The Ricochet Podcast - Two Plus Two Still Equals Four

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Rob Long and John Yoo are reunited with James to serve up some laughs as they sift through some unpleasant truths that many of us would prefer to ignore. The trio yawns at the conclusion of the record-long government shutdown but sees plenty to worry about in its resuming business as usual; considers some elementary underpinnings of the affordability problem; John Yoo takes a barrage of questions on the SCOTUS term and presidential war powers; and Brother Rob takes us out with some thoughts on walking one's path even in tough times.Sound from this week's opening: The House adopts the Senate’s plan to reopen the government and Sen. rand Paul talks the deficit on NewsMax2

No guests. We're guests, John. Oh, I'm the guest. Oh, I thought I'd finally been elevated to host. You could be the host, I can be the guest. No, no. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. It's the Rikishay podcast with Brother Rob Long. He's back. And John Yu, he's back as well. I'm James Lillick, so we're going to talk about everything that's going on. So let's have ourselves a podcast. On this vote, the ayes are 222, the nays are 209. The bill is passed.

The motion is adopted. We're facing a $2 trillion deficit, so I don't think we're going to get out of this annual deficit by taxing people. Now that tariffs are out there, the president's saying tariffs are his favorite word, and he loves tariffs. Replace the word tariff with tax, and you would think, oh, my good. Goodness, Republicans love taxes. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rickusay podcast number 765.

I'm James Lallex here in Minneapolis. Rob Long is back. Brother Rob is amongst us. I don't know where he is. We'll find it in the second. And also joining us is Schrodinger's pundit, John Yu. Is he a host? Is he a guest?

Is he alive? We don't know exactly. We're going to consider him a host, because after all of these years, it just seems ridiculous not to grant him that honorific. So welcome, John. Welcome, Rob. It's about damn time.

I'm against granting John Any honorific if it comes down. Although I feel like this is the last week of the major league season. This is when they pull all the people up from AAA. Indeed. Well, here you are. And we're glad to have you. And there's so much to discuss today. We haven't had Rob on for a while.

And so we'd like to get Rob's take on things as they have been. This topic comes up an awful lot. I know it's important. but I cannot gin up the passions exactly to discuss the before, the after, the during, whatever, of the shutdown. Because the shutdown just seems like such theater, and I tire of it. But, you know, you can't do that. This is the Rickshay podcast. We've got to have an opinion.

We've got to set forth what we believe. So, government's back. 43 days. Wow, I don't know how we made it. President signs a funding bill late Wednesday, fund the government through, well, through January 30th. So, yeah, you know, here we go again. The agreement reverses the mass federal layoffs. And I seem to remember that there was something brooded about that this would be the opportunity to just decap, well, not decimate, but decimate plus large sections of the federal government by just saying, oh, we're going to zero you out and can't come back.

That didn't happen. What do you think, guys? Win, loss. Let's look at it this two ways. The actual winners and losers and what are now being thrown to us as the perceived winners and losers in the spin game.

Rob, you go first. It's been a while. Well, I mean, you know, the reason you're sick of it talking about these is we have them every year, practically. I mean, we should start to number them because, like, World War I, World War II. So we keep track.

No, give names like hurricanes. Yeah, exactly. This is shut down, you know, Charlie, Bertha or something. And I am baffled by them. I'm baffled by why they keep happening. Really, the political rule of thumb is, and I could be wrong, but I sort of did some very fast research on this last week.

The party not in the party in the White House during a shutdown almost always wins politically or comes out slightly ahead. It doesn't matter who that person is, doesn't matter who the president is, but usually the president comes out ahead politically. Everyone else loses because, of course, it's never an opportunity to cut government, and it's never an opportunity to rethink priorities, and it's never an opportunity to cut the budget, and all the things that, all the levers that people use and the jeopardy they put into it never quite comes true.

And what it really does is it's 43 days of just these hysterical dramatics, often from the party in Congress, in this case the Democrats, or the party in the, you know, not in the White House, I should say, complaining, predicting all sorts of disasters, planes are going to fall out of the sky and children would go hungry. And I mean, whether we're losers or not, we have, we must at some point confront the fact that as a culture, as a people, we love the dramatics of this. We seem absolutely dead set on having these. dramatic confrontations about nothing every couple of years.

And I think that if you're a normal American, you just tune it out. You tune it out. You know that it's never going to be a disaster, but you also should know it's not going to lead to anything better. And that, I think, is the sort of the exhausting part of it, James, to try to explain why you're exhausted. To clarify there, you said, we love it, and then you said the American people tuned it out. If by we, you mean those who are obsessively following politics and the rest of it, I don't.

I find it all a bunch of tiresome nonsense. And I think the we in the general national sense is that people, yeah, that people tune it out. Because if anything is a lesson to be learned about exactly how much impact the federal government has in a day-to-day basis. I know it is funny because we talk about the, you know, the heavy hand of the state is always pressing down upon us. And then it goes away for 43 days and we're like, oh, yeah. Oh, okay. John? I let me put my thinking in military terms.

tactics, tactics, operations, and strategy. Oh, by the way, when it comes to naming, I'm surprised Rob didn't say we should name them like professional wrestling meets, right? Don't they always have some clever name like Lola Palooza, fat guy rolling around on other people number seven? Right, that would be perfect. And would be fitting with this administration's favorite sport, it seems. So I think tactically what happened here is I agree with Rob, the Democrats in Congress

one because they juiced turnout for the elections. And I think that's what this was all about, which is why the deal was reached right after the elections are over. They made their base angry. They got them to the polls. They won huge margins in places like New Jersey and Virginia, way more than two years ago or four years ago. That might blow back on them because now their base is really angry because they had heightened expectations. I think at the higher level, what this shows is how Congress as an institution has failed. because the reason why you do shutdowns, and I was around for the first one,

I was actually working in Congress during the Gingrich shutdown. And so I remember the very first shutdown. The reason why is because everything now that gets decided by Congress is folded into gigantic spending bills. You don't have any individual bills anymore. There are no more individual appropriation bills.

