The Ricochet Podcast - To the Moon and Flipping a Grunt

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

Bondi's out at DOJ. SCOTUS heard another big case and issued another big ruling. We're at war, and Congress is out of the loop... We need a legal expert this week. John Malcolm joins — Vice President of the Meese Institute for the Rule of Law at Advancing American Freedom, and Executive Editor of the third edition of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution. Plus, Charles, Steve, and James are rejuvenated by the Artemis II launch, underwhelmed by Trump's address on the war, slightly stunned by modern slang, and mildly ticked by faulty diction. 

Unfortunately, you make them sound really cool when you say that. I don't like these people, but that makes me sort of think they're cool. Well, they aren't. And here we go. 10, 9, 8, 7. RS 25 engines. 8. 4, 3, 2, 1.

Booster ignition. And lift off. The crew of Artemis 2. Bound for the moon, humanity's next great voyage begins. It's the R ricochet podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Howard. I'm James Lillick. Today we talk to John Malcolm, the Institute for the Rule of Law. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Our enemies are losing in America, as it has been for five years under my presidency,

is winning and now winning bigger than ever before. Welcome, everybody. This is the Rickishay podcast episode number 783. Why don't you join us at Rickettshire? dot com from Wednesdays the Springs and you two can be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the internet. I'm James Lilleylux here in Minnesota for not the penultimate but soon to be penultimate and then ultimate episode from Minneapolis and I'm joined by Charles C.W. Cook in Florida and Stephen Hayward who I believe is broadcasting from John U's office which may explain the tie on the wall on the hangar. Is that actual U neckware that we're

seeing here in the video feed? It's actually you neckwear and new books and you everything behind us. So you go. Good for you. Good for you. I will get to the president's speech in a bit. He finally made that bully pulpit speech about around the people have been asking him to do. But first and foremost, in my mind, is the fact that it didn't blow up on the pad. I'm sorry, we're going back to the moon. That was fantastic. That was absolutely

stunning and brave, as they say the things that are neither. And we are indeed going back to the moon. And I'm curious what you guys, how you think this plays in the American consciousness right now because I think this is a great moment to do it. I'm all in favor of spending huge amounts of money to put people on other planets. I always have been. When I was a kid, I was just a space nut. And the sight of the rocketing into the heavens still thrills me.

It makes me glad to be an American. What say you? Yeah, so I was the same as you, James. I would get up on the West Coast at 5.30 in the morning, which is a lot for an elementary school kid, to watch the Gemini launches and the Apollo launches. And partly that's because my dad actually worked on the project, like many thousands of other Americans in those years. My dad had a small company that made some parts for the rocket stagings, and even the parachute release timer and relay for the Apollo capsule, which was kind of an important thing if you think about it, right? Yeah.

Right. And so, you know, he was in the middle of the whole Apollo 13 story that's dramatized in the film, not in Houston, but, you know, up all night with his engineers testing and retesting to see how low on Amperage the thing would still work in that desperate situation. situation. But I remember my dad saying later, I said, oh, why aren't you bidding on and trying to work on a space shuttle? And he said, NASA's becoming too bureaucratic and difficult to deal with. In the 60s, they were in a hurry, and they didn't have time to build in the stupid bureaucracy and slow things down and make it more expensive. And so my dad said no thanks by 1974. And so that's where we are today. The costs for NASA's projects are way higher than SpaceX and the other private sector efforts. And some of the stuff they're using, they're contracting out to the private firms, as they did with the rockets in the 60s and 70s.

But, you know, I do think that NASA became ossified. But, you know, one story you may know about was Apollo 12, the second mission to land. I don't know, a minute after takeoff or 30 seconds, the rocket got hit by lightning, and everything went dead. And, you know, today you would have said, well, you got to pull the punch the abort button. And instead they look around and the astronauts are rebooting things and they have a bunch of 28-year-old engineers with pocket protectors. And they'll look around. They do this and that. And they say, yeah, we're good to go.

We wouldn't allow that to happen. Right. I mean, now we've had two bad accidents with the shuttle, of course. And so we're more risk-averse than we were then. But still, that was a different world then. And I think a better one. Yeah, they had to reboot the operating system, all 642 kilobytes of it. Right.

Charles, you know, this is how I don't know how you feel about these things growing up. as a Brit as you did, you may have felt part of the anglosphere that made this possible, but you didn't have the same sort of flag waving rah-rah, here we go, go-eagles sort of thing. I, like Stephen, believe that Elon Musk is probably the future and he's going to get us to a Mars base. Starliner is an incredible piece of machinery, but still, still, I'm happy Artemis is in its way, will be on its way. I love it. I always have.

I didn't feel part of it. In fact, it was one of the things that made me realize how awesome America was. as a kid, they were the only country that had been to the moon and they had the space shuttle. So I didn't have any stolen valor. I thought this was a distinctly American achievement. I wanted to be a part of it, but I wasn't. Living in Florida, it's been really fun because I'm in North Florida, so I'm not too far away from the Kennedy Space Center,

and I'm close enough that I could just walk out the back of my house and watch it go. And it looked pretty close. So what we did is we put on the NASA app on the Apple TV. And then I sent the audio from it to every Sonos speaker in the house. So it felt like we were in the control room. And then when it started going, we walked out the back door and watched it actually go up. It was immense fun.

