one of us should get something out of this um and our uh and actually not our lawyers i shouldn't say that it's like really our lawyers are being really really good to us um so ricochet.com special we need you to join we'd need you to join. We'd like you to join. And then also, once you join, you get to come to a big DC event in June with Byron York and a bunch of other stuff.

So this is the beginning of a really great in-person IRL phase of post-COVID Ricochet. We're coming back with a vengeance. It's entirely possible, too, that people who are not members of Ricochet will look upon this group of handsome attractive fascinating people having witty discussions and want to join on the spot so i will have a you know a pocket full of fives and ones and also a little changer because 27 50 i think is what is the uh is the special price that we're offering at ricochet.com future something like that i mean so i would have to i'll have quarters in other words so i'll give exact change for people who want to. Well, you have the little thing, like the old, the ice cream, the guy.

Come up. Give me a 20 and a 10. You have one. I know you have one, right? No, I actually don't. No. Really? You know what?

I hate coins. I've come to the point now where, and I still carry cash. I like cash. I really do. I feel like I have something when I have cash. I can look at my Apple Pay thing, and that's my balance. It doesn't mean anything. But when I have my dad's money clip.

Me too. Tuck that in my back pocket, and I feel like I'm ready. Wait, your back pocket? Yeah. Don't do that, dude. That's like you're losing. No, I'm not in New York. When I'm in New York, I switch it to the front pocket.

Because nobody ever gets ripped off in Minnesota. Well, we don't have a lot of strong armor robberies between the four blocks that I spend downtown. So when I get changed, though, I just look at it like, what am I going to do with this? It's going to go in a coffee can. And then eventually I'm going to have to go to the bank and I'm going to have to ask them for the sleeves. And at some point, and I do this once a year, I pour everything out on the floor and I separate the dimes and the nickels and the quarters and the rest of them. And I put them in those

and then eventually turn that into folding money. But coins are, it's like, tote up the number of things that you thought when you were growing up were just part of life, period. Like mail coming once a week, like coins. And we've lost more of these things we take for granted, I think, in the last 10 years than, well, find me another time when you think that so many common little things of life were tossed aside by some technological and societal improvements can you the 20s the teens the 90s i don't know what

yes steven no you got me i mean it's a it's a stumper it has a it's a stumper of a question that's not particularly interesting so i'm just basking what it's. But what do you got? What's your answer? Well, I don't think there's another time because, I mean, you can keep all the things. Newspapers are still around, but they're not important. Magazines, they're still around, but they're not important in the way that they used to be. I mean, you used to go up to Hudson's in New York, Times Square. There would be an entire wall. There'd be every single possible subculture you could imagine would be manifested in some glossy sheaf.

That's over. I mean, the assumptions that I used to make about life downtown, about there being a lot of people there, about seeing at twilight on a winter's night, all the lights pop on in the skyscrapers, this beautiful sight of the traffic leaving of the throngs in the skyway at lunchtime. It's gone because all of a sudden we decided to work from home, which is a paradigm shift that hits every single city you could possibly think of. So the last 10, 15 years have been, I mean, disrupt. They love to disrupt. We love this disrupting.

But it sometimes makes you feel as though everybody hits a certain point in their life where they realize, you know what? Yeah, I'm kind of the last, a dying breed of people who remember how it was. But the number of things that I remember that seem to have evaporated, like rubbing alcohol on your skin, it just is astonishing to me. And it's hard sometimes to feel in sync with the times when you keep looking around and saying, that's changed and that's different and that's changed. The pace of it, the acceleration of change and such right now

is I think what causes a lot of people to just simply check out and just put on their vinyl records of Pink Floyd and get out a ratty paperback book and just say, you know what, have fun. Well, you know, James, there are at most supermarkets these days, these machines where you can dump your coffee can of coins straight into it, and it will count them up automatically in about two minutes and spit out a receipt and you get your cash that way. Now, they charge about a 7% commission. Yes. But what's your time worth? My time's worth a lot more than 7% as opposed to rolling up coins on the floor. They took all those machines out of the stores here for some reason.

Really? Okay. There is, however, a machine, I think, that will take your coins and convert them into Bitcoin. There is a Bitcoin machine. Oh, that's great. At the supermarket where I shop. And it is patronized by absolutely zero people. Right. Right. You don't have to go back too far, though, to remember the good old days. How about just a little more than two years ago when we still had all-day breakfast at McDonald's? To me, the greatest casualty of COVID. The only good thing that happened in the Obama years was all-day breakfast at McDonald's.

I'm with John Yoo on this McDonald's business. And I don't know if it's coming back. All-day breakfast at McDonald's, by the way, is one of the great innovations that came out of globalism. That's an import from China. The McDonald's spent, I think it was almost a decade, decade and a half,

trying to get the Chinese to understand that you're not supposed to eat eggs and bacon and sausage after 10 a.m and the chinese like no no no you don't understand we eat them all day long and mcdonald's saying no no no no you don't you eat them uh you stop eating at 10 a.m and then individual uh franchise owners would just sort of break the rule and then mcdonald's side hey wait a minute you may be on to something because people in america like i want a sausage egg you know biscuit yeah um and i would want i won't want it too in the afternoon

because they're delicious it's really the only thing one of the very few things mcdonald's that's a savory item it's not i mean that's not not fries that is like genuinely delicious all day um i told my daughter once that the freest people in the world ever may have been people in the 1970s driving down the road with the top down, no seatbelts, smoking a cigarette. And I would tell her that and say, and by the way, buckle up and don't smoke cigarettes. But you just brought to mind the fact that in those days also, we would be eating our McDonald's out of styrofoam clamshells that fit together with a sort of nice little touch. And those are gone, of course, and the rest of it. I don't miss Styrofoam clamshells. And I think that's where I want to end this podcast, because sometimes a man's just got to say what's on his mind.

And I just said it. But I would also like to say that on my mind are Tommy John's underwear and Raycon's. Raycon's, in fact, later going to be in my ear. Support them for supporting us and join Ricochet today. Have we mentioned you should join Ricochet? You should, and we did. And if you could leave us a five-star review of Apple podcast, we'd be happy about that as well.

I assume Pete will be by next week, unless, of course, he's just realized Stephen's been knocking it out of the park. I know. Setting a new standard. So, again, I said this last week. It's been great, Stephen. We'll see you down the road somewhere. Listen, don't tell me any plans next week.

I get to figure at some point your camera's going to tilt and we're going to see a closet with Peter's head. It's just full of Peter's sweaters and realize that there's some silence of the lamb things going on down here. Peter will put on the lotion or he gets the hose. And with that, we end. Thanks. We'll see everybody at the comments

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