There's very few authorizing bills like the Voting Rights Act, which we'll talk about later. All legislation gets rolled up into these spending bills. And so if, If the spendables weren't as important, you know, if you didn't have everything in one omnibus bill, then it wouldn't cost as much to have them blocked. But now, everything shuts down because Congress as an institution doesn't work. It's too easy to get it to stop.

The larger thing is an American citizen, you know, taxpayer, this is not, as Rob said, this is not going to solve the budget deficit. You could shut down the operations of the government for years and never solve the budget deficit because the budget deficit's being produced by one thing, which is entitlement programs. And those are on automatic spending no matter what happens. So, yeah, you could have the government could have been shut for the next decade, probably. And still, we would have this enormous budget deficit because Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security are what driving the country bankrupt. Doing my part. Well, is there any hope ever at any point at getting rid of these

blob-dibus CRs, these continuing resolution? These massive things that contain, you know, universes and multitudes. And going back to this, dare I say it, archaic method where you actually have a bill that is about a thing. And there's a debate about the thing. And then there's another bill that is about a thing and we have a debate about the thing. Is there any appetite for that in either party or are they just simply too comfortable with tucking all the stuff that they love into this thing and wink and wink, not scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. It goes through. I think it's hopeless.

I don't think there's a chance at hell of ever going back to something we're. We're voting on individual bills for everything. Well, the reason we don't do that is because we can't afford to. We can't afford it. It's a shell game for the federal budget and for government expenditures in general. And so the more complicated you make something, the harder, the easier it is to ignore the problems, right? So the more ornaments you put on the building, the easier it is to realize to discover that the building isn't, you know, sound. and so it's kind of this like general understanding that we all have that you know eventually the music's going to stop but it hasn't stopped yet that well we'll fix this later we'll kick this can't down the road and at a certain point that makes some sense you know that sort of the Reagan Bush even Clinton years kind of you could kind of do the math and say well you know we could maybe grow out of if we hold the line on spending kind of we can kind of grow out of our deficit and lower the debt that sort of happened

But it's essentially a demographic problem because there are more old people taking Social Security than there are young people kicking into it. And it's been a pay-as-you-go program pretty much forever. So what the people have to decide, and this is sort of where I put the blame, is that they recognize and accept that there is no such thing as a free lunch. And that they are going to have to give up the free lunch. and that none of the people they hire these sort of craven publicity hounds and attention seekers in Congress and the Senate and in the White House, none of those people is going to have the courage and the probably, I think, and the truth to tell you the bad news, which is we can't afford to do and promise what we've been promising the way we've been raising money. And it's, I mean, I mean, this is a horrible thing to say, right? I'm a Republican, well, not anymore, but basically a Republican, right? And I would say, you're either going to cut entitlements, as John says, or are you going to raise taxes?

And if you're a liberal Democrat, that's a perfectly fine outcome. Like, if you talk to any liberal Democrat, they don't think we have a problem. They think it's an accounting problem. The government has, as far as they're concerned, 100% access to. to 100% of your net worth at any given time. So, yeah, you just raise taxes at 75%, 90%, and debt eliminated. It's only conservatives who believe that that would be a huge, huge mistake. And that number is dwindling.

The number of people who believe that is dwindling getting smaller and smaller and smaller to a tiny remnant of people who believe that actually taxes and fees are bad. I think there's a moral case there to be me. You're the moral expert, Rob. I defer to you now on morality. I'm just a simple utilitarian, evil, evil utilitarian. I'm sure you've got it. I'm sure in your seminars, you have an effigy of a utilitarian you wheel out and assault verbally.

It's a picture of you. But two things about what Rob said. One is there's a moral case to be made that I think you're hinting at, Rob, which is why does the government have the right to do that? Why does the government have the right to take money out of one person's pocket and use it to pay for the health care for another person? And Reagan used to be so good. Now, Reagan's 40 years ago, but he was the last leader I remember who really made a moral case for or against this. Well, for you, Rob, everything's eternal. That's the problem. This is all just passing moments on the way to the big time.

The show. And so, but here's the other thing. I was just, giving a talk in Arizona at the University of Arizona. I talk with some undergraduates there. They are angry. I think that's one thing this shows is that they're pissed at the, you guys. I'm not in your guy's generation, the baby boomers. They are so angry because I think that they understand that social security, Medicaid, Medicare, these are all just massive transfer programs from them, right? The young people are taking, their money's being taken away from them, all their opportunities are being narrowed to pay for the baby boom generation's retirement because they didn't save because they didn't take care of their own health care.

I think they're very aware of it. That's why you have other eruptions like the election of a socialist in New York City, even though he's an anti-Semite. The anger that you see is there. And I think that Democrats, you saw some of that now. That's why they're getting so much blowback on caving on the shutdown because that generation thought actually something big was going to happen and they're ticked off. Maybe this is the opportunity for conservatives now that we're going to have this debate about Obamacare subsidies is, why should we still give out health care subsidies that were designed to take care of the COVID emergency and make them permanent? Why is it okay to take money from young people and to narrow their resources,

their opportunities in life so that 75 and 80-year-old people can have their health care paid for and have a comfortable retirement? It should go the other way around. The old people should be preparing away for the young people. And you know what? I mean, I, I, this is not a digression. It is an aggression. But you just, you said two really important things. One just always triggers me is this talk about Obamacare.