My kids were enthralled. Actually, one of them, though, wasn't here with me. He was at a baseball practice. And he said, and this is the most American thing I've ever heard. my life. My wife said, all of the kids at the baseball practice, drop their bat, stop playing baseball for a moment, and looked up at the sky to watch the rocket go up. That is America. That is absolutely America. Although, you know, to be somewhat dark here for a second, I can imagine you watching it go up and then there's a bright flash as it explodes.

And there's three seconds before your Sonos feed changes and you think, oh, I've got a lag problem here. I'm curious about what we're going to get for new technology. Are we going to get any tang out of this. Are we going to get the space pens that write upside down? And by the way, I'm always reminded of that anecdote that people tell, you know, well, the Americans, the Americans in their way, with all of their money and their desire to solve problems that didn't need to be solved, invented the space pen that could write upside down and have ink go flow to the ball at any single angle. The Russians used a pencil. And we're supposed to say, ah, those crafty, you know, those Russians, they're really cutting through it until somebody pointed out that's the worst thing

you want to use because it releases micro particles of graphite, which get into everything and clog relays, which is why, you know, they end up, you know, going down in flames and them telling nobody. Anyway, so. Well, James, I'm looking forward to that old newspaper cliche from the 60s to make a comeback. You remember it is. Any country that can land a man on the moon can solve X social problem. I always said the best version was any country that can land a man on the moon can abolish the income tax. But then the problem that cliche was we couldn't land a man on the moon for another 50 years. So now that we can, we'll bring it back. We'll bring it back. And so we'll have people with slide rules who are then trying to figure out exactly how to balance the federal budget.

Right, right. Well, enough about space. Let's get back to Earth with John Malcolm. John is vice president of the Edwin Meese, the Third Institute for the Rule of Law at advancing American freedom. John, welcome. Hi. Good to see you guys. Well, a little bit of shift at DOJ, Bondi out. Reports are the president gave the news as the two drove to hear initial oral. arguments before SCOTUS in that birthright citizenship case.

What would you say about her performance and what do you believe was the reason that she was shown to the door? Oh, yeah. Oh, a whole variety of reasons. She obviously hasn't had a great deal of success in terms of indicting some of the people on Donald Trump's enemies list. Certainly her handling of the Epstein files was something of a fiasco, but she helped drummed up a lot of interest for the whole thing by, you know, saying that this was just a cover-up, and the Biden administration was hiding all of these records. And then at one point, she was talked about, you know, a client list, and she said, it's right here on my desk and sitting right here, and, you know, we'll be releasing all of this stuff soon. And then it came out in dribs and drabs,

and she said there was no client list, and there were all kinds of problems with the redaction. And so no matter what she did at that point, she was accused of covering up, and it, no doubt infuriated Donald Trump. And that's probably just, you know, one of several things that she did. She, I think, tried to be a loyal soldier, you know, pursuing all of these investigations into the 2020 election, which clearly obsesses the president. She actually got indictments returned against Jim Comey and Letitia James, but they were dismissed. And so for, you know, that and various other sundry reasons, it was time for her to go. Well, John, can, given that Trump really wants to use the DOJ to persecute his enemies,

about which I have a certain political sympathy with, but the question is, can anyone do the job that he seems to want done by DOJ? Yeah, I think it's going to be very, very hard. I mean, he fired the U.S. attorney, the appointed U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia because he said that he wasn't going to do it, that the evidence wasn't there to indict either Comey or James. He then installed somebody who had been a personal attorney for him who had not been ever been a prosecutor at any point in her life and got those indictments returned. And then a judge ended up saying that she had not been validly appointed and threw the indictments out.

At this point with respect to Comey, I mean, he was charged with perjury for testimony that he gave before Congress. The statute of limitations has run. The charges, against Letitia James. You hear that she might be, they're looking into the same kinds of charges against Senator Adam Schiff from California, all have to do with mortgage fraud, kind of, you know, weak charges. And then they attempted to bring an indictment against these six Democratic senators who had put out a video, you know, that said that soldiers should disobey illegal orders. And not only did a grand jury refuse to return an indictment, but you're hearing that not a single grand juror voted to return that indictment, which is remarkable. I mean, I'm a former federal prosecutor. I mean, you have a

room of about 24 citizens. You have to get 16 of them to say, just that, you know, it's more likely than not that a crime was committed. The presentation is made entirely by government lawyers and government investigator and not a single one thought that there was a case there. So the headline, the headline is ham sandwich acquitted? That's exactly right. Ham sandwich not even presented on the menu. Well, how much of that is Bondi's fault? How much of that perhaps is just the case itself where people were disinclined to get the administration what they wanted for reasons? Well, I think a lot of that had to do with not, had nothing to do with, Pambani in the same sense that, you know, Janine Piro, the U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia

tried to bring felony charges against the DOJ employee who's since been fired for throwing a sandwich at an ICE officer. Grand jury refused to return. They let the ham sandwich off and then they got thrown at the officer. They actually brought misdemeanor charges against him, which doesn't require a grand jury to return an indictment. And the guy got to acquitted for that. So, you know, some of these cases, I do think that with respect to the Epstein files and the halting release of this and the overpromising what they were going to show, she bears some responsibility for that. I see a certain paradox here in that on the one hand, a lot of the blame has to be at Trump's feet because Trump's obsessed with silly things.

