Stephen Breyer [TEASER]

Hey everyone, this is Leon from Fiasco and Prologue Projects.

On this premium episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking about Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

Breyer is the longest-serving justice on the court, and one of just three justices appointed by Democrat.

The 83-year-old Breyer has so far declined to retire.

His argument is that strategically retiring during a Democratic presidency would politicize the court.

Your hosts argue that that horse is all the way out of the barn, if it was ever in there in the first place.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have rotted America's soul like candy to a child's teeth.

I am Peter,

and I'm here with Rhiannon.

Hi.

And Michael.

Hey, everybody.

And today we are covering a bit of a hot topic: Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

Wow, so spicy.

Stephen Breyer is, of course, one of the three remaining liberal justices on the court, and he is by a wide margin the oldest.

In fact, just a few days ago, he turned 83 years young.

Happy birthday, Stephen Breyer.

Yeah, he's also the, did you guys know this?

He's also the Supreme Court justice who looks most like a jar of Manning.

Now that you say it.

That does sound right.

It does sound right.

And, you know, of course, Breyer has attracted controversy lately with what appears to be a decision, at least for now, not to retire

at a time where Ruth Bader Ginsburg's failure to retire under a Democratic president has officially cost us a seat on the court, his decision has come under some pretty well-deserved scrutiny.

So we are going to walk you through Stephen Breyer's life and see whether we can glean from it what might have caused his brain to malfunction so thoroughly, leaving him without any notable ideology.

and completely unable to process the politics of the modern world.

Yeah, his brain just goes 010111.

The Supreme Court is good.

Robot servant to the Supreme Court.

Yeah, and on that note, obviously we'll wrap this episode up with me doing an impression of Stephen Breyer as the Blade Runner android

giving the Tears and Rain speech.

Excellent.

And we can call it a day.

Blade Runner is a movie about Stephen Breyer, really.

Well, the difference between him and the robots and Blade Runner is that we don't really know whether they have a soul, whereas we know that Stephen Breyer does not have a soul.

The moral dilemma is completely absent.

The central question posed by Blade Runner, what is it to be a human, is something that you could easily see asking yourself after a long conversation with Stephen Breyer.

Yeah, title of his memoir.

Sari, I think first we're starting off with a young Stephen Breyer.

Yeah.

What was that guy like?

Was he ever young?

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's just like a perpetual old vanilla white guy.

This biography is going to bore you to tears.

But here we go.

You know, the story of Breyer's ascent to the Supreme Court is a really classic story of the career trajectory to the Supreme Court for this generation of judges, right?

So he started off in the Supreme Court's mailroom, impressed the right people.

Worked his way right up.

It's like Will Smith in Pursuit of Happiness.

Yeah.

Just like Will Smith in Pursuit of Happiness, Stephen Breyer attended Stanford for undergrad.

There you go.

And then was a Marshall Scholar.

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