Because Obamacare was a failure from the DNA of Obamacare does not work. And we knew it didn't work. And everybody who could do math, knows it wasn't going to work. In the same way that people knew Social Security wasn't going to work either because you can look at actuarial. tables and you look at the way, you look at the population growth, right? You just know, right? But what I was so dishonest about Obamacare,

at least with the Social Security people, they kind of knew, well, this is, you know, in 50, 60, 70, 80 years it would be a problem and we'll solve it then with some magic. We'll all be living on Venus or something with jet packs, right? ObamaCare, they knew it wasn't going to work. And the lies were so deep. Do you remember the famous picture of the little boy in pajamas?

And he's like, when you, pajama way when you go home to your parents you remember you should talk about health care and it was this idea somehow it was so inverted that the that the solution for america's health care crisis was getting old people and your parents to sign up for obamacare that is a total falsehood it was backwards they should have had a picture of an old man in pajamas saying when your kids come back for the holidays make sure the kids sign up for Obamacare because it's the young people who are going to support this program because they don't use health insurance and they don't actually they don't get sick mostly. They don't need to, they don't have all the problems that old people have. All people

like John's like, you know, you look at it. He's like, I don't know how you're hanging on. They don't have. Korean skin cosmetics, my friend. Korean skin cosmetics. I mean, health insurance of the kind that we have designed only works if we make sure that. that young people pay a lot of money for it and they don't need it. And that this honesty was baked in. And I do think that there is, I mean, I think the larger issue is you're starting to see this socialist being elected in Manhattan or New York. I think you're seeing a lot of young people on the right who are really, really angry and furious at the lies they've been told and are continuing to be told. And I, at some point, as I said, I gave a talk the other day and I just said to

bunch of young people is that the only solution for you is you got to take the car keys away from grandpa. You got to kick the generate, the sclerotic large generation at the top that refuses to leave and you got to kick them out. And that's the only way this is going to change because all people are never going to sit there and vote to raise their, to lower their, their entitlement check. It's always going to be bigger. Well, they had the opportunity in New York to do that, and they took it. The Cuomo guy to the curb. Mondami, they got him in. And even though you said before that we all know that eventually this thing is unsustainable, to paraphrase, Heinlein, there's no such thing as a

free bus ride, yet there it's going to be. There's all of these things that they're going to be given free or heavily subsidized because they're good, shiny things. and they want theirs, and somehow the money will come out of the air. But it is strange to me that we say that we are supposed to tell the young people that we have to get rid of this generational transfer whereby you are paying into Social Security that you never see in Medicare that will be probably too expensive, and we're taking money from you, and we're giving it to the old people. And then, at the same time, say, but don't go for socialism.

I mean, that's exactly supposedly what should be along their crux. credo where the money is pooled and given to those in the most need and those in the most dire straits, et cetera, you'd think that they'd be for it, but they're not. And the reason that they have this, as you point, as John was pointing, oh, no, is Rob, which one of you were pointing about the people that you talk to are mad, the young folks who are mad. I think we both talk to me, yeah. Okay. All right. Well, it's also because I was in Tucson, Arizona, and I would just be pissed to be there. So the man for a variety of reasons. And one of them is that, yes. One of them is that indeed, yes, why am I paying for this

in these programs? But the other has to do with a sense of stagnation of cultural immobility of the idea, perhaps, that they've done all the right things. They went to school, they got the degree. They had the credential. But yet, somehow, if you're in Brooklyn, you're paying $4,000 for a two-bedroom house,

you're on some BS job that really doesn't do anything. It consists of shuffling emails around or running grants or something if you're of the elite. And the whole access and upper mobility and the rest of it seems to be denied to them. They don't think they're ever going to have a house. They're going to be stuck in a flat forever. So they hate the boomers for a variety of reasons.

One of them is that they're having to pay for Social Security. Two, they think that somehow all the boomers squatted on the houses and grove the prices up and that the boomers just look at them and say, well, don't have your avocado toast and you can afford it. That we're clueless and out of touch. And also because generally the collapse of the very institution's credibility that they want to be part of. They want to be part of the credentialed important class, the technocratic managerial class, at the same time that we've just seen the whole reputation of that class dissolve after five,

10 years of COVID and everything else. So, yeah, you can understand them being mad. But the solution is not free bus rides. The solution is not what California is proposing now, which is a new billionaire's tax. Of course they want a billionaires tax. They want to tax 5%, I think, of the net worth and that qualify. That's land, stocks, art, everything. Liquidate your stuff, pay it off.

And this will generate supposedly a whole bunch of money, which will then be used to go to health care for illegals. And that's not going to, I mean, if you can try that once, and then everybody's gone, if everybody isn't gone from California already. So none of their ideas are sustainable. But Rob is right. The basic idea that everything that you own actually already belongs to the government and we can just continue to print money through magical quantitative easings or modern monetary theory or whatever.

The only thing we lack is will. The only thing that really is holding us back is a will to socialize absolutely everything and go full Nordic country on you, you know, to apply the lessons that worked for a while for a country of six million people to somehow translate that to a nation of 350. Well, the affordability issue is big. Trump sat down with Laura Angram recently and was talking about the whole affordability thing. Apparently the stats

say that voters blame Trump, not Biden for the state of the economy, which some people would regard as more perilous than I do. I'm, I don't know, I drift farther and farther from these things because, you know, what do I care? I got my fixed income checks coming in. I'm good. Yeah. But I did

notice the other day at Trader Joe's that the bananas, which had been 19 cents forever, their version of the Costco hot dog, were all of a sudden Which used to be the price of the organic bananas. I noted that. I noted that the meatballs that I used to get that I would put into my spaghetti that used to be $6.99 are all $10.99. And I'm thinking, well, we don't import a lot of pork.