And he's asking his attorney general to do silly things. and when you ask somebody to do silly things, they very often get silly results. On the other hand, the conservative movement in general, and Trump in particular in some senses, has goals that are quite hard to accomplish. I think most of them are correct, but they are hard to accomplish because they require the unsettling and often the reversal of lots of precedents and bureaucratic habits. and you really need someone deft to do that. You need an Edwin Meese.

And so how much is this the product of because Trump has a lot of silly ideas as well as good ones, he's not picking someone who he can tolerate who is really exceptionally good. Like, you know, Bill Barr. I just looked at Pam Bondi, and I have nothing particular against her. Florida. She was fine here. But she's not the person who's going to upend America in the Trumpian mold, right? I think what you're talking about when you're talking about a Bill Barr or an Edwin Meese, it's a very different kind of nominee. So it used to be the case, particularly in a post-Watergate era, that while attorneys general are part of the administration,

are supposed to implement a president's policies in terms of, you know, defending laws that he's gotten passed or or changing priorities in terms of prosecutorial direction, that presidents were under no circumstances supposed to get involved in criminal investigations. And that was largely done to protect the integrity of the investigation and also protect them from political fallout. Donald Trump has blown through all of those barriers. You know, used to be that you could only, the president could only talk to the Attorney General, maybe the Deputy Attorney General.

There were protocols in place, you know, for how these things go. And now my understanding is that Donald Trump calls whoever he wants to in the Justice Department about anything he wants to. If he doesn't like the way the banner that they've hung of his face outside of the Justice Department, which I faced, by the way, from my office, he can call the janitor and ask him to, you know, rearrange it. And he just doesn't care. I mean, he has supporters who will sit there and say that the Biden Justice Department

with some justification weaponized the justice system and that he is out to rectify all of that. And, you know, certainly the way he appears to be rectifying it is by exacting enough pain against his Democratic opponents that everyone will cry uncle and no one will ever do this again. I don't think it's going to work. But anyway, so a Bill Barr and an Edwin Meese, they honored those limits. And they said, this is for your good, to protect the rule of law, and you will not ask questions about these investigations. And a Bill Barr, of course, had the guts to stand up, both when it favored the president by, for instance, saying we're not going to date on either the Russiagate allegations. or the obstruction of justice allegations,

even though Mueller had at least suggested that the latter was potentially prosecutable. But he also had the guts to stand up to Donald Trump and say, there is no evidence of massive fraud in the 2020 election, and we're not going to pursue it. And if you want, my resignation, here it is, and the president accepted it. But they're also brilliant, right?

I mean, there were brilliant people. And I think that's one thing I'm driving at is I found it really frustrating with Trump because he won. He got his revenge, in my opinion, by winning. And he has all of these ideas, some of which are important, some of which are the ideas that the conservative movement has had for years and that he has just picked up.

And I just, I'm asking, that's not going to get done by a Pam Bondi or Matt Gates who never got there, right? You need someone who is a hard core heavyweight. And I'm just, is Trump going to pick this guy, or is he going to fail? Because it seems to me that he's going to fail. Well, I'm not so sure that picking somebody who's intelligent is going to still get him what he wants. I mean, look, there are many, many respects in which this president is exerting executive authority. He's challenged all kinds of norms in court.

And he's actually won a fair number of these challenges, and he's likely to win more. He lost on the tariff case. He may lose on birthright citizenship. He might lose the Lisa Cook case. But he's going to win more often than not on the cases that he has been bringing. and they have certainly been very, very aggressive. But whether he picks Todd Blanche or Harmeet Dillon or Zeldon or Janine Piro, you know, I, these kind of personal vendetta stuff.

Right. I think that the IQ of the person whom he appoints. Oh, no, no, I don't mean that stuff. That's all silly. I just mean the rest of the agenda that he has is benefits from a very smart AG. Oh, that is true. Look, they've been very good. good about the cases that they have been bringing. I mean, they're losing in all of these district

courts because the challengers are being strategic about where they're filing these cases, but they're winning most of them the appellate level and certainly at the Supreme Court. And that shows there's some very smart attorneys who are picking and choosing which cases to bring and when to file. Well, how about this, John? If we want a big name, or Charlie, if we want a big name for AG, why don't get one from the past? How about a guy named Robert F. Kennedy? I can't listen to that. I know, I know. Can I switch gears to the Supreme Court, John, for a bit?

Because that's the other thing on our mind this week. So, I mean, everyone I think in the media would say Pam Bondi had the worst week in Washington. But actually, I think Katanji Brown Jackson had the worst week in Washington because she's going to last a lot longer. And so first you had the eight one decision early in the week on the Colorado statute to try to ban conversion therapy. And not only was she the sole decision. and a rather dumb one, but even Justice Kagan couldn't take it any longer, and in a footnote, swatted her down. And I thought, boy, that really shows you what a blunder Biden made putting her on the court.

And then in the birthright citizenship case, she said some of the silliest things. I want to go through that case more seriously with you. So there's that, and you don't have to spend any time enough if you don't want to. But let's go through these two cases. I think that first one, being eight one, was pretty significant because a lot of blue states want to. I tend to avoid the language of the LGBT agenda, but there really is one at work

behind these statutes, right? They're trying to really enforce a specific ideological, identitarian orthodoxy, and the court did well in us, I think. I assume you're following all of these, as you usually do. Yeah, look, Colorado in particular

is aggressive in this agenda. They went after Jack Phillips the Baker. They went after the woman who had 303 creative, the website, and now there's this case, versus Salazar. Katanji Brown Jackson would not have been my pick. My former employer has said that I actually said that she was a good pick.

I never said that she was good pick. All I said was that she was not the most radical nominee in the history of Supreme Court nominees. That prize could have easily gone, for instance, to Ruth Bader Ginsburg over Katanji Brown Jackson. But she's there now. She is life tenured. An eight-to-one decision doesn't always mean that you are. wrong. I, you know, Justice told the

reporter in Morrison versus Olson. I think that time that his dissent has stood the test of time. But, you know, she's not only going to be there next week or next month, giving someone else an opportunity to take her place as having had the worst month,

but she's going to be there for as long as she wants to be there. I suppose now that Pam Bondi is on the hot seat. The two people who are most happy about that are Kirstie Nome and Corey Lewandowski. Well, right, I say that Katanji Brown Jackson will be a longer legacy of Biden and Hunter Biden's paintings. Yes, that's not a hard call.

Now, the birthright citizenship case, I was on an airplane, and so I couldn't hear it, so I've caught some snippets. But it doesn't sound like it went very well. And, you know, reading a tea leaves is always a doubtful thing to do because they often surprise you. But what's your sort of first pass handicap of the thing? Well, going into it, I thought it was highly likely that the administration would lose. I think, by the way, they actually have a very strong argument. I mean, you know, people like my colleague, Amy Swearer, has written law review articles on this. Yvonne Werman, Randy Barnett, Kurt Lash, and very, very serious scholars, think that there is, you know, within the phrase, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, a notion of allegiance that was discussed in the 14th Amendment was adopted.

And there were a few of the justices, Justice Alito, Justice Thomas, although I didn't say a whole lot who, you know, appeared to take those arguments seriously. I still think that it's likely that the administration will lose this case. Jonathan Turley thinks that the administration actually is going to win, but he appears to be a sole voice out there. But, you know, as they dig into these briefs, there were a lot of amicus briefs files, some of them were really quite good. You know, they may change their mind. I mean, you mentioned before about the Child v. Salazar case. I mean, if you had told me after that oral argument that Sonia Sotomayor was going to join with the majority, I would have said you were crazy based on the questions that she asked,

and yet she did end up joining the majority in that case. So I think it's likely the administration will lose a birthright citizenship case, but I think it's closer than many people think. And we'll see. Well, now you make an interesting point. You mentioned Elon Werman and Richard Epstein has joined the, joined the, right, and this used to be a very fringe theory limited to my friends, who really, I think, were the first to come up with it 30 years ago, Ed Earler and John Eastman,

right? And now it's kind of gone mainstream, and you have people like Richard Epstein and Ellen Wormann and several other people you mentioned. I also think back to a case, and I wonder if Trump loses this case, I wonder if it might have the effect of the loss in the Kilo case 20 years ago. You remember that case that IJ brought for using eminent domain? And they were sure they were going to lose, and they thought they'd be lucky to get two votes, would be ecstatic with three, and they got four. And what happened then was a political backlash, right? A lot of states changed their laws. Now, I don't know if a loss in this case, I mean, I think if you lose, it's going to propel this argument forward. And I keep going back to what I hear about in California a lot,

and Trump's talked about it, is the birthright tourism of the rich Chinese, for example, right? I don't see how under any common sense understanding of subject to the jurisdiction or of could apply to people who come here for a week with, you know, companies that organize this in China to have a baby so you can get the option of United States citizenship later and then just leave on the next plane out of town. So, you know, other aspects of this for, you know, a Mexican family that's been living and working here for two years, that's different and more difficult. But it seems to me that at least on that birthrights tourism phenomenon going on, that somewhere there's got to be a change in that. And maybe it's legislative, maybe it's

constitutional, always harder, but it seems to me that even a loss is going to be advanced the ball down the field. Yeah, well, certainly as a political matter, it might. Birth tourism is a reality. You know, it depends. If the Trump administration loses, it depends to some degree on how it loses. Whether they say, well, just as a constitutional matter, anybody who's born on our shores, except if you're an ambassador's kid or an invading army, you are a citizen, then that's it. require a constitutional amendment. If they sit there and say, well, you know, if you're a temporary sojourner here and you really don't have any status, you're not domiciled here, you haven't been there for a while, that maybe Congress under, you know, clause five of the 14th Amendment can pass