I'm noticing these things. I'm wondering why exactly this is still a problem. I'm kind of sort of blaming tariffs. And I'm pretty damn sure that if this is not feeling better by next election, cycle. It will be a bath of blood. Can I be baby economist? Baby economist is that this is inflation. So inflation is under control, right? It's below, I think just below three percent. And it was right, hitting 9 percent, 10 percent under Biden, which is ridiculous. That doesn't mean the prices go back down to the way they were in 2020 or 2019. It just means they grow more slowly.

They did with eggs. They did with eggs. Everybody was telling me when eggs were $5.99 or $4.99 for a pack of 12, that they're never going back down, that this was the new standard. I'm sorry, but they did. They're a buck 99 now. Do go on. My anecdotal uselessness. Are you buying those old eggs where you open it up and there's like a baby chicken inside? I mean, eggs aren't that cheap, but I'm in California where I was so psyched that gas had fallen to $4 a gallon. So I was like, wow, I got to take a picture of the pump. It's $4 a gallon. Yeah, but you know what gas is going up, though, don't you? Actually, it's going down in California, but that's because people, I don't know why, actually, why it's gone down.

I think because there's more oil being produced by the United States and coming onto the market, which is great. Well, there's been a 30, well, there's been a 30-cent jump recently. Part of that may be switching over to different blends. Part of that may be whatever, but the instability in the oil market because of Russian production is a whole interesting asset. We can get to it later. Anyway, so, no, yes, gas is not where it was. Eggs have come down, and I'm not buying the discount. dollar store eggs. I'm buying them farm fresh.

Yours would be more expensive because California has laws that say that each chicken has to have 75 yards in which to walk or something like that. But yeah, even though it's more space than a studio apartment in San Francisco, these eggs, these chickens and cakes. Exactly right. But it doesn't feel, does it, it's a feel

thing. It's whether or not people feel that things have gotten better. And apparently the polls are showing that they don't, which I don't think is actually a reflection of reality. Well, I don't think, I it's hard for political leaders to explain that you can get inflation under control, but that just means prices are going to grow more slowly and that your salaries would keep up the thing.

And Biden never was able to handle this, is that wages did not go up as fast as prices. So people were getting real wage cuts throughout the Biden presidency, and it may be going on. We still might be living with the overhang of that during the beginning of the Trump administration. Just like, remember, Reagan, we were around for that. Reagan had to take drastic measures to kill off inflation. He got clobbered in the 82 elections because it took, yeah, three years, basically, for the real results of those tough measures to come into effect. Now, the problem is, I don't see Trump and anyone in Congress wanting to reduce spending. And so, right, that's going to still keep inflating the economy. Inflation might be just under 3% now, but you could see it continuing to get worse. And you could see these measures just being short term unless they take some, you know, dramatic structure. changes because, look, if you reduce the money supply, lower interest rates the way Trump wants, and you keep engaging in humongous deficit spending, inflation is going to still keep going

up. It's going to be worse. Yeah, it's not going to be better. Two plus two is always going to be four. And it doesn't help matters if you're going to send everybody a $2,000 check. Exactly, right. You know, whatever you want to call it, that's basically Bidenomics, again. I mean, unless you get it in McDonald's gift cards like the students gave me in Arizona. See, I do That's nice. They know you. They know you. You are literally a definition of cheap date. If I look at my dictionary under cheap date, I see a picture of John you. I hear the McRibs back, man. Everyone knows where to take me. Here's the thing that if you order, if you, wait a second, Robby, if you order that

Mick Rib in some selected restaurants, you'll notice, of course, you're not going to talk to a human being. You're going up to a kiosk, right? Yeah. And you're using that incredibly germ-flecked thing. I always love to see people punching the kiosk thing with their index finger that they will then later use to extract the french fry and eat it i mean i'm not a germ foe but no use your knuckle buddy use your knuckle but i saw a great story about new york which has of course instituted all kinds of high wages for people who stand behind the counter and punch things into a computer into a pad that some of these places are no longer using actual cashiers they have a video screen and behind the video screen is somebody from the philippines

who's paid about 80 cents an hour so they get around the whole high cost of things by putting in a video screen that pipes a person from Manila in there and voila it's almost like it's an unintended consequence of raising the cost of doing business a great deal and then

people complain that the jobs have have fled anyway so that's my thing about McDonald's Rob you're going to say about inflation. Well I just to go back for a minute I mean I I I

because you when you mentioned the productivity The productivity gains that we experienced for, I don't know, 15, 20 years, slowly from somewhere around late 90s, mid to late 90s to 2000 something that were brought upon by computing and the Internet and all sorts of decentralized, distributed sort of thinking. We had a hard time digesting them in many ways we have not yet digested them. but the productivity gains that are going to happen are happening now with AI are happening massively and measured in months. And so they are measured in a time, in a time frame that we have never experienced before and a workforce has never experienced before.

And that is not a recipe for stability. And the strangest thing about American politics, you know, I don't know, since 1994 will say, just because since Newt Gingrich won that historic House, you know, midterm, and the Republicans took back, took control of the House of the House for the first time in half a century. American politics has been incredibly volatile. It swings back and forth. We've had like speakers of that, more speakers of the House in the past decades than we had before. We had, I'm growing up, it was just Tip O'Neill, right? And that volatility was not necessarily reflected in an ultra-volatility.