some legislation on that, then maybe you can do something legislatively. Do you think that the Trump administration's position, which is in line, I think, with the mainstream rights position on the unitary executive is going to survive. We've got a case with the Federal Reserve where I think that the argument shouldn't be any different for the Federal Reserve than for any other agency, but I suspect it will be practically just because the Federal Reserve works well and there's so much faith in it and the United States has the reserve currency and so forth. I'm very interested in this because I'm very much of the view that the unitary executive theory is correct, but I'm a little bit nervous that we're

going to start seeing these exceptions, which over time will eat away at the hole. So I don't, you know, look, I don't think there's anything particularly novel about the unitary executive theory. It wasn't hatched out of thin air. I mean, it just says, you know, Article 2 vests the executive power in A.m. president of the United States. So there's nothing magical about that. I think you are right. I mean, there's the one case involving the head of the Merit Systems Protection Board and, you know, the FTC, about whether you can fire somebody from an independent agency for cause. The Federal Reserve, that case is different against Lisa Cook because the president is purporting to have cause against her.

And it says, I get to make the determination about what's caused. and how much due processes do. I think he may lose that case. But he didn't attempt to fire her without cause. Now, John Sauer was asked during that argument, hey, what's the diff? You know, I mean, are you arguing that we could fire her? You could fire her without cause? And he said, no, we're not making that argument. And it was just kind of left hanging out there. I don't see what the big difference is other than the political argument that you make, which is some people may say, you know, the Federal Reserve is just too

important to touch. But look, that did not stop Janine Piro, probably at the direction of Pam Bondi, from issuing subpoenas to the Federal Reserve that basically implied that they were going to charge Jerome Powell

with perjury. That's certainly an attempt to, and many people said, well, this is really just an attempt to bully the Federal Reserve. they weren't firing Jerome Powell, but they were just threatening to indict him of bringing pressure. But if they win that case against, you know,

on the independent agencies and the ability to remove somebody without cause, then I suppose the Federal Reserve is fair game and a future president, maybe this one, will decide to test it out. Trying to think of what other big ones are left out there. It's only early April. Are there any more big cases still to be argued,

John, I know we're going to wait until the end of the June, as usual, were some of the big ones. But what's still left to be argued that's a big one? I've lost track. Well, the president just granted, I mean, not the president. The court just granted cert like two weeks ago, but ordered argument for the second week in April for a case about whether the president can end the temporary protective status. Oh, right. Or for all kinds of, you know, aliens from different countries. You know, it's supposed to be temporary protective status, but of course, in Washington, there's very, very few temporary things, and people have been there for years.

And the president said, okay, I'm going to end through the secretary, it was Kirstie Knoem, now to be Mark Wayne Mullen. We're going to end temporary protective status for all these people that they're no longer in danger, national disasters, natural disasters are over. You know, we're ending this. And a bunch of lower court judges said, oh, no, you can't do that. You didn't follow proper procedure. Well, there's a statute in place that says that a judge cannot question the secretary, DHS secretary's determinations to grant or terminate or extend temporary protective status. And twice the Supreme Court lifted injunctions by lower court judges, but that that did nothing.

District court judges kept right on granting these injunctions. the Second Circuit allowed that injunction to stand. And I think the court is going to say, enough is enough. This statute is very clear that judges have no role in this, and that's what it means. So that's an important case. Obviously, millions of people will be affected by that, and that's going to be argued, I think, next week. So that's quite an interesting issue, because we had a case. The first birthright citizenship case that wasn't,

where the matter of injunctions was raised and supposedly limited. And yet I still see people throwing their hands up and saying, ah, the lower courts are out of control. They either won't uphold precedent or they keep intervening and arrogating themselves and enjoining clear legal uses of executive power. So did that CASA case have a lot less forced than we were told it did, or are we just seeing the around the edges exceptions? Well, I think it was an important and important case.

I mean, nationwide injunctions had been around for a while, but they were really just out of control in this administration. But there were still other avenues, class actions, et cetera, a state or a judge determining if there were many states involved that you couldn't grant complete relief without basically imposing a nationwide injunction that left room for this sort of shenanigans by lower court judges. And, you know, the lower court judges will sit there and say, well, all of these rulings, not the Cossack case, but these rulings, lifting these injunctions, you know,

their interim orders, and we're not really getting any reasoning as to why they're granting these issuing, why they're granting these different orders. So, hey, we're trying our best until you give us greater clarity. I think some of that's a bit nonsense. I mean, you know, you can hear the music as well as anybody and know what kind of tune they're playing and should be able to govern yourselves accordingly. But, you know, district court judges, their life tenure too, they're going to do what they're going to do. And I think the Supreme Court this time is going to put an end to this. John, let's talk about where you work.

Advancing American Freedom. Now, according to my little web search here, you're located on 801 Pennsylvania Avenue right next to the FBI building, which some regard as restricting American freedom. so there's a nice little, you know, push-pull thing going on. There must be some static electricity in the middle of the street. Tell us more about this institution, and specifically the Institute for the Rule of Law, because that is one of the things that we like to think characterizes the United States, imperfect, though it may be, separates us from other places, and is an inherited tradition that goes back to Roman times.

Is it in peril this rule of law? Has it always been so? Have people always looked upon it a bit of scantz and say it's two-tier, it's rigged? where are we let's let's start there where are we rule of law wise in america is compared to where we've been well it's interesting you talk about the push and pulse we're across the street from the from the FBI we are caddy corner to the Department of Justice yeah we're also across the street from the national archives where the constitution sits so the meis institute for the rule of law obviously named after edwin mee 75th attorney general of the

united states we used to i used to be in charge of the mee center at the heritage foundation We've all come over to advancing American freedom. The organization doubled in size when we did. And it was founded five years ago by former vice president Mike Pence. And in terms of the rule of law, you know, we care about things like the issues that we've been discussing. Judicial overreach, executive branch overreach, reempowering or giving Congress a backbone so that it starts to exercise its constitutional prerogatives. We care about things like judicial interpretation, promoting originalism and originalist scholarship. You know, that's important.

The non-weaponization of the Justice Department, I'm a former federal prosecutor. I was, for seven years, I was an assistant U.S. attorney. I was a deputy assistant attorney general, just like John U. in the Bush administration. We were colleagues. You know, very important that the rule of law be upheld, particularly when you have the ability to incarcerate someone and take away their liberty interests. And we work with the conservative people in the conservative legal movement to try to bolster

their efforts to put forward what we think are correct and defensible positions in a whole host of areas. Is there a golden moment in which the rule of law in America was probably at its apex? It was applied fairly. Behind the scenes there were no men

meeting in rooms with cigars and whiskey to determine how a case should go or has it pretty much always been an imperfect thing, this crooked timber, et cetera? Well, I think there used to be a perception that when you were appointing life tenured federal judges that you look for things like qualifications and not for things like,

you know, do you think they were going to agree with you as a political matter on this issue or that issue? That certainly appears to have broken down. So you have some judges who I don't think ought to be on the bench who are there and they're going to do what they're going to do. But look, I think this court is a solid court, certainly from the perspective of being an originalist. It's the strongest the court has perhaps ever been. I mean, even in Katanji Brown Jackson during the confirmation hearing talks like an originalist. And Elena Kagan says, we're all originalists now. Some are more rigorous in how they practice it. But I think at the Supreme Court, they're not cowed particularly by this president. I mean, Neil Gorsuch and Amy

Connie Barrett, he said after the tariff case that they were an embarrassment to their families. I don't think that either that or his showing up in court the birthright citizenship case is going to make any difference in terms of how they're going to rule. I think they have a backbone. So I think the rule of law is in pretty good hands at the moment with the Supreme Court. At the lower court, it's more of a mix. Let's talk about advancing American freedom, the organization under which you are tucked or in which you are tucked. If you had one issue that you had to work upon to advance American freedom, the one thing that says this is where we're losing the most, what would have been? Well, the thing about advancing American freedom and with Mike Pence is that it is a principled conservative organization unapologetic about that.

And there are times when the president does things which we support, like when they extract Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela, fighting the war in Iran. There are times when he does things that we do not support, the terrorists, taking equity positions in companies. and we feel free to advance arguments to support our positions and let the chip to fall where they may. There are other organizations that are out there that do not follow that practice. This may sound petty and small-minded, but sometimes, those of us here,

think that the restrictions of an American freedom can be something as quotidian as a light bulb or the ability of the toilet to flush with gusto. So is this one of those things that you look? I mean, when you cast your eye upon the great American country, you can see, of course, legislative initiatives, laws, things that restrict American freedom. But there's also the matter in which the regulatory state has so many little effects on people

that we get penned in a little bit more by these things. Trump's done a lot to get rid of that, I'm saying. But is that a plane in which you involve, engage, or are you more concerned of things at a more stratospheric level? Oh, no, no, no. We certainly fight back against overreach. by the administrative state. It's not only President Trump in terms of his deregulatory effort that I think made some significant advances there. The Supreme Court has tried to return power

to Congress through the major questions doctrine, through overturning Chevron deference with the lower bright and relentless cases, and sitting there and saying, you know, look, Congress, you can't just pass vague laws and then go home and fundraise. You know, if you're going to hand over vast quantities of power, you're going to have to be explicitly clear that you're doing that and why you are doing that and lay down some intelligible principles that an agency can impose. And then we'll decide whether or not you had the, you know, the congressional, whether you had the constitutional authority to delegate that. So all of this is an attempt to reign in the administrative state. I hope that Congress seizes that opportunity. I hope the courts

take Loper Bright seriously and say, okay, we're now going to look at laws and implementing regulations, and we're going to come up with our best interpretations and not just defer to an interpretation by an agency that falls within the realm of reasonable, even if it's not the best interpretation. In terms of things that I worry about, I worry on both the right and the left, that there appear to be arguments that, you know, I'm not that apocalyptic. I think that we've had tough times and we're going to continue to move along throughout different administrations. But to a people on the right and on the left who seem to think, if we don't seize the reins of power and do absolutely everything we can now during the Biden administration, during the Trump

administration, all is lost, and we might as well just, you know, give up and cease being a country. And I fight back against that. I think these are important fights that we have. But I do not believe that everybody who espouses a different view from me is necessarily evil, nor do I believe that if I lose an argument on a particular issue at a particular time, that that's it. The world as we know it will never be the same. Well, I agree with a lot of what you say, particularly having Congress vote on these things, as opposed to delegating to an EPA guy who says that your backyard inflatable kiddie pool is a wetland and cannot be taken away.