I mean, Americans still kind of went to work and things were changing, but did not reflect it would seem to be this weird circus going on in D.C. And I think that's going to change. And unfortunately, I don't think we're ready for it. I think right at the time that we need sort of sober, thoughtful, compassionate, but realistic leadership, we're going to have real volatility in the work. workforce and real volatility in our economy. I don't think there's anybody in D.C. right now who has the character, really, or the credibility to speak to the American people as a whole

and tell them the truth, which is going to be that the future is going to be a little rougher than the past. And that's a new concept for Americans. Not necessarily forever, but I don't think that we're prepared as a nation, as a modern nation, for this kind of change. I really don't. You see it all the time. Like, there's radical, radical changes in the workforce because of AI. And you can't pass a law to repeal the future. And you can't build a wall to keep technology out. It's just going to come in.

And we just have to be prepared for it. And I don't think we are. If only there was some smart charismatic tech guy who understood AI down to the bones and was launching his own effort in that way, who was in government somehow. Oh, we had one of those. And he gave a Nazi salute. So never mind that. John, you were about to say something, but I have to tell you that as long as we have you here, we got to ask you actual pointed law questions.

Yeah, we got to get our monies worth that. Oh, no. You don't want that. We do, because I've been told I'm to ask you about equal protection versus VRA, and I have no idea. I have no idea. Big important case, school us all, Professor U. Can I just see one last thing about what Rob was saying first before I answer? your question. Just one real point is that's what connects all this to the, I was in D.C., this humongous

intra-conservative fight about Kevin Roberts and Heritage and Tucker and, you know, Nick Fuentes and whether there's Nazism in the conservative movement. These are all the same responses you saw the last time there was this huge change, this revolution that Rob's talking about, which was nationalization of the economy, the industrial revolution, the turn of the last century. And you saw huge change in the economy and you saw populism rise. And you saw, right, exactly this anti-Semitism. And you saw

and there were even religious leaders like Father Coughlin, which you will not be Rob. Rob could be the next Father Coughlin, but I don't know. He might go a different direction. But you saw these pop Huey Long, these populist leaders, FDR, who responded to this and figured out how to

appeal to people who are dislocated out of work from a dislocate economy. But anyway, the law. This is a huge Supreme Court term. Now, I know every time you have me on, I go, this is a huge Supreme Court term, but this is really a big one. The last case from last week, just the tariffs. We may not even remember that case by the time this term is over.

So one of the big cases you've asked about is this case called Louisiana v. Calais, which is about whether a very important part of the Voting Rights Act is constitutional anymore. And it does involve the California redistricting and all these other redistrictingings, that are going on right now to increase House delegations for Republicans or for Democrats. Because the Voting Rights Act basically says there should no longer be barriers to people to vote based on race. That's basically what the Voting Rights Act is about.

And you can see after the Jim Crow South engaged in all kinds of ridiculous things to try to prevent blacks from voting or diluting their votes, the government responded with measures that would never normally be allowed. One of them was struck down about 10 years ago, which said that any southern state that wanted to change any voting rule, anything involving elections that had to get an approval from a federal court or the Justice Department, that's incredible. There's nothing like that in any other area law. That got struck down by the Supreme Court, much wailing and rending of garments.

I'm speaking in the language that Rob understands now. And then, but still, what the Justice Department courts have been forcing primarily southern states to do, but it applies to states all over the country, is to try to try to draw congressional districts in states to maximize the number of minorities that get elected. That, I think, is offensive to minorities. Because I'm a minority, I don't feel like all Asians vote the same way. If we did, I'd be really worried if we did all.

vote the same way. I don't think blacks all vote the same way. Or you white guys, you guys just definitely don't vote all the same way. But that's the theory underlying this part of the Voting Rights Act is, oh, compact all the blacks into one district in the South, and then they'll elect a black member of Congress. Why that's the purpose of the Constitution or should be the point of federal law is beyond me. All that I think the law says is stop any barriers to people voting. So this This law, this case that you mentioned, James, asks whether that part of the Voting Rights Act or the way it's being enforced, at least, should be thrown out, which would overturn, yeah, about 60 years of precedent, if going back all the way to practice all the way back to the civil rights movement. But that's just the first of a whole series of huge blockbuster cases coming down the road, which could do a lot to determine the success of the Trump administration, for example, for the rest of the next two years, three years. Rob? Or it's just no more can be said or need be said.

Well, you know, I say into you, truly, truly I tell you, John. I think you're correct. I mean, it's funny about the outcome, basing your legal philosophy on outcomes and using outcomes as the metric for whether it's fair or true or not. It's such a strange way to think, and it only comes from people who believe that they're always going to be in charge. And what it's surprising to me is that the history of American politics is if there's anything you can say about it is that you're not always going to be in charge. And the reason that we have the rules is because

you're not always going to be in charge. And I think that we have this, certainly we do this, you get any college class, certainly the most college classes, all of those I went to, and I'm sure. What they try to tell you is that there's some systemic evil that's permanent. It started in 1619, I'm just to use a number, and it's always going to be there. And so it's okay to bend the rules and twist the rules because we're never going to be in charge

and we're not in charge now and we've never been in charge and the system is always the way it is. And the problem is that then you have moments like the court cases that John was citing that seem to just simply respond to, seem to just reiterate the fact that you can't make a law based on an outcome. And the people who have been living that way go absolutely bananas. So you read, if you read the New York Times, the headlines are always, you know, Supreme Court sets back civil rights. The conservative Republican Department of Justice turns the clock back on civil rights. And then you go to, you read the third paragraph, and you realize it's not true.