So yes, indeed. All right, John, Malcolm, thanks a lot. lot. Usually on the way out here, we say, and don't forget to read his book or his recent paper. And so the next time we have you, we would like you to have a book done so that we can read more about the rule of law. I'll tell you what, a good thing to start. I have to be right here. I didn't even add. Oh, yeah. Well, is the heritage guide to the Constitution. This is something that I edited with Josh Blackman while we're still at the Heritage Foundation. I'm very, very proud of this.

And anybody who wants to understand originalist arguments and understand the Constitution better, can look at it, clause by clause, and I would encourage people to get this book and read it. I'd write it, but I edited it. Heatedly endorsed, John. I assign that to students. I use it myself a lot. It is one of the best resources, and I'm so glad you guys did the new edition. Thank you. Fantastic. John, thanks for joining us today. We hope to have you back in the future. Good luck, and we'll talk to you later. Bye-bye. Sounds great. Well, he mentioned there briefly the war in Iran, which apparently advancing American freedom is for. We are at war in the president. Finally gave that bully pulpit speech. A lot of people had been

asking him to do. Stood up there and addressed the nation and said, and I quote here, I said a lot about things about the, you know, armed forces swift, decisive victories, it's, Navy's gone, Air Force, and Ruins. He said their command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is being decimated as we speak. And then talking about the Strait of Hormuz, he said, you know, when it comes to that oil, we don't need it, we don't need it.

We've, he said, quote, we've beaten and completely decimated Iran. They are decimated both military and economically in every. other way in the countries of the world that receive oil through the straight must take that passage, must take care of that passage. Use it for yourselves, he said. Iran has been essentially decimated. Here we have the clip from Princess Bride where you keep using that word. All right. I know this is the least important thing upon which to fasten, but I have. Would either like of you to weigh in on whether we've lost the word decimate as well? yeah sadly i'm afraid we have it's like using impact as a verb i've been against that forever and i've

lost the other phrase that's now 30 years old is we're going to grow the economy it's just it's fingernails on the blackboard to me i'd be i'd squash all these i'm be mused by what you said there yes jarrs nauseous nauseated is one upon which i insist but have lost there's all manner of these and i drive my kids crazy by insisting upon them, but yes, we've lost that. Nauseous and nauseated, of course. If you are poisonous and poisonated, yeah, somebody corrected me on that once,

and I can't not undo it. And it's a tremendous burden, isn't it, gentleman to walk in the world? Momentarily, James, momentarily is another one that is wrong. But I feel bad about this because at Disney World, they still have that old great voice that they had from the 50s. use it on the trams that take you from the parking lot. And it says, the tram will be here momentarily. Which is wrong. Which is wrong. But I mean, we can't go back and get him to re-record it because he's dead, but he should re-record it. It won't be here momentarily. It

will be here in a moment. And then it will stay here until it's taking you to the front. Is that Paul Freeze who did the voice for that? I think it might be. It might be. Because Paul Frees did the haunted mansion quite nicely. He was all over the place. The man of a thousand voices, they call him. You know, I think I've heard four, but he was great and distinctive. All right, war, so what do you think of the whole speech? Did you like it?

Was it mission accomplished? Was it, I may keep hearing, we're going to talk. We're not going to talk. We're talking to them. We're not talking to them. All I know is that they're continuing to pound and to pound and to pound and degrade. And the Straits of Hormuz thing is very interesting. We talked about this before.

We don't need the oil. We don't need it. We don't care what effect it's going to have on you. Gas goes up for a little while. Gas goes up for a little while. Let's use this whole as an object lesson to show how absolutely toothless the European military is and how China doesn't want to seem to tiptoe over and do something in concert with the Americans. I have nothing new to add on that, but to you, gentlemen, mind?

Well, Charlie, what did you think? I know you've been wanting the president to say something, and I have my own thoughts, but since you've been demanding it, I want to hear your evaluation. I thought, as the English say, it was rubbish. I thought it was rubbish, and it's not going to be. I'm against the war. I think the case is quite strong. I think we're doing quite well, with the exception of the Strait of Formos, which is big. I do think there's a big political price being paid, but that's what power is for, you could argue. I just think that Trump's

unfocused, and he has never created a coherent framework for the war. I wished for the entire thing that Marco Rubio was speaking, because he would have done it so well. Trump is, in his own way, a really good communicator, but just not things like this. The bread and butter of being president eludes Trump, whereas the bread and butter of running for president and introducing new ideas into the national bloodstream is natural to him. But this, where you have to be really focused, Reagan was an absolute master at it. Franklin Roosevelt, unfortunately, was a master at it. But Trump can't do it.

And so I felt having called for him to do it as if I was perhaps wrong. or he should have let Rubio do it. Yeah, I mean, I think I said last week, or one of these recent episodes, that I think Trump is not good at this kind of speech, the Oval Office address, or even here he's standing, and the same idea. That's just not his strength.