but this apocalyptic need to make even your tiny little adjustments or even your major adjustments that are not legal somehow not only legal but imperative not only imperative but morally important not only morally important but if not happen but a return to Jim Crow if not enforced you know first of all exhaust everybody so those that language no longer has any power it creates a reaction formation which we're seeing now on the right and and I think parts of sort of the the extreme left. And it just, it corrupts the currency of the law, the currency of the language, which we're, you know, that's all we have at the end of the day, right? I mean, John, I'm sure I would get an F in your class, but what I'm always struck by the Supreme Court is that the Supreme Court decided it had the power to review legislation in Marbury v. Madison. It just, it, it, it chose that for itself, and it made sense. And so that's what it's got. And if we sort of let the language be sort of debased and the way we talk about rights and

civil rights be debased like that, I think, you know, we end up where we are now, which is that people screaming at each other about essentially nothing and certainly not the law. I mean, that was a very rambling way of agreeing with John, which I'm sure he would. No, no, I can. First of all, Rob, yeah, you guys. NF. I don't, because I would suspect you of using AI to do all your exam answers anyway. That is a concern. Yeah, oh, you know, I don't know how to fix it, actually. Actually, you know what

we're doing? We're bringing back blue books and handwritten exams. That's what I've been saying, yes. We have, we have been bringing back the blue book exam and timed exam sessions. And you're in the room with everybody else and writing a pencil now. So AI has forced us back to the educational Stone Age. But can I just make the point what to the Rob actually makes a very important point about judicial review, which is, you know, the courts don't have any power to back up what they say. So the, right, the president has the sword, as Hamilton said, and the Congress has the purse. What does the court have? It can't compel any of us to obey it. It only has, this is Alexander Hamilton's famous words. It says it only has reason. It can only persuade us that it reached the

right answer, and we voluntarily obey the courts. And I think Rob's right. The left has been on this campaign to devalue the meaning of language and to make everything relative. And the more they succeed, then the more force becomes the way our society governs itself, not persuasion and argument, because the words don't mean anything. Well, if the system does not provide the desired results, then the system is illegitimate. It must be changed, ignored, or done away with. also on the docket or maybe coming up I should say there's another strike I think it's 20

strikes now on the guys who are driving boats out of Venezuela I think the New York Times did a profile and said well they're not cartel members I mean they don't have they don't have cards right they didn't they don't pay their dues they don't get benefits but you know they're just working for friends

say that yes he moved a lot of drugs from here to there but you know he just had to he loved to bowl he was a fan of damn Okay, fine. So they've whacked about 20 of these things, and the Democrats are appalled. And I'm sure the fig leaf is that they're appalled by what they perceive to be the extra legality of it. But I think it's just the general idea of what they're doing is, you know, we're being mean to these guys.

And there will be a court challenge, John, won't there? Will there not be some something that floats up? I mean, I don't imagine that survivors of one of the Venezuelan power boats is going to, is you have standing, but what can we expect on this front? So, James, eventually, I think you're right, there will be a case. It probably will work its way to the Supreme Court. Remember, we have faced a similar issue. I was at the Justice Department on 9-11, and we had to make a similar decision.

Can we have war against a terrorist group, not a state? We've always had wars against other nations. And so, and right, in 9-11, the last thing people would have thought of is, well, two years from now, will there be a Supreme Court case that will challenge all the decisions we make. But there was because we captured somebody and that person wanted to be released and brought a case that we made it all a Supreme Court. You could see that happening here. There could be survivors that will be brought on board and then they'll file to be released. Or the family members are the people who are killed. They could sue. And that could get to the

Supreme Court. And this actually was the subject of my talk at the University of Arizona this week, which I gave unusually, not at a law school, not at the school of divinity, but in the engineering. department. Well, I know you weren't in the Divinity School. I can guarantee that. Well, I wouldn't be rolled out and attacked as the resident utilitarian. Come on. Well, no, you'd be struck by lightning.

So this is a really difficult but very important question, but I think it has actually a straightforward, simple answer in the end. We can't be at war with every drug cartel, drug gang, drug runner, right, drug seller on the street corner. there's a line between what's war and crime. Crime is governed by the Bill of Rights and all the protections that the courts have, you know, labored to build. For every criminal suspect, when Rob gets pulled over speeding between New York and Princeton, you know, back and forth, you have all these protections. The government can't say, oh, a lot of people are killed by speeders on the highway, so we're just going to use military force on speeders. Just because something causes harm to the country doesn't mean it's war and that you can use military. force. It's reserved for enemies. So I don't think that drugs, you know, strikes just on every drug boat are actually legal. I don't even, but here's why I think there's a straightforward answer. I think we're really at war with Venezuela. We're at war with another nation, Venezuela. We're not

war with drug dealers, because if we were, we would be bombing fentanyl factories in Mexico. That's where the real harms come from. The drug boats, apparently, these drugs are headed for Europe. They're not even headed for the United States. If we really are, though, at the world of Venezuela, like a terror. Yeah, it's like a 100% tariff. And the head of Venezuela is also head of one of these drug cartels. And the drug cartels are like an arm of the Venezuelan government and the Venezuelan intelligence. That actually legally, this is very simple and straightforward. We're at Venezuela and we're attacking elements of the Venezuelan government and armed forces. which is totally legal under the law. So in a way, it's nice that we have somebody here on this podcast who is part of this argument. So just to go back to 2001, 2002, in a way, so Venezuela, the government of Venezuela is, in your argument, like the government of Afghanistan. It is the large, it is the organizational name for a bad actor, and it is, and it is,

Is they're bad luck that they can't legally define blowing up a Venezuelan boat or invading Afghanistan as a police action, right? Because that was the big question then. Was it like, is it a place action as a military action? Well, I think also the reason they're doing this is that they don't politically want to say to the American people. We're at war. This president doesn't want to start any new war. So we are conduct. And we have the most modern American aircraft carrier that Gerald Ford is sitting offshore of Venezuela.

right now. We have a huge military force that's trying to coerce them to get rid of Maduro. That is, you know, the Gerald Ford's not going to be helpful chasing little outboard boats, you know, like Rob's pleasure craft from his, you know, prep school days, you know, around a lake because it might have drugs in it. I mean, the Joe Ford's only good for her. Just for the record, it definitely did. Right. It's not, it's not, you know, for, you know, it's good at, you know, attacking other countries, armed forces and overthrowing regime maybe, but not for chasing down, and, you know, small pleasure crafts concealing drugs. So, yeah, I think your work exactly.

It is a war, but politically the president doesn't want to call it a war. But when you look at all the elements of what's happening, it looks to me like a war, and that's legal. So he has a political problem. Let me, let me, let me ask you this, as a law professor, I'm your student getting an F and I'm just trying to make you like me again. Is the question, do I have, can I, am I summing up the situation, accurately or semi-accurately. What we're really talking about, and I believe this was also the case in Afghanistan and

definitely in Iraq and in Venezuela. What we're talking about is in fact an international but still a police action. There is no legal ability for the president to do this. So he is calling it a police, he's keeping it murky because he can't call it a police action because that's illegal. If he called it a war, that'd be perfectly legal, but he can't call it a war because politically that's untenable for this president. And so he's in this weird, he can't call it anything. Yeah, no. How about special military operation? No. Right, right. But I mean, you have to invent some kind of weasel word so that you can thread the needle between the thing that you can't do

politically and the thing that you can't do legally. Is that a fair assumption? Is that a fair something? Yes, and because of that, that's what's causing all these legal doubts. And will cause, right, soldiers and agents to say, you know, and I, am I allowed to do this, right? And that's, in fact, happened after 9-11. There were soldiers and agents who said, are we allowed to legally fight al-Qaeda? Or, you know, is it like pre-9-11 where we would, you know, catch suspects and bring them back to the U.S. for trial, not shoot them with drones. And so part of what Trump's not doing, which we had to do then was we went to Congress and

explained it all and got Congress to pass a law authorizing it so that when we, all of the got challenges in court, that became extremely important. The Supreme Court's not going to second guess the president and Congress in wartime when they agree. But here, this might not happen. So this might be legally more problematic unless, as Rob says, the president comes out in public and says, we are at war with Venezuela. And I'm just the analogy here, the comparison to me right now, because we brought it up earlier, and I'm still mad about Obamacare. The Obama administration kept saying this is not a tax, this is not a tax, this is not a tax. And then they, I think this is what happened.

And then they went to the Supreme Court and they said, oh, by the way, it's a tax because I know we can do that. And then the Supreme Court agreed with them and said, yeah, it's a tax. And then they could do it because they argued in court that it was, they argued in court that it was a thing that they absolutely denied it was in public. And so in this case, we're going to have a president arguing in court if it gets there that he's doing a thing that he's allowed to do because he's the president. and the commander-in-chief, and it's a war, but that he, but publicly he won't say that. Is that? I had thought of that parallel, but that's exactly true. That, yes, that happened in Obamacare.

Politically, they said it wasn't a tax, but when they got to the Supreme Court, they argued that the Obamacare system was all built on this coercive tax to force people to buy health insurance. And the Supreme Court, you know, Rob's favorite, Chief Justice, Chief Justice, and Squish, John Roberts, agreed with Rob. And so, yes, it's a toss. Greed with Rob and, yes, upheld his tie. And, yeah, that's unfortunately happening here.

I think you're right, Rob, that he doesn't want to politically call it a war. All the things he's doing are warlike actions. And if it goes to court, that's the first of the administration he's going to say. And in fact, this is already happening. Remember, we talked about earlier months ago, the case of the Venezuelan, right, deportees who are sent to El Salvador. That's being litigated right now, and in court, right now, under oath, the Trump administration is saying we are at war with Venezuela and that we are, and Maduro is the head of a drug cartel and the head of Venezuela. And because of that, we can trigger something called the Alien Enemies Act, which applies only in wartime and kick every Venezuelan out of the country.

Well, we also have the administration today, or yesterday or recently declaring Antifa to be a terrorist organization and also declaring a whole bunch of Antifa adjacent organizations in other countries. to be foreign terrorist organizations. Does this mean then that we can use the Venezuelan example and start using military force to go after them, or is that bright dividing line still in place domestically? I think that's another species of what Rob was just talking about, but in the other direction. Here, I think the Trump administration is rhetorically over-promising when the law doesn't allow it. It doesn't make any difference for our domestic law, whether the president wants to call Antifa a terrorist group or not, the criminal laws just apply to them normally. What they did was they also designated all these foreign Antifa groups as terrorist organizations.

That does give the government a lot more power against them abroad. But I don't think it really changes what's going on domestically. I mean, still the question is, can the president call out the National Guard to restore order in the cities where Antifa is using violence to attack federal officers or block the execution of federal law. Calling them terrorist organizations or not doesn't change that fundamental question, which also is another one. You start all this up with the Supreme Court. That question is heading steadily to the Supreme Court too and may be decided in this term because you've got two appellate courts that disagree. Strangely, the one out here in California says that

the government can deploy the National Guard to the cities, that there is sufficient unrest, violence domestically in our cities to use military protection of the federal government, whereas Chicago, the courts there have blocked President Trump so far and not allowing deployment. So Rob happens to live in the Midwest, and I'm sorry, James happens to live in the Midwest, where I guess chaos will continue to be rampant. That's exactly what I'm experiencing in this very moment, looking at the flaming mobs coming on the street now here in Minneapolis. Actually, it's been quite nice for the last few days,

but still, when you mentioned fundamental questions, there's no more fundamental questions than the things that Brother Rob grapples with at Divinity School, so we're going to wrap up by asking him a few things there. First of all, how are the people in your school viewing what seems to be a resurgence of anti-Semitism in new places, which are, of course, the same old places? But is this much of a discussion?