I don't go in for the Trump place for D-Chess, although sometimes it kind of works out that way, I think, for instinctual reasons and not deliberate reasons, but never mind that. I do suppose that I could be persuaded that he is being deliberately inconsistent, as a way of keeping the Iranians off balance. At some point, that's got to end, or resolve itself somehow.

There are two pieces of news I saw reported first thing Friday morning. One is on the Strait of Hormuz, our European and Far Eastern allies had a virtual meeting to talk about it that we declined to participate in. Didn't send anybody to listen even. Maybe that's true, but it does suggest that the wider story you hear that Trump is really using, us to bash NATO or maybe even get us out of NATO or cut our commitment to NATO by some significant portion. You know, maybe that's possibly true. He's trying to keep our allies off balance, which I think is possibly ill-advised. The second thing reported Friday is that our intelligence or maybe it's foreign intelligence thinks Iran still has half of their weapons

in inventory. And so while we've degraded lots of capacities and all the rest, they still have a lot of armaments. And I don't know what's going on, but it sure doesn't look like they are getting ready to surrender any moment soon. So I'm not sure. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. If half the stuff is in underground cities. Yeah.

What are they going to do? Yeah. I don't know. Unfortunately, you make them sound really cool when you say that. Oh, they have weapons in underground cities. I don't like these people, but that makes me sort of think they're cool. Well, they aren't. but they looked around and they saw the best thing to do

was to hold it was to have these underground complexes and then just take them out and we load them on the missile launchers from what I understand. So we've been bombing the entrances and the exits and they get the construction crews out and they dig them out and then they do it again. So if they have half of their stuff and it's still buried they can't get to it,

yeah, that's bad. But if you notice the number of missiles they've been firing and dropping and dropping and dropping and dropping. Yeah, it seems to be brutal, but then it seems to be resilient. And again, we're five weeks into this, and I think to expect anything else is a bit much. But attention is going to flutter and fade, I think. So it's good that he talked about it.

Well, it's pretty clear that he's not calm. Well, the epicycle he had going for a couple of weeks of calming the markets by making some erratic statement about we're about to win or about to. I think that has dissipated now. And so that doesn't work. You can't calm the markets now with just another happy talk statement. Yeah, and this is something I must say I dislike about Trump, because it is so detached from reality.

I follow the stock market quite closely, and I read the Wall Street Journal's stocks page, and every day for the last three weeks, it's the most short-term nonsense you've ever seen. For a start, and this is an indictment of people who are criticizing the war, for a start, every small thing gets reported as if it's breaking news. The Dow went up 500 today, the Dow dropped 500 today,

mortgage rates have gone up 0.2%. Yeah, I understand. I'm not saying that it's not very annoying if you're buying a house right now, or if you're liquidating your stocks right now, or if you need to fill up your car in the next few weeks. But the hanging on the small changes in the markets is irritating, and Trump indulges it. And what he really should say is,

guys, we're going to get this done. And it will be too long because I'm not in favor of Forever Wars, but we do have to finish this. But instead what I read is while he's trying to send signals to the market, so it will go up again. For what? A week? And then it goes back down again.

I know. I know. All right. Well, we have a couple of things here that I want to mention to you. One, here's a headline on USA Today's page. This was put in my show notes that I should say this. Quote, Gucci Main allegedly robbed kidnapped its studio by rapper Poo Shisty, D.O.J. says. Finally.

I thought immediately of this tweet, which floats around from time to time it came. about a couple of years ago of a guy named Damon Owens who said, I'm 50. All celebrity news looks like this. Quote, curtains for Zusha, K-smog and Bat Boy caught flipping a grunt. He's absolutely right. Absolutely right. The other thing I wanted to mention, of course, is that if you would like a flip a grunt, you can do so with fellow ricochet people in Milwaukee, July 24th, 26. You've got plenty of time to get there to get your plane tickets, hope the price of jet fuels come down by then. Or just take the train.

It's the 24th, 26th of July. And if you're wondering, what do you mean? Meetup. That's because Rickashay members get together in person, in person, with others occasionally. And if you're thinking, oh, I don't want to go. I love the place. I love the people. I go some more talk politics.

I found that I absolutely never talk politics in a ricochay meeting. It's been everything. But it's not getting together with people you've known for years but haven't met in the flesh. It's great fun. Do it. and if you're a Rurcache member and you would like others to come to you, well, you know, just call one in your neighborhood

and you'd be surprised how many people show up bearing hot dishes and smiles and the rest of it. It's a strange and wonderful thing about RICOchet. And if you don't know what RICOCHA is and you just stumbled into this by some trick of the algorithm, well, first of all, there's 782 podcasts for you to listen to. Secondly, there's lots more at RICOA.com, but behind the wall, the member feed is a whole community,

and yes, you have to pay a little to get to it. but that means it's self-selecting. It's a code of conduct, and you will find and meet wonderful people who talk about absolutely everything. There's more to life than politics. There's moonshots and Charles telling stories of boys in the baseball field dropping their bats and gloves to regard with reverence as American power thunders into the imperialian again. All right.

Well, we'll see everybody in the comments at Rickettsay 4. Whatever it is. Give us that five-point rating if you don't mind. Stephen, Charles. It's been great fun and we'll see you next week. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Rurcache 4. Whatever. Bye-bye.