Does this come to the four? Are they aware of it? Or are they just so isolated in their theological bubbles up there in the ivory tower that the vagaries of messy daily politics haven't penetrated up there yet? Or are they all next pointies fans? Are you asking me? I thought you're asking John. Yes, of course.

I would ask John a series of questions about things in the theological institution. Well, for a minute, I thought you were talking about students in general. Um, the, the benefit of divinity school, um, it's certainly Princeton is that everybody here is, has a purpose. Like it's either you're, I mean, some, sometimes the purpose is you're just a, you know, an ancient language nerd, uh, or an archaeology nerd and you just want to like look at cuneiform and old Acadian. Um, and sometimes you're just a theology, a theologian and you just, this is a wonderful system and you want to like, write, you know, long, multi-volume essays on, you know, Carl Bart and people like that. But the rest of us just are there because we have a purpose. And so everything is seen through the lens of what we want to do with this learning.

And that does kind of keep things on the rails. So there's a general, you know, and also what we're studying mostly is everybody, everybody who's a student is a profess Christian, is that we struggle. with more more than we struggle with societal problems and cultural problems, although some people do. We struggle with personal things and your personal relationship and relationships. And that I think also kind of keeps, can order the mind and keep people from, you know, sit in encampments and a lot of noisy and you know incredibly aggressive behavior it's a smaller community and there isn't any benefit there isn't any philosophy that encourages that kind of behavior so but you know

it's interesting because just because you mentioned niquentes and anti-Semitism it is a it's something that we all have to think about certainly I'm I just came I mean I have my morning class here on Friday mornings is an exegesis of John, Gospel of John, and John has been used in Good Friday Liturgies and beyond, and it has been used as a text, John especially, although Matthew 2, as a text to justify incredible anti-Semitism. And unpacking that and sort of like trying to un-tease the strands of that is really, really hard and very, very difficult. And you can lead you down the wrong way. And so, I don't know, if anything, what we're experiencing today in the culture or what we, or the evidence of the, the evidence that

people are pointing to, I'm not, maybe I'm just not quite ready to call it a giant crisis. It may be, but I'm not sure it's there yet or it's going to get there. I still have hope that people will, of course, correct. But all of those things are things that people have been struggling with forever and failing at in many ways in many instances in history, but it is a, this is not new, and it's not, and it's not something that people haven't been thinking about and struggling with for forever, I mean, since the, you know, since the beginning, since Paul. Right, not new. And I can't imagine the theological institutions are known for turning like a dime.

They're fairly stately organizations, right? It's like getting the Titanic to do a full circle. Depends on which one you're talking about. Yeah. The invocation at Yale Divinity School last year apparently was a Wiccan prayer. Oh, well, that's novel. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Really? Yeah. And one of the most popular classes I'd told at Union Theological Seminary,

and apparently it's a really good class, is Witchcraft. But you could do a concentration in witchcraft, probably, which is a very strange thing. I mean, no, your enemy yet. I mean, but it does seem to be drifting from the central ideas. But I'm not surprised. Every institution in the West seems to have forgotten why it was founded in the first place, which was to protect and advance the West, and instead turns on a critique of it, often banal, often juvenile or juvenile, or jejun.

But that's how they get there. You know, the eternal post-1960s shock mom and dad, everything sucks. has become the dominant cultural theme. And until we get away from that, we are going to have a typical time preserving and reviving this great republic of ours. On the other hand, if you want to talk about these things more

with actual human beings, you, the listener, can take a ricochet cruise. That's right. There's going to be a meetup December 13th of the 20, Rurkishay at sea. Holland America Line is going to cruise to the Eastern Caribbean. I've taken it many times.

I'd be there if I... That's a great cruise. I'd be there if I could, but alas, I'm going to be elsewhere. and also Florida centric February 6th through the 8th Florida Space Coast Don't you love the sound of it We're going to have a meetup at Cape Canaveral

And I'm old enough to remember when Cape Canaveral Was the actual name of the thing And I love the fact that we went back to it No slight intended JFK But Cape Canaveral is just baked into the bones And a lot of us that's you know That's it's it Yeah that I'm just looking at my calendar

Because I was so spacing on looking at my calendar Oh that'd be great I'm going to try to make that. I'm going to try to make that one. I am too, because by February, I think I'm going to need someplace warm to be with all that's going on here and ending as well. Also ending, this podcast. That doesn't mean you shouldn't go to Apple podcast and give us five stars. Boy, we'd appreciate that. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't go to ricochet.com. You should. You can read the front page for free, listen to the podcast. But if you sign up for just a few meager, minor coins, you can have access to the member feed, which is a whole different community. and it's where friendships form.

The things that we discuss there, there are no limits. Go there. See what I mean. And, well, I'll see you there because I frequently write a ricochet. John, you, I know reads it. And Rob Long as well, of course, is one of the founders of this institution. So between the three of us, if that's not three good reasons to go to ricochet, don't know what is. I've asked Charles C.W. Cook, if we were here today, what version of RICO were on?

It's probably 4.06.07. always improving, always tinkering, new stuff coming. And no matter how much it changes, the basic idea, mission of ricochet will always be the same. People there who have skin in the game, as Rob used to say a long time ago, and it keeps the conversation civil and polite and interesting. It's like no place else on the web.

I'm James Lannick. This has been fun. I thank John you. I thank Brother Rob for joining us today, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Rookishay 4.0. Bye. Bye. See you.